Recap / Loki Episode 4 "The Nexus Event"

"Do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki is the fact that we're destined to lose?"

Loki and Sylvie sit down outside of Shuroo as they wait to die. Sylvie tells Loki more about her capture as a child, and in her despair, she appears despondent. Trying to make her feel better, Loki says some encouraging words, praising Sylvie for being a survivor who has evaded the TVA throughout her life. In their seemingly last moments, they look affectionately at each other as they hold hands. This ends up creating a Nexus Event and Mobius and the Hunters detect where Loki and Sylvie are, recapturing them but also saving their lives.

Loki and Sylvie get separated, and Mobius interrogates Loki to find out what caused the Nexus Event. By lying to Loki that Sylvie has been pruned and seeing that Loki is on the verge of tears, Mobius realizes that the two of them have fallen in love, while Loki is in denial about this. Instead, Loki tries to tell his friend that he and everyone else at the TVA are Variants, but Mobius thinks Loki is lying. Nevertheless, because Renslayer is also evasive about Hunter C-20’s cause of death, Mobius secretly takes her TemPad and finds out that C-20 had discovered that she is a Variant, realizing that Loki is telling the truth. He tries to make plans with Loki, but they are they are intercepted by Renslayer who has realized what Mobius has done, and has him pruned right in front of Loki. Meanwhile, B-15 has confronted Sylvie about something she saw while being enchanted by her in Haven Hills. Sylvie tells her the truth as well and shows her her memory again, and B-15 turns her back on the TVA too.

Later, Loki and Sylvie are brought before the Time-Keepers, but B-15 releases them from their Time Collars. They fight the guards, and when Sylvie throws her sword and cuts off one of the Time Keeper's heads, they realize they are just androids. Sylvie is disheartened, and Loki attempts to comfort her by admitting his feelings for her. Before he can get the words out, he is pruned from behind by Judge Renslayer.

However, the The Stinger reveals that Loki is not dead but has woken up somewhere else, with four other Loki variants standing over him.

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Tropes:

• Achievements in Ignorance: Without meaning to, Loki and Sylvie manage to create a nexus event in the middle of an apocalypse, something that should've been impossible because they would have been wiped out anyway. It's implied by Mobius to have been because Loki was falling in love with Sylvie, but in the end no one is certain.
• Actually a Doombot: Sylvie succeeds in killing one of the Time Keepers, only for her and Loki to discover that all three of them are simply androids, leaving the question of who is actually behind the TVA and the Sacred Timeline.
• Alliance of Alternates: In the post-credits scene, Loki meets a group of Loki Variants.
• Alternate Universe: Sylvie is not just a Variant of Loki that chose to take a female form. In her own timeline, she was born female, and it just took until she had grown up somewhat for the TVA to register a nexus event.
• And Starring: Richard E. Grant, Jack Veal, DeObia Oparei, and Cailey Fleming are credited as "Special Guest Stars" in the end credits, portraying Classic Loki, Kid Loki, Boastful Loki, and Kid Sylvie respectively.
• Apocalypse How: Class X with Lamentis-1 and its planet colliding with each other, continuing from the previous episode.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Loki is being taken into a time looping dimension, Mobius says, "You know, it occured to me you're not actually the god of mischief." Loki responds by launching into another rant, daring Mobius to hit him with his folksy sayings one more time. Mobius' response in turn completely shuts him down.
  Mobius: You're just kind of an asshole, and a bad friend.
• Awful Truth: Mobius steals Renslayer's TemPad and searches its database for information about C-20. What he finds is an interview log in which C-20 is railing at someone about the fact that she had a real life, friends, and a family, before the TVA took her and brainwashed her into being one of its foot soldiers, confirming that Loki wasn't lying about everyone at the TVA being variants. This revelation sends him into a brief Heroic BSoD.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Loki and Sylvie do this at the start of the fight in the Time Keepers' chamber before the Hunters separate them.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: When Mobius asks Loki whether he and Sylvie are partners, Loki denies it and lists some negative traits of hers trying to prove that (which, ironically enough, just ends up being the moment he—and probably Mobius—realizes he has feelings for her).
  Loki: She's difficult, irritating, and tries to hit me all the time.
• Big Damn Heroes: Just before Loki and Sylvie are executed in front of the Time Keepers, B-15 arrives in time to free them from their Time Twister collars and give Sylvie a sword to fight the other guards with.
• Big "NO!": Loki, when Mobius is pruned in front of him.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Renslayer is revealed to be, at best, a Knight Templar. She executes C-20 for remembering her life pre-TVA, and then lies about it to Mobius. Then, despite the two supposedly being close friends, she doesn't hesitate to have Mobius pruned when he rebels against her.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Time Keepers' chamber is full of Escher-style staircases, walkways suspended in mid-air, glowing red symbols and Ominous Fog.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Sylvie asks Ravonna what the nexus event was that got her arrested by the TVA. Ravonna eventually coldly tells her that she doesn't remember — though her expression implies otherwise.
• Call-Back:
  • Sylvie brings up how Lokis are destined to lose, as Mobius told Loki in "Glorious Purpose".
  • Mobius himself takes back his words on how Loki was born to cause pain, suffering and death, also in "Glorious Purpose". His words also bring to mind what Thor told Loki in Ragnarok, which prompted Loki's Heel–Face Turn in that film.
    Thor: You'll always be the God of Mischief. But you could be more.
    Mobius: You could be whoever, whatever you wanna be, even someone good. I mean, just in case anyone ever told you different.
• Call-Forward: Vampires are confirmed to exist in the MCU, and there's only one anti-hero who specializes as a Vampire Hunter who's getting his own movie soon.
• The Cameo: Jaimie Alexander appears as the Time Cell's manifestation of Sif, the first time she's appeared since Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Loki is about to tell Sylvie how he feels about her and after brief hesitation, he nearly completes the sentence before getting pruned.
• Cassandra Truth: Mobius understandably doesn't believe Loki's claim that the TVA is lying to him. When Loki explains exactly what he knows about the TVA being made up of Variants, however, he starts to put the pieces together.
• Casting Gag:
  • Cailey Fleming plays young Sylvie in a flashback where she's separated from her family against her will, not unlike her previous role as young Rey in The Force Awakens. Similarly, her playing a young girl who has her regular life stripped from her at a young age and later in life lives in apocalypses also sounds like her role as Judith Grimes in The Walking Dead.
  • DeObia Oparei being cast as a Loki variant is presumably a nod to Oparei's previous role as criminal Loki Hayes in Santa Clarita Diet.
  • Richard E. Grant plays a variant Loki who appears dressed similarly to his original Marvel Comics incarnation. Tom Hiddleston's Loki was regularly noted on social media to resemble Grant's star-making role in Withnail and I when The Avengers was first released.
• Cathartic Exhalation: Loki takes a deep breath after Mobius reveals that Sylvie hasn't actually been pruned and is still alive.
• Cerebus Call-Back: Back in the first episode, the processing that Loki went through was treated as a comedic, karmic punishment for a version of Loki who deserved to be taken down a peg. That same processing, however, is terrifying and heartbreaking when it's a young child like Sylvie being put through it, as seen in this episode — especially when that child has done nothing to deserve it, and is implied to be a genuinely good-hearted little girl.
• Chekhov's Gun: Mobius hands over Sylvie's blade that his team confiscated to Ravonna, who proudly places it on her trophy rack. Later in the episode, B-15 somehow manages to break into Ravonna's office and steal the blade offscreen, and gives it back to Sylvie so that she can fight the guards in the Time-Keepers' chamber.
• Chiaroscuro: Just like in the first episode, Mobius interrogates Loki in a room with very narrow, moving ceiling lights that produce a stark contrast between light and dark. It is used to set the mood and emphasize the story bits. When Mobius hears that all of them are Variants, he leans back into the light cone as he considers it. Then he chooses to ignore it and stay in the dark both metaphorically and literally as he moves forward away from the light.
• Cliffhanger: Sylvie has Ravonna at her mercy and demands her to tell how the TVA was really created, while the recently-pruned Loki merely ends up in an alternate dimension, where he is found by other Variants of himself.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Unlike normal Time Doors, which are yellowish white, the Time Doors leading in and out of Time Cells are red in color.
• Come with Me If You Want to Live: After Loki was pruned and he ends up in an unfamiliar place, a voice speaks out to him.
  Loki: Is this Hel?... Am I dead?
  Classic Loki: Not yet. But you will be, unless you come with us.
• Continuity Nod:
  • As Mobius confronts Ravonna about his past life, he says, "Maybe I had a jet ski." Mobius had previously confided in Loki about his fascination with jet skis in "The Variant".
  • Ravonna prunes Loki by stabbing him from behind, with a "wound" forming in the center of his chest, similar to how he stabbed Coulson from behind and the blade emerged from Coulson's chest in roughly the same area.
  • When Loki gets pruned, his face is the last part of him to disintegrate, similar to how in the finale of WandaVision, Vision’s face is the last part of him to disintegrate when the Hex goes down.
• Conviction by Contradiction: One of the things that likely causes Mobius to start believing Loki is that B-15 is showing no signs of cognitive deterioration despite also being subjected to Sylvie's enchantments. Then Ravonna constantly sidesteps Mobius's questions about the time frame of C-20's deterioration. Something like that would be important to know when monitoring anyone that has been enchanted by Sylvie.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: After Loki is captured, he is imprisoned in a "Groundhog Day" Loop where he is forced to relive a physically painful moment (getting slapped in the face and kneed in the groin by Lady Sif). But being told he's alone and will always be alone is what truly makes the memory painful for Loki.
• Crapsack World: The place in time that Variants are sent to when they are pruned looks like a ransacked, heavily destroyed version of Earth. Buildings have turned to ruins, some of them — including the Avengers tower — on the verge of collapsing.
• Create Your Own Villain: The TVA abducted Sylvie for no apparent cause other than that she had a life in which she was well-adjusted and quite possibly destined not to break bonds with her family. This act causes her to develop into the most ruthless and cunning temporal fugitive that the TVA has ever faced.
• Crying Wolf: Mobius doesn't believe Loki when he tells Mobius that the TVA has been lying and everyone there is a variant, since he knows Loki is a Consummate Liar. However, it does weigh on his mind enough to investigate further.
  Mobius: You've already told me about 50 lies in the past 10 minutes. Now, I'm supposed to believe your terrorist girlfriend?
• Dark and Troubled Past: Sylvie was taken as a child, and has been on the run ever since. Everywhere she went, she created a nexus event, because the Sacred Timeline says she wasn't there. Eventually, she discovered the apocalypse loophole, and ran from one apocalypse to the next. She grew up in "the ends of a thousand worlds," as she puts it.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Loki tells the Time-Keepers that he lost count of how many times he has been killed and invites them to do their worst.
• Defiant to the End:
  • Knowing that he's been caught red-handed by Renslayer, Mobius chooses to use his last moments to call out the TVA for what they've done to him and other Variants. She orders him pruned for admitting that he knows the truth.
  • Loki and Sylvie have no means to escape their pruning in front of the Time-Keepers, so they choose to call out the Time-Keepers for fearing them, with Loki even daring them to do their worst.
• Designated Girl Fight: In the hall of the Time-Keepers, Ravonna fights Sylvie while Loki fights the other male guards — though on Sylvie's part, It's Personal. Very, very personal. Also played with, in that she's the superior fighter without magic.
• Disney Death: At the end of the episode, Loki is pruned by Renslayer, but The Stinger shows that he's still alive and was transported to a reality where other presumably pruned Lokis reside. This may also be the case for every other pruned victim, including Mobius and C-20.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Like most of the TVA's Variants, it's implied that Sylvie's original Nexus event was only a minor, arbitrary offense before the TVA erased her timeline, and she's shown innocently playing as a child when she's apprehended. Whatever she did was such a small, meaningless deviation that Ravonna doesn't even seem to remember what it was when Sylvie asks her about it later (though she might just be lying to mess with Sylvie).
• Do Not Go Gentle: This exchange between Sylvie and Loki, as the two quietly watch the destruction of the moon that they're stranded on.
  Sylvie: Do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki... is the fact that we're destined to lose?
  Loki: ...No. We may lose, sometimes painfully. But we don't die. We survive. I mean, you did. You were just a child when the TVA took you, but you nearly took down the organization that claims to govern the order of time. You did it on your own. You ran rings around them. You're amazing.
• Double Take:
  • Mobius does a double take when he sees how shaken B-15 and how desperately she wants to find Loki and Sylvie.
  • Mobius does another when Loki starts to tear up after Mobius tells him that Sylvie has already been pruned.
• Emotionally Tongue-Tied: Loki has a very hard time apologizing to the memory of Lady Sif, and later telling Sylvie about his feelings for her. He is pruned by Ravonna before he can get the words out.
• Empathy Doll Shot: After the young Sylvie is arrested by the TVA, the camera pans to her abandoned toys as they're dissolved by the reset charge.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Despite Ravonna herself ordering her Hunters to prune Mobius, she can't bear to watch as her former friend slowly disintegrates in front of her, and she is visibly distraught afterward.
• Face Death with Dignity: When Sylvie has Ravonna at her mercy, Ravonna just tells her to do it. Sylvie has other ideas.
• False Confession: During the interrogation with Mobius, Loki lies that he was behind everything that happened and that Sylvie was just his pawn, to protect her.
• Flashback: The episode opens on Sylvie being taken by the TVA as a child. Interestingly, Sylvie is a girl with brown hair at the time, rather than a boy with black hair, like how Loki is shown in the prologue for Thor. Then-Hunter Renslayer is the one to pick her up. At her trial, Sylvie manages to swipe Renslayer's TemPad and escape.
• For Want Of A Nail: Sylvie being a girl and knowing she was adopted made her such a well-adjusted and happy child that it diverted her from the "required", villainous Loki path — leading to the TVA coming to arrest her as a little girl.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Even though Loki and Sylvie are fighting the TVA agents right in front of them, the Time-Keepers remain seated and don't even attempt to either interfere with the fight or run for their lives. Ravonna even shouts an order to keep them protected, foreshadowing that they're not as powerful as everybody believes, since they're actually just mindless androids.
  • On the note of the Time-Keepers needing protection, their movement is weird... they move and talk like cheap Chuck E. Cheese animatronics which is in direct contrast to the MCU's high-quality animation of the nonhuman characters. Turns out they're just that: robots that act as a decoy for who's really in charge.
  • On a much grander scale, vampires are confirmed to exist when Mobius lists the types of beings that the TVA have taken in. Marvel's Vampire Hunter, Blade, is set to make his debut in the MCU, played by Mahershala Ali.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Just like in the first episode, we see young Sylvie quickly stealing Ravonna's TemPad after she distracted her, which she used to escape. Also, in this scene we see that Ravonna's Hunter uniform has "A-23" on it, which indicates the name she used to go by when she was a Hunter.
  • As Mobius looks through Ravonna's TemPad for C-20's file, we briefly see several dates for missions that she's been on: March 15, 2050; November 8, 1537; and July 13, 1979.
  • In The Stinger, in the background of the Wham Shot of the Loki Variants, to the right is a destroyed building that somewhat resembles Avengers Tower.
• Friendship Moment: When Mobius finds the truth about the TVA's nature, he goes to Loki in the Time Cell, tells Loki that he was right all along and tells him that he wants to help him to save Sylvie. Loki himself for the first time admits that Mobius is his friend and Mobius then takes back everything he told Loki about his supposedly predetermined life and tells him that he can be whoever he wants to be, even someone good. The two share a warm smile before exiting the Time Cell together.
• Get It Over With:
  • When Loki faces the Time-Keepers and realizes that he's been summoned only to be killed in front of them, he says that he's already died countless times and dares them to go ahead and do their worst.
  • After Ravonna prunes Loki, Sylvie strikes her down and points the Time Stick at her. Ravonna tells Sylvie to just do it, but Sylvie demands her to tell her everything instead.
• Give Me a Sword: Loki asks Sylvie for some help against the guards, and she tosses him her sword. She picks up a Time Stick.
• Groin Attack: Loki's Time Cell loop involves an angry Sif kneeing him in the groin over and over in retaliation for a prank where he cut off a chunk of her hair. On one loop he appears to have convinced her to work with him against the TVA... only for her to kick him in the crotch again.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: The TVA's Time Cells work by trapping someone inside a time loop constructed from a specific memory—in Loki's case, forcing him to relive one physically painful past event from over and over until he relents. We see this in action when Mobius throws Loki into one where he ends up being kicked in the groin repeatedly by Lady Sif because he cut her hair as a prank. He's able to stop the kicks when he's apologetic and admits his flaws. But the only way for Loki to get out of the loop is with an outside intervention — in his case, by Mobius himself.
• Heel Realization: Mobius and B-15 turn on the TVA after learning that they're actually Variants whose memories of life have been suppressed.
• He Had a Name: Loki rejects the notion that Sylvie basically is Loki himself when Mobius implies such after lying about her having been pruned:
  Mobius: You fell for yourself.
  Loki: Her name was Sylvie.
• He Knows Too Much: Hunter C-20 is pruned for remembering her past life. When Mobius learns of this, Renslayer has him pruned as well. Renslayer also finds out that B-15 spent some time alone with Sylvie and puts out an alert for B-15, saying she now has been “compromised by the Variant” as well.
• Held Gaze:
  • Loki and Sylvie gently look at each other instead of looking at the approaching shock wave of a meteor which is about to kill them when they are stranded on Lamentis.
  • There's another brief one between the two of them after they're captured by the TVA. When Sylvie is separated from Loki, she turns back to look at him before he's pulled further down the hallway. Mobius notices this, which prompts him to investigate what Loki and Sylvie feel for each other.
• Holding Hands: Loki and Sylvie are holding each other's hands as they sit and wait for their imminent doom, thus affirming their affection towards each other. It turns out that two Variants of the same being doing it is a paradox big enough to cause a Nexus Event even amidst an apocalypse.
• "I Can't Look!" Gesture: Ravonna has a brief one when a Minuteman prunes Mobius.
• In Spite of a Nail: Sylvie's age when picked up by the TVA implies that she was treated no differently than a male Loki would have been in her position, so it took potentially hundreds of years for a nexus event to form and for her to catch the attention of the TVA.
• In the Back: When Loki and Sylvie are talking, Ravonna hits him in the back with her Time Stick and he disappears.
• Internal Reveal: B-15 and Mobius learn about the TVA agents being brainwashed variants.
• Interrupted Declaration of Love: Loki is on the verge of telling Sylvie his feelings only for Renslayer to prune him.
• Ironic Echo: As Ravonna and Mobius hang out in her office after Loki and Sylvie are apprehended, Ravonna asks him, "If you could go anywhere, anytime, where would it be?" Mobius avoids the question and just answers that he likes being in the TVA, doing work and hanging out with her. Later, after Mobius finds out the truth about the TVA and is confronted by Ravonna, he finally has an answer:
  Mobius: You know where I'd go if I could go anywhere? Wherever it is I'm really from. Yeah, wherever I had a life before the TVA came along.
• Ironic Hell: Loki is dropped in a Time Cell which creates an endlessly repeating loop of a past memory of Sif attacking him for cutting her hair as a joke. Loki isn't fazed by it at first because he disregarded it as a small and insignificant event in his life. Being forced to dwell on it, though, really affects him.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: The TVA do not shy away from torturing dangerous Variants to get the answers that they need. They put the Variants in "Time Cells" and make them relive their bad memories on repeat. Loki is forced to re-experience Lady Sif beating him up in a loop as a punishment for cutting off her hair.
• Kick the Dog: When being escorted to the Time-Keepers, Sylvie asks Ravonna, the agent who first arrested her, what she did to become a Variant. Ravonna's expression implies that she knows the answer, but she callously claims that she doesn't remember.
• Killed Offscreen: Ravonna tells Mobius that C-20 is dead after the mission in Haven Hills because she "lost her mind", not telling him whether she died naturally or was killed, though we never see this happening. Mobius later scours through Ravonna's TemPad for C-20's file and finds out that she is listed as "deceased".
• Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: Renslayer has Hunter C-20 killed when it's clear that her suppressed memories have resurfaced. She later has Mobius pruned after she realizes that he found out the truth as well.
• Lying to the Perp: Mobius doesn't believe Loki's false confession and lies to him that Sylvie is dead to see his reaction. Loki tries to hold it together, but fails so badly that Mobius starts to laugh. He realizes that the two have fallen for each other, and that this was the Nexus Event that registered even amidst an apocalypse.
• The Man Behind the Man: The three Time-Keepers are revealed to be mindless androids. Whoever actually created and runs the TVA has yet to be revealed.
• Man Bites Man: In the opening flashback, young Sylvie bites Ravonna and stomps on her foot before swiping her TemPad and escaping.
• The Masquerade: With the reveal that the Time-Keepers are just an elaborate puppet show, the TVA and its mission to maintain the Sacred Timeline are revealed to have been an illusion. Considering that the TVA's staff consists entirely of brainwashed variants, who are summarily executed if said brainwashing is broken, Loki was right ("a cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear").
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Mobius has spent most of the series trying to take Loki under his wing. Right after he gives Loki an inspiring motivational speech, they're caught by Ravonna and Mobius is pruned.
• Mercy Kill: Renslayer implies to Mobius that the TVA did this for Hunter C-20 due to her rapid mental decline as a result of Sylvie's enchantment. Mobius later learns that C-20 was killed due to her old memories resurfacing.
• Mistaken for Afterlife: After having been "pruned", Loki wakes up in an unknown place and asks if he died and is in Hel, the Norse afterlife for the unworthy. It turns out that he is still alive but trapped in some bizarre dimension.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • After Mobius finds out the truth about the TVA, he goes to Loki in the Time Cell. They reconcile and Loki even calls Mobius his friend, and they start to make plans on how to save Sylvie and throw over the TVA. But as they exit the Time Cell, they run right into Ravonna, with several Minutemen, who has figured out that Mobius took her TemPad and orders them to "prune" Mobius, seemingly vapourizing him in an instant. Sad music plays as Loki is dragged through the corridors Trying Not to Cry.
  • Loki reassures Sylvie that everything will be all right and awkwardly tries to confess his feelings for her, when he starts fading into nothingness right in front of Sylvie, because Ravonna has just "pruned" him in the back.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Sif being angry at Loki for cutting her hair is a reference to Norse Mythology, where Loki did the same thing in the Prose Edda. Loki also asks "Is this Hel?" after he was pruned; Hel is one of the places in Norse mythology where the dead are sent to after they die, ruled by a goddess of the same name (known as Hela in the MCU).
  • One of the Lokis in the credit scene is wearing Loki's classical comic outfit.
  • Ravonna Renslayer used to go by "A-23" when she was a Hunter. In the Marvel comics, Ravonna's first appearance is in The Avengers, issue #23.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Loki falling for Sylvie — two Variants of the same universal role falling in love — creates a nexus event so powerful that it breaks through the apocalypse on Lamentis-1 and allows the TVA to find them.
• Noodle Incident: Mobius reminisces on a few past TVA cases, including ones involving vampires and Titans.
• No, You: Loki and Mobius's dialogue when Loki gets arrested again:
  Loki: You betrayed me!
  Mobius: You betrayed me!
  Loki: Grow up!
  Mobius: You grow up!
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Sylvie, after getting away from the TVA, hopped through the timeline for centuries, avoiding patrols, until she managed to find out that apocalypses could hide her from the TVA. We see none of this after she escapes, unfortunately.
• Ominous Fog: The Time-Keepers' chamber is quite foggy, giving them a sinister atmosphere.
• Perp Sweating: Mobius believes Loki is in league with Sylvie and interrogates Loki about their plans and the cause of the Nexus event that allowed the TVA to find them. They sit in a dark room with narrow ceiling lights, spin lies and spar wits, screaming Film Noir.
• The Power of Love: Despite both of them being minutes away from dying, Loki and Sylvie starting to fall in love with each other causes a Nexus event so powerful that it registers with the TVA despite happening during an apocalypse, which would normally mask any aberrations due to the coming devastation eliminating the evidence. What's more, they've never seen one that progresses that quickly, assumedly because they're different versions of the same being.
• Prank Gone Too Far: Loki's punishment in the Time Cell is to relive the fallout of a prank where he cut off a chunk of Sif's hair leading to her delivering a brutal speech about his flaws.
• Pretend Prejudice: When asking Mobius about C-20 and later about Loki, B-15 makes sure to add that Loki and Sylvie are "plotting their next massacre" and to call Loki a "Variant pet," but the tone of her voice betrays her. After Sylvie enchanted her in Roxxcart and B-15 saw glimpes of her past, she no longer means it and is just trying to uncover the truth with her inquiries.
• Psychological Torment Zone: The TVA use "Time Cells" where they repeat a person's worst memory in a loop. When Loki is placed in one, he faces a memory of Lady Sif who calls him a pathetic worm, hits him in the face, knees him in the groin, says that he'll always be alone, and leaves, only to reappear and do it all over again. It is not long before Loki is reduced to begging on his knees for it to stop.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The memory used to make Loki's Time Cell is of Sif giving him one of these for playing a cruel prank on her.
  Sif: You conniving, craven, pathetic worm. You did this. I hope you know you deserve to be alone, and you always will be.
• Redemption in the Rain: Hunter B-15 takes Sylvie back to the Roxxcart disaster to learn the truth. They stand under a very heavy rain, with flickers of background light shining upon B-15's face as Sylvie shows her her past life. The former antagonistic By-the-Book Cop says in a tiny voice that she looked happy as she realizes that everything the TVA taught her was a lie.
• The Reveal:
  • A minor line from Mobius confirms that vampires exist in the MCU.
  • Ravonna tells Mobius that C-20 was put down after losing her sanity to Sylvie's enchantment. Mobius later learns that C-20 was killed because she remembered who she really was.
  • Sylvie was a child when she was picked up by the TVA, only to grab Ravonna's TemPad and escape before her trial.
  • Loki and Sylvie learn that the Time-Keepers are actually lifeless androids being controlled by someone.
  • "Pruned" Variants are actually sent into another world.
• Rewatch Bonus: Subtle voice clue: For most of the first 2 episodes, Wunmi Mosaku's portrayal of Hunter B-15 gave her a baseline contralto, befitting her role as an intimidating TVA Hunter. The only other time that this was dropped was when Sylvie initially possessed her, carrying a very cheery/sarcastic tone. The fact that for most of this episode, her voice has grown softer/sounded more vulnerable, also reflects her growing anxiety at what she's discovered: that she is indeed a Variant, and she had a life before the TVA.
• Robotic Reveal: Sylvie hurls her sword at one of the Time-Keepers, taking off his head and revealing that they're just animatronic puppets presumably controlled by an as-of-yet unseen force.
• Scenery Gorn: The world Loki ends up in after being pruned appears to be a desolate and ravaged New York.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: B-15, disturbed by what she saw during Sylvie's enchantment, takes her through a time door to Roxxcart to interrogate her about it. Mobius also begins to doubt the TVA and ultimately tries to help Loki rebel against them.
• Screw Yourself: As Loki and Sylvie watch the Lamentis-1 moon collide with its planet, they (subtextually) express their developing romantic feelings for the first time, causing a Nexus event powerful enough for the TVA to detect despite it happening during an apocalypse.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Mobius figures out that Loki has developed feelings for Sylvie and calls her his girlfriend. Loki vehemently denies it.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: Lampshaded by Mobius:
  Loki: Welcome to the real world. Down there, we're awful to get what we want.
  Mobius: Now I gotta have a prince tell me how the real world works?
• Shoo Out the Clowns: To emphasize the bleakness of the struggles against the TVA, Mobius and later Loki himself get pruned, leaving only a seriously pissed Sylvie and fearful Renslayer left in the main plotline. The Stinger subverts it when the audience learn that Loki survived and is with other Loki Variants somewhere.
• Shout-Out: The TVA Time Cell forcing someone into a "Groundhog Day" Loop, forcing them to come to terms with their mistakes, is arguably a more benign version of a Gallifreyan confession dial-turned-torture chamber, as shown in Doctor Who.
• Sick and Wrong: Mobius initially reacts this way to Loki's and Sylvie's relationship, mostly just to provoke Loki during interrogation:
  Mobius: Two Variants of the same being, especially you, forming this kind of sick, twisted romantic relationship. That's pure chaos. That could break reality. It's breaking my reality right now.
• The Stinger: Loki wakes up on another world after he was pruned, where multiple Loki Variants appear before him and tell him to come with them if he wants to live.
• Stylistic Suck: The Time-Keepers barely move, and when they do, they articulate like cheap theme park animatronics, in contrast to their informed omnipotence. This acts as Foreshadowing for The Reveal of what they really are.
• Taking the Heat: Loki attempts to take the blame from Sylvie and put it on himself by lying that he was the mastermind behind "the plan", and Sylvie is nothing but a meager pawn. Mobius sees through it.
• Time Loop Trap: Mobius puts Loki into one — endlessly looping him through repeatedly getting beaten up by an angry Lady Sif — when he thinks Loki is messing with him. Well, more than is usual for a Loki, at any rate. Loki has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, possibly deliberately imposed on him by Mobius, so that he's aware of the loop — but nothing he can try can break him out of the pattern.
• Together in Death: Believing that there's no way for them to escape the destruction of Lamentis-1, Loki and Sylvie sit holding hands and looking into each other's eyes as the debris from the planet rains down around them. Luckily for them, the mere act of doing so creates a nexus event powerful enough to break through the apocalypse, allowing Mobius to work out where they are and open time portals to bring them back to the TVA.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Mobius and B-15 realize that they are in fact variants who had their past memories erased. It causes them to turn against the TVA.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: It's revealed that Sylvie was literally this as a child for the TVA's purposes — they arrived to arrest her for "crimes against the sacred timeline" right after she fantasized about saving Asgard. Between being born a girl (and therefore less ostracized for being a magic user) and knowing she was adopted (meaning she grew up content in that knowledge, rather than likely to break down over it as Loki did when he found out), she was essentially too pure and good to be a proper Loki.
• Trapped in Another World: What happens to people who get pruned. It's shown in a post-credits scene where Loki meets the other Variants of himself on what looks to be a ruined version of Earth.
• Trying Not to Cry: Loki has tears in his eyes, but pretends to be unaffected, when Mobius lies to him that Sylvie has already been pruned. Later on, he is trying (and visibly failing) to hold it together after Renslayer had Mobius himself pruned.
• Uncertain Doom: It's left up in the air to whether Mobius' pruning led to him either being Killed Off for Real or only ending up in another dimension like Loki.
• The Unreveal:
  • It's left uncertain if Loki and Sylvie developing feelings for each other was what caused the nexus event, or if something else was at play.
  • B-15 asks Sylvie to show her what her life was before the TVA wiped her mind. The viewers don't get to see what Sylvie shows her — just B-15 tearfully saying that she looked happy in the memory.
  • On the way to the Time Keepers, Sylvie asks Renslayer what Nexus event she caused to make the TVA pick her up. Renslayer claims that she doesn't remember.
  • The Time Keepers are shown to be animatronic puppets, but the true mastermind of the TVA, if there is one, is not revealed.
  • After being pruned, Loki wakes up in another dimension where he meets other Variants of himself. Whether other people's Variants, including Mobius, are in this dimension or another one, is not shown.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: It is implied that B-15 and Sylvie went back to 2050 Roxxcart to not only have B-15's memories returned, but also to arrange a rescue plan for the latter should things go wrong — hence, B-15 arriving just in time to give Sylvie her sword to fight the guards.
• Villainous Rescue: The TVA plucks Loki and Sylvie from Lamentis-1 just before the meteors would have killed them, but only because they intend to prune both personally and aren't aware that the pair are stranded.
• Wham Episode: To recap, the Time-Keepers are actually just mindless androids, Judge Ravonna ends up being Evil All Along, Mobius and Hunter B-15 find out that they are Variants, Loki and Mobius are both pruned, and it's revealed that pruning Variants transports them to somewhere in time instead of killing them, as seen with Loki in The Stinger; Mobius' fate is unknown.
• Wham Shot:
  • Sylvie beheads one of the Time Keepers... and then its head starts emitting sparks.
  • Just as Loki is about to tell Sylvie his feelings, he's suddenly pruned from behind by Renslayer.
  • In The Stinger, Loki wakes up in another dimension, as an offscreen voice tells him to come with them. We then see the voice belongs to one of three other Loki Variants (possibly even four, given that Kid Loki's holding an alligator that is wearing a horned helmet).
• While Rome Burns: Loki and Sylvie sit together and hold each other's hands, watching Lamentis-1 being ravaged by the planet colliding with it. A stray meteor from the planet falls right in front of them, and causes an explosion large enough to engulf them both; ultimately, this trope is subverted when they inadvertently cause a Nexus event so powerful that the TVA is able to detect and arrest them before they are killed by the explosion.
• Would Hurt a Child: Sylvie appears as a young girl playing with her toys before the TVA show up to apprehend her, sentencing her to the same pruning as any other Variant.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
  • While waiting to die on Lamentis-1, Sylvie wonders whether all Lokis are destined to lose. Loki refutes this by pointing out how Sylvie managed to survive all by herself:
    Loki: We may lose. Sometimes painfully. But we don't die. We survive. I mean, you did. You were just a child when the TVA took you, but you nearly took down the organization that claims to govern the order of time. You did it on your own. You ran rings around them. You're amazing!
  • After betraying the TVA, Mobius tells Loki that he doesn't have to be defined by his assigned role as the villain, and he has the power and the choice to be whatever he wants to be.

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