Last week, Loki took his TVA responsibilities very seriously, even helping Mobius figure out where their mystery Variant Loki was hiding without being detected. And when they found them, chaos ensued. The Sacred Timeline was bombed by a woman who looks eerily like a female, blonde Loki, and Loki has took off through the time door after her, abandoning Mobius and the TVA.
Well okay then, Hunter C-20 and the Variant are at a lovely lunch, and the Variant is giving Hunter C-20 a lesson about brain freezes. She asks the TVA Minuteman how many people are guarding the Time-Keepers? Hunter C-20 is taken aback; she can’t answer that. Sylvie tries to pull the info out, because they’re best friends, right? But Hunter C-20 figures it out. She doesn’t actually know who this woman is.
It turns out we’re moments before the TVA and Loki enter the Roxxcart, and the Variant has Hunter C-20 under a spell of enchantment while she’s being held captive.
Now directly following the ending of last week’s episode, the Variant is at the TVA and gets a rude awakening when she learns that her magic is no good here. She wasn’t expecting that. However, her hand-to-hand combat is just as impressive as her magic prowess, and she takes down a small squad of four Minutemen singlehandedly. Then, Loki arrives through the time door hot on her heels. He fetches his confiscated knives from the lockers before starting his pursuit.
The Variant is still taking down Minutemen when Loki finally finds her, and he wants some answers. He asks if she’s really a Loki? No answer. He wants to work together No answer. Fine, with or without her cooperation he’ll get to the Time-Keepers. Then, Renslayer finds them (bickering and fighting in the hall like children).
The Variant threatens to kill Loki if Renslayer steps any closer, and Renslayer is just fine with that, but the Loki outsmarts her and sends himself and the Variant crashing through a time door and out of the TVA.
Unfortunately for the Variant, when she tries to get rid of the pesky Loki on her tail the TemPad is out of battery, giving Loki the chance to slip away in a flash of green and take her by surprise. He calls her a Loki again, and again she’s offended, confusing Loki before he sends the TemPad into his magical pocket.
An explosion hits, and bad news, it wasn’t either of them. The Variant asks where Loki had sent them — Lamentis-1 in 2077.
The Variant has a variety of Apocalypses saved on her TemPad (she was using them to hide in), and it turns out Lamentis-1 is the worst possible option. It’s a moon that a planet is about to come crashing into, and no one makes it off alive. She tells Loki that she’s tethered to the TemPad he sent into magical subspace, and he asks if they’re a team now? “Oh God, no.”
They take refuge in a building, and while Loki catches his breath the Variant approaches and gently touches his neck, her palms glowing green. She’s trying to enchant him, but it won’t work. His mind is too strong.
Loki proposes a truce as she draws her sword, and he tells her that the TemPad is hidden in his heart, and they aren’t getting to get very far if she keeps trying to kill him every few minutes. She also knows that he’s kept her alive because he needs her to recharge the damn thing.
The plan Loki interrupted was years in the making, and the Variant wants to finish her work. The pair threatens to kill each other, again, before setting off to find enough power to navigate through time and space with.
The plan? Find a town. He calls her Loki again, but she tells him she’s Sylvie now. It’s her alias, which Loki finds very un-Loki like.
SYLVIE: What exactly makes a Loki a Loki?
LOKI: Independence, authority, style.
With 12 hours before Lamentis-1 collapses, they find the old abandoned town. Sylvie finds a source, but Loki calls her bluff when she asks him to hand it over. She tells him this requires a massive power source, not a night light. They continue their search.
They stumble upon a small residence, and Sylvie tries to kick her way through the door. She’s greeted with a blast to the chest by the home’s inhabitant, sending her flying back. Loki shape shifts into the form of the woman’s husband he sees in a photo behind her, which isn’t met with the warmth he expected. He also takes a blast to the chest and lands beside Sylvie.
Sylvie asks the woman where everyone is? And she tells her that they’re heading to the evacuation vessel the Ark. Ah, something like that will have enough power to charge the TemPad. The only roadblock? Finding a ticket.
People are queued up waiting to get on the train to get them to the Ark, but Sylvie has a plan to get on board. Of course it involves fighting in some way, so Loki insists they’re doing this one his way. He shifts his clothing to match the guards, and he leads Sylvie right past the first line of defense, but they meet resistance at the second. But Sylvie saves their skins, enchanting the guard to grant them passage.
They take a seat and begin their familiar bickering, starting with how each insists they travel on a train (frontwards, not facing doors), to Loki insisting Sylvie get some sleep after she yawns, but she can’t. She can’t sleep around untrustworthy people. Sylvie softens slightly when Loki mentions that his mother taught him his “fairly decent magic,” as she called it.
She asks what his mother was like, and Loki also softens. “She was a Queen of Asgard. She was good. Purely decent.” Sylvie asks if he’s sure she’s his mother, and he responds no, he’s adopted. Turns out Sylvie was adopted, too, and she found out at a much younger age than Loki did. Now, he wants to know about Sylvie’s mother. But she doesn’t remember her.
Loki shows her a little trick that Frigga had taught him, small fireworks erupting over the palm of his hand, and Sylvie is mildly impressed. Loki wants to know where Sylvie learned her magic, and she tells him she taught herself. Loki is very impressed.
Loki asks if Sylvie has a lucky beau waiting for her at the end of her crusade, and she says she does in jest, a postman. She asks him the same question, any ladies or men in his past, and he responds a bit of both. Sylvie confirms she, too, has had a bit of both, but neither of them have never had anything real.
SYLVIE: Love is mischief, then?
LOKI: No. Love is, uh, something I might need to have another drink to think about.
As Sylvie naps, a rather drunk Loki has began a lively concert in the cart, singing along with the passengers and dancing, and Sylvie notices an older man looking oddly at Loki before leaving. He directs his attention to her as he sings in Asgardian, and she seems to understand this message meant just for her. He also has an answer to her earlier question:
LOKI: Love is a dagger. It’s a weapon to be wielded far away or up close. You can see yourself in it. It’s beautiful. Until it makes you bleed. But ultimately when you reach for it …
SYLVIE: It isn’t real.
She hates the metaphor, and then the older man comes in with some guards asking for their tickets. When asked to procure them, Loki sets fireworks off in his palms (oops) and Sylvie gets her way — it’s a fight. The pair easily takes on the train’s guards. It’s going really well, until Loki is tossed out a window. Sylvie, still thinking of the TemPad, grabs her sword and goes after him.
She’s not taking his nonsense anymore and threatens him with her sword to give her the TemPad. A TemPad that is now smashed thanks to Loki’s tumble out of a train. Time for a new plan.
Loki suggests they hijack the Ark and ensure it gets off the planet instead of meeting its predetermined fate of being destroyed. Sylvie agrees.
As they make their way back towards the train, Loki whines about having to walk so much like the Prince he is, and then asks Sylvie to teach him about her enchantment powers. After a little back and forth, and Loki insisting that he needs to know he can trust her, she gives him the rundown. She tells him that Hunter C-20’s mind was fogged and messy, she had to use a memory from hundreds of years prior to be able to keep the enchantment hold on her, from a time before she fought for them.
This little fact takes Loki aback. Before her time with the TVA, Hunter C-20 had been a normal person on Earth. Well, that doesn’t line up what Loki was told. Everyone working at the TVA was not created by the Time-Keepers. They’re all Variants, just like they are.
Time is running out when they reach the Ark’s launch site. The planet is about to crash into them. Between guards, the terrified people of Lamentis-1, and the falling meteors, it’s nearly impossible to get to the launch, but hope is lost when the Ark is hit by falling debris and destroyed.
Now, they’re stuck.
How will Loki and Sylvie get off Lamentis-1 now? Episode 4 of Loki premieres Wednesday, June 30 at 12 a.m. PST.
Be sure to keep up with our ongoing coverage of Loki with episode recaps, analyses, deep dives, and more as the series progresses!
