Warning: The following article on Loki’s villain not being a who, but a system, contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 3, of the Marvel Cinematic Universe show.
In this week’s episode of Loki, there is an interesting moment. Visiting the famous World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) pauses to note an attraction styled after Norse mythology. Befitting a show about time travel, Loki has a recurring fascination with this sort of pageantry, the intersection of histories real and imagined. “The Variant,” the show’s second episode, featured a trip to a renaissance fair in Wisconsin in 1985.
Loki is shocked to discover that while the decals of this attraction include his brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins), he has been omitted. In a winking joke, his place has been taken by Balder, Thor’s other brother and a popular comic book character who has yet to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Why’d they include Balder?” Loki complains. “No one’s even heard of him.” Mobius (Owen Wilson) replies, “Sure they have. Balder the Brave.”
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It’s a small moment, but it is a reminder of how history can move past individuals. Loki is a literal deity, but even he can find himself trimmed from the narrative. To a certain extent, that is one metatextual reading of Loki as a television show. It is a story about characters who have been “pruned” from continuity and who exist in a strange sort of limbo. Loki himself is a “variant,” a temporal loose end created by the time-traveling heroes in Avengers: Endgame.
Superhero stories tend to be ruggedly individualistic. They are stories about exceptional people who do exceptional things. Naturally, because of the nature of these stories as action-adventure narratives, the villains also tend to be exceptional people. Thanos (Josh Brolin) is an antagonist of singular will, who harnesses the tremendous power of the Infinity Stones to bend the universe to his design. It is always satisfying to have a villain who can be punched in the face.
Even the streaming shows have largely been beholden to this logic, often to their detriment. WandaVision ended with Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) throwing colored energy balls at Agatha (Kathryn Hahn), while Vision (Paul Bettany) faced off against his own doppelgänger (also Bettany). Hawkeye ended with Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) wrestling Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) in a giant toy store. She-Hulk subverted this by teasing a showdown with the Abomination (Tim Roth).
This is part of what makes Loki so interesting in the context of this shared superhero universe. It is a show that eschews a lot of that familiar superhero framework. Its heroes tend to be bureaucrats and office workers. They are people in suits, mid-level functionaries. They are, essentially, white-collar workers. Part of Loki’s big character arc has been accepting that he is not exceptional, learning to work with Mobius and embrace his own variants, including Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino).
The second season of Loki seems to be suggesting that the same is true of its villain. The first season ended with Loki and Sylvie confronting He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), the man who had positioned himself atop the Time Variance Authority (the TVA). He had done so by making himself exceptional, creating a wall around reality that could exclude his own variants, such as Kang the Conqueror (also Majors) who appeared in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
The first season ended with Sylvie killing He Who Remains, plunging the multiverse into chaos. The Sacred Timeline began to fray and fragment. Various members of the TVA have reacted to this in different ways. Loki and Mobius try to keep things ticking over. General Dox (Kate Dickie) tries to destroy the fragmented timelines. X-5 (Rafael Casal) flies into an alternate life. Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) sets out to find a replacement for He Who Remains.
The second season of Loki has been preoccupied with the idea of paradoxes and time loops. In the season premiere, “Ouroboros,” Loki is able to solve the problem of skipping through time by talking to Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) in the past, giving him enough forewarning to fix the problem in the future. “Wow,” Ouroboros notes of this solution to the problem. “That makes perfect sense. There’s no flaw in our logic.” These characters are stuck in loops and cycles, past and present interwoven.
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In that premiere, Loki skips back and forth between two versions of the TVA. The institution is largely the same. The corridors and the buildings all still exist and serve the same purpose. The same employees are essentially working the same jobs. Very little has meaningfully changed. In the present, Loki can still see the damage that he caused in the past. There are cracks in the floor that have never been repaired and broken windows that have never been replaced.
However, there is a suggestion that the management – or at least the approach to management – has changed. In the past, there are monuments and statues to He Who Remains, but those have been removed or painted over in the present. The implication is that this is all cyclical. That the TVA has survived and endured multiple iterations of itself. Plunging a knife into He Who Remains does not destroy the institution that he sat atop.
Indeed, the third episode raises some interesting questions about the relationship between He Who Remains and the organization that he ran. Loki and Mobius follow Renslayer to Chicago in 1868. They are confused about what drew her to the period. “This isn’t a pivot point in history,” Mobius notes. “Any major figure arises from here?” Loki asks, receiving no answer. It’s ordinary, it’s boring, it’s mundane. There is nothing special about this time or place. It could be anywhere at any time.
Renslayer has allied herself with Miss Minutes (Tara Strong), the artificial intelligence that largely oversaw the day-to-day running of the TVA. They are actually following a plan that was set down by He Who Remains “when he knew the end was near for him.” Renslayer and Minutes plan to fill the power vacuum created by his death by finding a surrogate that they can prop up in his place. This replacement would effectively create a new He Who Remains.
Traveling to Chicago, Renslayer provides a copy of the TVA Guidebook to a young man named Victor Timely (also Majors). Inspired by that booklet, Timely becomes a scientist. He attends the World’s Columbian Exposition to show off his wares, including what appears to be a small-scale prototype for the temporal loom employed by the TVA. He promises a mechanism by which “chaos of particles is transformed into order.” Loki is terrified when he first sees Timely, frozen on the spot.
However, it quickly becomes clear that Timely is no evil genius. He is a hustler and a charlatan. Despite his theatricality, none of his inventions actually work. Loki pegs him as “a confidence trickster.” He runs small scams for profit. In a sense, he is not too different from Loki. Both Loki and Timely are pathetic figures who aspire to greatness, only to fall short of that measure. It is impossible to imagine Timely as a man of true vision or power.
“That is the man who is destined to become He Who Remains?” Renslayer asks, aghast. Minutes reassures her, “With our help, he’ll be all he’s meant to become.” It seems that there is nothing special about Timely. He is not predestined to greatness. When Timely describes Minutes as unique, she responds by promising to make him unique, “You’re pretty singular yourself. Or, at least, you will be.” Timely responds to this flattery, “It’s like the story of myself that I always imagined is true.”
In some ways, this feels like Loki playing with the idea of the “Great Man Theory of History,” the idea that some individuals are so forceful and so important that history alters its flow around them. Loki suggests that the exact opposite is true. That the flow of history is so strong that it can elevate a con artist to ultimate power. Timely holds no real power over his own destiny. “It was delivered to me when I was a child, dropped into my life by some divine hand,” he remarks of the guidebook.
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Of course, the hand wasn’t divine. It was a plan executed by Miss Minutes, a computer system that was created by He Who Remains, “a fully conscious and sentient artificial intelligence entity” granted “autonomy to write [her] own programming.” She is a living system, who treats human beings as mere functions or expressions. When Renslayer insists that she brought the guidebook to Timely, Minutes corrects her, “You brought it to him the same way that the postman brings the post.”
It’s telling that the most significant new character added to the show’s cast in its second season is named “Ouroboros,” evoking the circular symbol that depicts a snake or dragon eating its own tail. He Who Remains may have created Miss Minutes, but now Miss Minutes is creating a new He Who Remains. It is a clever contrast to the typical superhero narrative. The system is self-perpetuating. There is no singular evil who can be defeated. There is no mastermind who can be killed.
Loki is grappling with big ideas, and it perhaps reflects a shifting understanding of the world around these epic superhero stories. More and more young people are confronting the reality that the current system is fundamentally broken and that the game is rigged. In reality, the mechanisms of power are structured to sustain and perpetuate themselves in the face of even the most dramatic shocks. This is perhaps a deeply cynical worldview, but it certainly resonates in this moment.
Thor has had the luxury of facing opponents like Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) or Hela (Cate Blanchett) — villains that he could smash with his hammer. Loki is up against something far more insidious: a self-perpetuating cycle of injustice maintained by a cruel system.
