Julian Recaps: Reality Bites in Loki S02 Episode Five

We are almost done with Loki Season Two as Marvel’s next Phase 5 movie The Marvels starts rearing its head in a couple of days. The multiverse is becoming increasingly chaotic to the point where we must ask, “What is reality at this point?” How will the gang get back together after the entire multiverse was blown up in the previous episode? Let’s find out how time and reality work again in this episode. 

Episode Five Science/Fiction finds Loki (Tom Hiddleston) surprisingly not incinerated from the Temporal Loom explosion. He walks around an empty TVA and suddenly his time-slipping ailments are back. He was able to take a TVA guidebook before the entire organization became spaghettified and went time-slipping again.

He travels to all of his friends’ original timelines; Casey (Eugene Cordero) aka Frank Morris, an Alcatraz escapee in 1962 San Francisco, Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) as Verity Willis, a pediatrist in 2012 New York, Mobius (Owen Wilson) as jet ski salesman Don, and O.B/Ouroboros (Key Huy Quan) as a failing science fiction writer and theoretical physics teacher A.D Doug in 1994 Pasadena. 

Loki meets with Doug and tells him about his life as an engineer at the TVA. However, Doug does tell him that the TVA still exists somewhere in time, but he can’t get there unless he controls his time-slipping. Loki provides him with a TVA guidebook allowing Doug to build a fully functional TemPad within 19 months which costs everything in his personal life. Now all he has to do is to round up the rest of his friends in their perspective timelines through finding their temporal aura.

The last person he needed was Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) in 1982 in Brixton, Oklahoma who surprisingly remembers the TVA and the Loom exploding. She tells him that the TVA is history and everyone who worked there is back to their own lives. Loki admits that he doesn’t want to lose all of his friends and be lonely again. Failing to convince Sylvie and sulking in his guilty conscience, he tells everyone to just go back to their lives. However, Sylvie comes back after learning that her timeline is about to be spaghettified. 

At this point, reality is about to be spaghettified as everybody re-enacts the aftereffects of Thanos’ snap in Avengers: Infinity War. All except Loki turn into spaghetti and the trauma from remembering certain characters from Infinity War turn into dust comes back to haunt Marvel fans. Amazingly, after remembering what Sylvie says a Loki in every timeline is destined to lose gave Loki the incentive to control his time-slipping. Upon this discovery, he can re-write the story and travel back to before Victory Timely (Jonathan Majors) got spaghettified and stop the destruction of the TVA before cutting it off on a cliffhanger. 

So, not much happens other than we have to find everyone again to restore the end goal of the series. It does go into depth about why Loki doesn’t want to be lonely again. Everyone can relate to that, besides nobody wants to feel alone. I’m just wondering what’s going to happen next when everything is restored and how it is going to affect the MCU going forward. That’s for the season finale to clear things up when it premieres. 

Episode Five Science/Fiction of Loki S02 is the calm before the storm that will prepare audiences for whatever climatic crescendo this season will commit to.