Timely Thorsday #22: Lamentis Won

Greetings to the eleven of you who may or may not know the most recent of my deepest, darkest secrets, which I linked to in Monday's Isekai "Quartet." I'll also re-link to it here.

Based on the clicks that link didn't get, however, it appears that I am once again hammering my head against the wailing wall because human attention spans are garbage anymore. Read something! But especially this!

Speaking of people overreacting to first world problems, did anyone else know that BET made the Karen stereotype into a horror movie? Here's the trailer. It's garbage. SNL probably already has a parody script written, and they're table-reading it as we speak. Watch that instead. But read my stuff, too!

If you're still reading, keep reading and click those social media buttons down below, and comment in the comments section of this post, not just on Facebook or Twitter. Enough lamenting, because it's time for a SPOILER Warning!

"Lamentis," the title of Loki's third episode, is a Latin verb conjugation referring to expressions of sadness, especially moaning, wailing, or weeping. It is where we get the English word, "lament," as in the Barenaked Ladies' sad but catchy Christmas anthem, "Elf's Lament."

In Marvel Comics, it was the one-time battleground of the Guardians Of the Galaxy, the Kree, and the Phalanx, in prelude to a new Annihilation Wave. In Loki, it is both an inhabited moon (designated Lamentis-1, because who wants to come up with unique and creative names for every celestial body in a fictional universe?) and the crumbling planet it orbits, which is raining a meteor storm of debris upon the habitable moon when Loki steals a time warp pad from Lady Loki (or Sylvie, as she insists on being called, because referential reasons) and inadvertently traps them there during the 2077 apocalypse.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. The episode opens with Sylvie, in a civilian guise, eating ice cream with a semi-familiar face. Things go all WandaVision, and we soon realize that Sylvie has tapped into the pre-TVA memories of one of the Minutemen (Minutewomen? Minutepeople? Minutia? Minutes? Modern word gendering is so hard...) to gather information on the Timekeepers. Not only does this provide us with confirmed special knowledge that TVA personnel were not created by the Timekeepers, as was previously exposited in Miss Minutes' orientation video, but it leads Sylvie to the TVA, with Loki in hot pursuit. The TVA agent she enchanted--Loki calls it that repeatedly, as an obvious Enchantress reference--also pointed her to the elevator system, hinting that the "ACCESS DENIED" level we see in the credits sequence is where the Timekeepers are...kept while they...keep...time. It could also be the "Nightmare Division" that Agent 3M name-drops in the first episode, but that will have to wait for confirmation. While in the halls of the TVA, Sylvie and Loki both engage in some amazing hand-to-hand choreography that argues against the impracticality of capes and Matrix trenchcoats, leading to the aforementioned time pad swipe. What ensues on Lamentis-1 in 2077 is equal parts odd-couple action-comedy and heist movie romantic subplot. When they aren't trying to kill each other, betray each other, otherwise out-Loki each other, or stiffly rescue each other, it feels like Loki and Sylvie are spending their last day of life on the ultimate blind date, and the chemistry at play here puts Lobius to shame. After employing a few Star Wars infiltration gags to get on Snowpiercer (the world is ending, and there's a train reserved almost exclusively for the rich, so, yeah, Snowpiercer) and use its power source to jump-start the time pad, the pair are discovered and literally thrown off, breaking the time pad. But the train wasn't the real vessel of salvation; there's a spaceship--"The Arc"--that is not destined to leave before the moon is destroyed, so they decide to follow established Apocalypse logic and commandeer the Arc to save themselves and whoever else is onboard because nothing matters when a world is about to end...except that if they save enough people, it ceases to be an Apocalypse event, Nexus energy builds up, and the timeline splits...except that's already happening anyway because Sylvie needed a distraction to pull personnel away from the Timekeepers, or whatever her "years in the making" plan was. This was the best episode of Loki so far, right up until the end. Instead of going directly to the Arc, the Lokis (Lokii? Loki?) run from explosions for three minutes straight, Sylvie stares at the sky for awhile before walking away, and the episode just ends, like there was something we were expected to understand without any foundation for it. Is she just accepting death? Did she have a backup all along, and she's leaving Loki to die? Or more farfetched,

is Sylvie a straw villain created by the TVA, Bladerunner-style, and when she found out, she went rogue and bombed the timeline as revenge? She admitted to having gaps in her memory, like Mobius did, she clearly hates the TVA, and she distrusts Loki, accusing him several times of being a puppet of the TVA himself. It would certainly be a nice callback to that whole "do people often not know if they are robots?" concept from the first episode. Do Lokis lament of mischievous sheep?

Also, before I forget--this is such a brief, strange (or Strange?) moment that I'm kicking myself for almost forgetting it--Loki is about to be crushed by a falling building during the final meteor strike of the episode, and he just...rewinds it. So not only has Loki stolen a Time Stone at some point, the TVA never realized it was missing or registered any (more) unusual temporal energy readings on Loki since then, and given what we know of Variant Infinity Stones from the comics and the whole "paperweights" gag, Loki had to have known which of the many Infinity Stones strewn about the TVA was the Time Stone that would work on "Earth-199999" (the Marvel Comics' Earth designation for the MCU). That seems like a lot of knowledge to suddenly have without build-up, doesn't it?

Remember to click and comment now that you're closer to the bottom, and stay tuned for more anime and Loki coverage in the weeks to come.

Ticketmaster's

Lament,

Out.