Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Episode 2 of Loki Season 2.
The Big Picture
- Loki "Breaking Brad" reveals the unregulated power of the TVA, which could rival that of Thanos and poses a significant threat.
- The TVA's history is a fabrication, created by He Who Remains to keep his other variants in check, raising questions of morality.
- The TVA's actions, such as bombing unpruned branches, amount to massive multiversal genocide, surpassing the devastation caused by Thanos.
While the title of Loki episode two, “Breaking Brad”, is a jovial pun, the stakes introduced are no joke. “Breaking Brad” provides a glimpse at the unregulated power of the Time Variance Authority and the threat posed by them could rival that of even Thanos. As Loki (Tom Hiddleston) continues to unspool his mysterious “time-slipping” between past, present, and future, the rest of the TVA grapples with the lies they’ve been fed by He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). X-5 (Rafael Casal), in particular, gets the chance to see what his life would have been like if he was never kidnapped to work at the TVA. On the Sacred Timeline, X-5 is famous movie star, Brad Wolfe, and when Loki and Mobius (Owen Wilson) hunt him down to zero in on Sylvie’s (Sophia Di Martino) location, he’s desperate to get back.
The Fabricated History of the TVA
As it is explained by Miss Minutes in the very first episode of Loki, it all began with the Time-Keepers, who put all the tangled timelines across the multiverse into one connected stream known as the “Sacred Timeline” to prevent a multiversal war. Then Time-Keepers created the TVA and all of its agents to keep the Sacred Timeline in check. If someone diverges off their path on the timeline, they become “variants” and the TVA is dispatched to secure and safely remove said variants to keep the timeline clean.
However, as the pieces slowly fell into place last season, it became clear that the TVA is one big front. The little introductory story told by Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) is entirely a fabrication; The Time-Keepers aren’t real, and they didn’t create any of the TVA Agents, they’re all mind-wiped variants kidnapped from their own timelines. He Who Remains (one of many Kang variants) created the TVA to keep his other variants in check, and while there are merits to his decisions (as we’ve seen and been warned just how dangerous Kang can be) there is a larger question of morality surrounding his unilateral decisions across time, like robbing people such as all TVA agents and as a result, Sylvie, of their lives.
Last season we saw glimpses of some of the agents' lives before the TVA, like Hunter C-20 (Sasha Lane), who was a free-spirited margarita lover before being recruited as a Hunter, or even Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who was a school teacher before she was swept up by He Who Remains. While they proudly serve the Time Variance Authority, their individual memories remain, but they are buried out of reach, accessible only by Sylvie who was able to extract them as she began to uncover the ruse.
Mobius’ Crisis and Identity
After being captured and taken into holding at the TVA, X-5 keeps mentioning how none of the work at the TVA is real. It’s all fabricated, all a ruse. Mobius, however, doesn’t want to hear anything about what X-5 has to say about the real world. X-5 asks Mobius if he’s curious to know who he was before the TVA, and what his real name was if he had a family. Despite lecturing Loki beforehand about not losing his temper around X-5, Mobius does just that and explodes, slapping X-5 across the face.
Though he is great at his job and a well-intentioned person, it is clear that the TVA brainwashing goes pretty deep for Mobius. Following his outburst, he drowns his existential woes in a TVA automat that only serves key lime pie. Even odder, there seems to be an illusion of choice as Loki asks Mobius if he’d like pie to calm his nerves and Mobius replies “key lime” as if there were options to decide against. While others have chosen, or been forced to see, their real lives on the Sacred Timeline, Mobius admits he’d rather not know what his life on the outside is like. Too much to reconcile when he just can keep doing the only job he’s ever known. It is understandable but still a bit sad as we can all agree Mobius only deserves the best in life and the possibility he owns a Jet Ski in real life is always possible.
Could the TVA Be More Dangerous Than Thanos?
The TVA is scary for a lot of reasons. For one, it isn’t exactly real, and yet it can destroy everyone and everything. Existing beyond space and time, the laws of nature that govern everyday life don’t apply to the TVA and the technology is so advanced it appears to be magic. As we saw in the first episode of season 1, TVA desk jockeys have multiple copies of the infinity stones and use them as paperweights just because they can.
Since electing to allow all the branches of the timeline to grow and let variants and their worlds live instead of resetting them as is the TVA’s main purpose, there has been significant unrest among the high-ranking Judges Council, specifically with General Dox (Kate Dickie). General Dox is frustrated by the decision to let the timeline branch and as we learned in Episode 2, decided to do something about it. Dox and her TVA loyalists are on a mission to bomb every branch off the Sacred Timeline, including Sylvie’s new life in Broxton, Oklahoma.
Back in Season 1, this would be written off as harmless and simply TVA protocol, but with the realization that the branches don’t need to be pruned and hold people with lives and families, Dox’s actions are essentially massive multiversal genocide. Dox’s unprovoked war against the unpruned branches is unhinged and devastating, as we see the Timeline monitor reflect the bombing. Branches are sporadically destroyed, creating an even messier timeline than the unpruned one.
Compared with Thanos, who set out to eliminate exactly half the population in order to preserve the resources of one universe, Dox and her loyalists are randomly killing entire worlds across the multiverse with no reprehension, amounting to billions of lives lost. In the TVA, Thanos and his infinity stones are null and void, the Mad Titan can’t even hold a candle to the devastation that can be brought forth by the TVA in the wrong hands. It is unclear where the season is heading, but the multiversal bombings have certainly hit a nerve with someone across the timeline, which means it is going to get a lot worse for Loki and company before it gets better.
