Recap / Loki Episode 8 "Breaking Brad"

"The TVA is the problem. It's broken. It’s rotten!"

Loki and Mobius track down Hunter X-05, who was supposed to be on the hunt for Sylvie, but has since abandoned his duty and started a career as a movie star in the Sacred Timeline. Meanwhile, Ouroboros tries to fix the Temporal Loom.

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Tropes:

• 15 Minutes of Fame: The punchline of Mobius's "Knock Knock" Joke to Brad implies that his stardom will fade, especially if he's not there for it, but they can choose to drop him off at the same moment he left if he plays ball.
• The '70s: Brad attempts to escape into this decade to become a famous movie star, forcing Mobius, Loki, and B-15 to apprehend him to get answers out of him.
• Apocalypse How: Class X-5 (pun not intended). Dox and her loyalists plant reset charges in every new branching timeline in an attempt to restore the Sacred Timeline. By the time she's stopped, there are only a few branches left.
• As You Know: When the episode starts, Mobius is explaining to Loki (and the audience) that they are in London because they want to find Sylvie, Dox and X-05 are not responding, and the last time X-5 used his TemPad before it went dark was in that place. Loki already knows all this.
• The Atoner: Lampshaded by Brad, when he taunts Loki:
  Brad: Everyone here knows what you're doing, you know? You're just trying to make up for all the terrible, awful shit you've done in your life, you pathetic little man.
• Auto-Kitchen: The TVA has an automat that exclusively serves Key lime pie. Loki and Mobius end up there by accident and decide to take a break and try it out.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: In the Cold Open, Loki and Mobius swap out their TVA suits for some dapper tuxedos to be able to go undercover as red carpet attenders. Furthermore, Loki himself gets a nice new coat to go with his TVA outfit.
• Bait-and-Switch: When going in to interrogate Brad, Mobius warns Loki and B-15 that Brad is notorious for being an asshole, and that they shouldn't let him get under their skin. True to form, Brad begins viciously tearing into Loki to try to press his Berserk Button, with Loki visibly taking offense. And yet, Loki manages to keep a cool head, and it's actually Mobius himself who gets provoked, angrily punching Brad in the face and calling him a "silly little man" when Brad starts mocking him about what his old life must've been like.
• Battle of Wits: Mobius calls Brad's interrogation a "chess match," because Brad is a good hunter who knows the TVA's usual tactics and procedures. It is also a battle between two Master Actors, Loki and Brad. Brad initially manages to get the upper hand — he shuts up B-15 by pointing out that by getting a life on the timeline he just did as she told him, and tears into both Loki and Mobius with Hannibal Lectures. He fails to trigger Loki but provokes Mobius into slapping Brad in the face. However, Brad erroneously assumes that Loki is still more of a villain and Loki leans into that to intimidate him and get the information he needs.
• Bullying a Dragon: Brad thinks he can safely antagonize Loki, a Physical God who captured him, by calling him a loser and pinning his mother's death on him. Brad believes that Mobius will ensure Loki doesn't do Brad any harm. Then Loki just happens to be alone with Brad in a torture chamber and decides to have some fun.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Brad tells Loki that he should stop trying to be a hero and embrace being a villain, because that's what he's good at. Loki then pretends to follow his advice in order to scare Brad into revealing where Sylvie is.
• Birds of a Feather: While talking to Brad, Mobius comments that this trope applies to Loki and Sylvie's relationship, rather than Opposites Attract.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: After Sylvie refuses to help Loki, Mobius and Brad arrive to tell her that her timeline is about to be destroyed, so she is forced to help him in order to preserve her home anyway. She bails out on him as soon as Dox and her crew are rounded up.
• Casting a Shadow: Loki is able to manipulate the shadows of his duplicates to mimic what they would look like were he in his full regalia, horns and all. He then has the shadows restrain Brad. Mobius thinks it's a bit over the top.
• Cold Open: The episode begins with Loki, Mobius, and B-15 going undercover in 1970s England to capture Hunter X-5, a.k.a. Brad Wolfe, who's trying to find a new life as the star of a movie called Zaniac. After a brief chase scene and some masterful illusions, they manage to take him down.
• Combined Energy Attack: Loki and Sylvie combine their powers to release a wave of destructive energy against Dox and her agents.
  Sylvie: [before taking Loki's hand] Don't overthink it.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Outside of the theatre where Loki and Mobius are looking for Brad, there's a movie poster of one of Kingo's movies.
  • When Loki wants to talk to Mobius after he slaps Brad, Mobius recalls how he told Loki that he can play the heavy keys, too.
  • Loki sympathizes with Mobius losing his cool by reminding him of what he himself did in The Avengers.
  • Brad telling his captors that they're getting desperate (which Loki acknowledges) is what the imprisoned Loki himself said to Nick Fury (which Fury acknowledged).
  • Just like his Sacred Timeline counterpart, Loki pretends to betray an ally who's in on his plan and fall back into his villainous ways in order to get what he wants out of his adversary.
• Contrived Coincidence: One of the few surviving timelines out of the countless destroyed by Dox just so happens to be the one Sylvie had set up shop in, as revealed by the end of the episode.
• Creator Cameo: At the dockyard where the team finds Dox and her loyalists, there's a sign reading "DeLeeuw & Sons" in Norwegian. Dan DeLeeuw is the director of the episode.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Without a Time Stick or the element of surprise, Brad is no match for Loki wielding the full might of his magic, a fact Loki himself lampshades when Brad complains about fighting fair.
• Defensive "What?": Mobius cautions Loki and B-15 that Brad will try to get under their skin but then says Loki's name, revealing that it was mainly targeted at him, prompting Loki to defensively ask "What?"
• Deadly Force Field: Loki interrogates Hunter X-5, a.k.a. Brad Wolfe, by using a machine that create a rectangular forcefield, encasing him in it. And then Loki toys with the controls, shrinking the forcefield side by side, threatening to slowly crush Brad to death with it if he doesn't start releasing information.
• Deep Breath Reveals Tension:
  • Mobius takes a deep breath before admitting to Loki that hitting Brad wasn't tactical but that he really did lose it.
  • When Loki meets Sylvie after their falling out in the season 1 finale, he just stares at her for some time before muttering "hi" while inhaling loudly six times in a row. She responds in kind.
    Brad: This feels tense. What do you say we leave them to it.
• Emotionally Tongue-Tied: When Loki finally meets Sylvie again, he's at a loss for words for many seconds, and both of them just stand there in awkward silence.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Loki poses dramatically at Brad's cell door as Mobius wheels in the torture device, only for the moment to be cut short when Mobius runs against the door frame and Loki has to help carry it in.
• Foreshadowing: It doesn't make much sense for a jail cell to have a lock that can't be opened from the outside, so Mobius getting locked out is an early hint that he and Loki are doing a bit.
• Funny Background Event: As Mobius is angrily walking after attacking Brad, he and Loki wind up at the automat, so they decide to get key lime pie. As the pair eat, several shots of the background show that not only is "Pies" the only thing on the menu, every pie is key lime pie.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Mobius and Loki roll a torture device into Brad's cell, but he's convinced it's a show and they don't really intend to use it. Loki points out the controller is missing, so Mobius leaves to get it, at which point Loki locks the cell and reveals he has the controller. He then uses the device to threaten Brad into compliance, at which point Mobius lets himself in, revealing the whole thing to be an act.
• Hand Blast: Both Loki and Sylvie fire green blasts from their hands when they fight Dox and her loyalists.
• Hannibal Lecture: Brad does his best to channel Hannibal Lecter himself during his first interrogation, calmly laying into his inquisitors with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that provokes the normally levelheaded Mobius into physically attacking him.
• Happiness in Minimum Wage: In the branch she made a new life for her herself in, Sylvie seems quite happy working at the McDonald's she ate at in the previous episode.
• Hidden Depths: Casey reveals he's quite knowledgeable about TVA tech, being able to figure out what was wrong with X-05's tampered TemPad that Loki and Mobius were having trouble with. This is because he's memorized the TVA Guidebook by heart, and is in fact a big fan of Ouroboros.
• Hologram: When Brad escapes while Loki pursues him, Loki creates an illusory group of Punkers who surround Brad to trap him until Loki gets there. Brad realizes what's happening when he tries to hit one of the Punkers with a crowbar and it passes through him.
• Hopeless with Tech: Downplayed, as this is TVA tech. Loki and Mobius have trouble figuring out how to dissemble and inspect Brad's modified TemPad, even with the help of the TVA handbook.
• Hunting the Rogue: Loki and Mobius are in London to catch X-5, the rogue TVA agent who was tasked with finding Sylvie by general Dox but abandoned his mission and hid on the Sacred Timeline.
• Hypocrite:
  • Despite her denouncement of the TVA and how its methods destroys lives, B-15 has no problem justifying her arrest of Brad by citing the bureaucracy's protocol, something he smugly lampshades.
  • Brad also implicitly calls Loki a hypocrite when he reminds Brad that there are lives at stake, to which Brad reminds Loki of the horrible things he's done in his past.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: After Brad gets Mobius upset by talking about his life before the TVA, Loki asks him if he doesn't want to know what his life was like. Mobius answers that he would be happier not knowing it, saying that the worst thing would be finding out that he had a good life.
• Implausible Deniability: When Loki and Mobius wind up at the automat, Loki is confused and asks if Mobius meant to go there, having been following him. Mobius immediately tries to claim that he was following Loki, even though Loki points out he was in front the entire time.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: It's revealed that Casey is a fan of the TVA Guidebook and asks for his copy to be signed by O.B. in the same manner as a comic book fan wanting an artist to sign their copy.
• Instant Costume Change: Right before Sylvie and the others go to the dockyard where Dox and her loyalists set up their camp, Sylvie changes her McDonald's uniform to a more tactical outfit with magic.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Loki reveals to the others that He Who Remains seems to have been in a relationship with Renslayer in the past.
  • Casey decodes the last message to Renslayer's TemPad, revealing that Miss Minutes is helping her, something that was apparent in the finale of Season 1.
  • Loki and Mobius spend most of the episode trying to find Sylvie through interrogating Brad Wolfe. Meanwhile, the viewers know exactly where she is, as it was shown to us in The Stinger of the previous episode.
• Ironic Echo: In order to upset Loki, Brad reminds him of "terrible, awful things" that Loki has done in the past. Loki then uses those exact same words multiple times while interrogating Brad, telling him he'll do those things to him now.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Loki and Mobius basically torture Brad for information about Dox and Sylvie. They get some, but not all of it.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • X-05/Brad makes a few good points when he's being interrogated by Loki, Mobius, and B-15.
    • He reminds B-15 that she said TVA workers are variants who had lives on the timeline, so she shouldn't be mad that he went down there to live his life.
    • He tells Mobius off for just abandoning the life he once had on his timeline before the TVA took him away from it.
    • He is not wrong when he calls Loki an atoner, a loser, and the one obsessed with Sylvie. It is Brad's belief that Loki is still a villain that does not hold water, and Loki uses that to his advantage.
  • After Sylvie returns to the TVA and sees how everyone utterly failed to stop General Dox from destroying so many of the branched timelines, Sylvie growls that the organization is far from being the last line of defense as Loki said it was. Furthermore, she notes that the TVA itself is the problem, and that it deserves to be burned to the ground.
• "Knock Knock" Joke: Mobius tells one to Brad during the interrogation:
  Mobius: Knock knock.
  Brad: Who's there?
  Mobius: Brad.
  Brad: Brad who?
  Mobius: That's showbiz.
• Lame Comeback: What Mobius says to Brad after slapping him, as his words are remarkably tame despite his uncharacteristic bout of anger.
  Mobius: You're a silly little man! Silly little man!
• Last-Second Word Swap: B-15 is about to curse when they discuss Ravonna, but duly stops herself.
  B-15: She really is fff... full of surprises.
  Mobius: You can say that again.
• Mind over Matter:
  • Loki uses telekinesis to throw away Brad's Time Twister to prevent him from escaping again.
  • At the fight at the end of the episode, Loki uses telekinesis to pull one of Dox's loyalists away from a Time Door.
• Mirthless Laughter: Loki laughs joylessly when Brad attacks his weak points and claims that he'll always be a villain.
• Mood-Swinger: O.B. goes from shouting "We're all gonna die!" to cheerfully greeting Casey and then immediately goes back to panicking.
• Mythology Gag: The name of the film that Brad starred in, Zaniac!, is the name of the persona Brad takes on in the Marvel Comics.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Part of Brad's taunt towards Loki:
  Brad: See, everything you and Sylvie have ever done to try to help, has only ever made it worse. [...] I've read your file. It's you. You're the problem. [...] At the end of the day, you just make everything worse. For Mobius, for B-15, for your mother. 'Cause that's what you do. You lose. You're a loser.
• Not Helping Your Case: Loki tries to convince Sylvie that, while the TVA is flawed, it's still the best way to protect the timelines from the threat of He Who Remains and his variants. That is, until they discover General Dox's attempt to bomb every timeline, which succeeds in wiping out the vast majority of branched timelines, which only convinces Sylvie that the TVA cannot be reformed.
• No, You:
  • When Brad calls out Mobius for not wanting to know what his life before the TVA was:
    Brad: And until you wake up, you're just a nowhere man. You're a…
    Mobius: You're a nowhere man! You're a silly little man!
  • After Mobius slaps Brad during the first interrogation, and Loki tries to talk about it with him:
    Loki: Seems like he got under your skin.
    Mobius: Nope. He didn't get under my skin. He got under your skin.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • X-05 becomes terrified when he realizes Loki is serious about interrogating him, at which point his smugness goes out the window. He later becomes erratic when he's taken to the McDonalds in Braxton that Sylvie works at, knowing that it's going to be bombed by Reset Charges at any minute.
  • O.B. freaks out when he realizes the blast doors to the Temporal Loom are locked and the only people who could open it are He Who Remains and Miss Minutes, neither of whom are around or likely to cooperate even if they were.
• Omnicidal Maniac: It's clear General Dox has no qualms with destroying trillions of lives to restore the Sacred Timeline, showing no remorse for her actions as she's being brought in.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Mobius, who's normally calm and levelheaded even during desperate times, becomes utterly furious when Brad starts questioning about his life before the TVA, slugging him in the face and screaming at him in response. Loki himself is utterly shocked at what he's seen and spends the next few scenes helping him through it.
  Loki: I've never seen you like this before.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Brad is shifty and impatient while Loki is talking to Sylvie, and Mobius realizes from his desire to leave that something other than Sylvie must be scaring him. When Mobius threatens to hang around indefinitely, Brad reveals Dox's plan.
• Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: The episode's title is an obvious pun on Breaking Bad.
• P.O.V. Cam: Mobius wheeling in the torture device is filmed from Brad's P.O.V. and upside down, because Brad is lying on the floor.
• Product Placement: Mobius happily gorging himself on McDonalds while crowing how it's such a good meal.
• Read the Freaking Manual: Mobius and Loki go to O.B. for help with Brad's modified TemPad, but since he's quite busy keeping the TVA from imploding, he simply hands them a TVA guidebook and lets them work it out.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: During the first interrogation, Brad calls Loki a loser who keeps making things worse for everyone he cares about because deep down he's a villain, no matter how hard he tries to be a hero.
• Refreshingly Normal Life-Choice: After spending the majority of her life hiding in apocalypses, Sylvie is happy with her new, mundane life as a McDonald's worker.
• Refusal of the Call: When Loki tells Sylvie that the TVA is in danger and that he saw her there in the future, she wants nothing to know about it and tells him she would never go back. Only when Brad reveals Dox's plan does Sylvie briefly join the team but then leaves again when Dox still succeeds in pruning many branches, believing the TVA cannot be reformed. However, the last scene has her holding He Who Remains's TemPad, suggesting she is to some extent tempted.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: Dox forms a faction of the TVA dedicated to pruning whatever new timelines pop up in the wake of He Who Remains' death. She ends up captured, along with a number of agents, but at least some of them escaped into the branches.
• Screw Yourself: When Loki and Sylvie go outside to talk, the weirdness of their (former) relationship gets hilariously lampshaded by Mobius:
  Mobius: Look. It's a complicated relationship, okay? There's a lot to unpack when you're basically in a relationship with yourself.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Mobius asks Brad what Zaniac is about, he eventually decides to say "It's cinema!" as a way of describing it, likely alluding to the "This is cinema" meme.
  • The episode title is clearly a reference to Breaking Bad.
  • X-5's alias, Brad Wolfe, also appears to be a reference to the Bad Wolf story arc from series 1 of the revived Doctor Who.
• Show Within a Show: "Zaniac" is a 1977 film that Brad Wolfe decides to star in, which is where Loki and Mobius show up to take him in.
• Skewed Priorities: Casey and B-15 look for O.B. at the Temporal Loom. They hear him screaming about how everyone is going to die in the distance, only for Casey to get sidetracked in fanboyish glee when he realizes he's talking to the Ouroboros, author of the TVA manual. B-15 has to remind O.B. about the impending doom to get him back on track.
• Starting a New Life: Both Sylvie and X-05, or Brad Wolfe as he prefers now, attempted start new lives for themselves away from the TVA
  • Sylvie got a job at the McDonald's she went to check out and eat at, and she seemed to be enjoying it.
  • X-05 becomes a famous actor on the Sacred Timeline and was currently attending the premiere of his latest film, "Zaniac".
• Terror Hero: While chasing X-05, Loki finally remembers he's a sorcerer and uses magic to chase the man down, then corner him, then grab him with horrifying horned shadows.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: As part of the act to get Brad to reveal where Sylvie is, Loki pretends to slip back into villainy after Brad tells him that he'll always be a villain, and that he is good at it.
• Up the Real Rabbit Hole: Brad repeats several times that nothing in the TVA is "real". He is convinced that life on the timeline is the only one that matters.
• The Walls Are Closing In: The device Mobius and Loki roll into Brad's cell creates a forcefield box around a target. The user can then shift the dimensions of the box as they wish. Loki uses it to trap Brad and then slowly compresses the box, making him think Loki intends to crush him to death. Once he breaks and gives up Sylvie's location, Loki deactivates the box.
• Wham Shot: The monitor of the timelines shows the extent of the harm that General Dox and her loyalists have done, with each pruned branch meaning that countless people just have been murdered.
• What Does This Button Do?: Loki pretends that he doesn't know how the controller for the force field machine works and that he's just pressing buttons at random, scaring Brad.
  Loki: What does this one do? [...]
  Brad: Hey, don't just touch random buttons on that, okay?
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Unsurprisingly, when you take a massive, dogmatic, rigidly hierarchical organization like the TVA that's been pruning entire universes as their rote answer to even the slightest deviations from the Sacred Timeline, people like General Dox and her loyalists resolutely fall back on that same scorched-earth tactic with no regard for Judge Gamble's proclamation in the preceding episode that the TVA would stop pruning timelines. Whether or not anyone else feels the same way or as strongly as Dox and her subordinates remains to be seen.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: Loki conjures an illusion of a group of punkers that invoke this trope to distract and trap Brad.
  Punker: Where's the fancy lad going off to, then? [...] He came down the wrong street tonight.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Discussed between Loki and Sylvie. Loki tells Sylvie that he saw her in the Future TVA, believing that it'll eventually happen. Sylvie defies it, saying that the future isn't written anymore and that she has no intention to ever go back to the TVA, so what he saw cannot come true.

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