Episode 3 of Loki, Lamentis, revealed not only some background on Sophia DiMartino’s Sylvie, but also the first crack in the facade of the TVA. Through the first two episodes, fans rightfully questioned the legitimacy of the TVA’s story as told by Mobius; today’s episode made those questions more relevant when Sylvie revealed that Hunter C-20, played by Sasha Lane, was a human with a history and not a product of some TVA baby factory where they produce Hunters, Minutemen and agents to do their bidding (no wonder your boy Mobs loves jet skis). As fans, once we learn that we’ve been lied to about the TVA’s employees, we should question everything (if we haven’t already) and that line of questioning is going to lead to one truth: the TVA is the great lie meant to protect the interests of a very select number of people.
It’s been fairly obvious, thanks to Loki’s thickly applied skepticism, that the TVA and the Time-Keepers are all part of a rather authoritarian propaganda machine meant to keep the TVA’s workers moving in one direction and questions to a minimum. We’ve seen Mobius’s questions about the Time-Keepers met with hand-waving by Ravonna Renslayer and Loki’s questions to Mobius met with very religious, faith-based “just accept it” responses. Unfortunately for Mobius, even though he’s perceptive enough to see the faults in the official story, he seems to come up just shy of being willing to question it and serves as a willing instrument of the great plan of the Time-Keepers, protecting the Sacred Timeline until he can exist in peace at the end of time. Ravonna, on the other hand, appears entirely implicit in preserving the agenda of the Time-Keepers despite it becoming increasingly obvious that they are, at least at this point, little more than fictional creations intended to keep everyone feeling safe. And when people feel safe, they don’t ask a lot of questions. Like Mobius said, if we start to questions things, everything seems ridiculous.
The TVA has amassed an incredible amount of power though even its employees seem unaware of just how long it’s been around. We know “time works a little differently” in the TVA and that objects of immense power don’t seem to work there, facts that point to the TVA being somewhere outside of time and space, somewhere like the Marvel Comics Temporal Limbo. In comic continuity, the beings that inhabited Temporal Limbo never aged because the dimension existed outside of the timestream; more importantly, it was lorded over by Immortus, an older version of Kang who had been chosen by the Time-Keepers to steer the timeline in one very specific direction towards the end of time. Part of that job meant that Immortus had to prevent different versions of himself, Kang Variants you might say, from achieving what he achieved: mastering time. Here’s a great time to ask another question: if the Hunters are Variants plucked from other timelines and chosen to work for the TVA and the official TVA company line on them isn’t true, can we accept any of Ravonna’s propaganda about the Time-Keepers?
Given Ravonna’s comic book history is so deeply tied to Kang’s and the obvious layers of bullshit she’s spreading about the Time-Keepers in her limited time on screen so far, it’s fair to say that we can’t believe anything she says about them. As apparently the only person with access to almighty space lizards and a person of great power and influence herself, Ravonna is sort of the Pope of the the TVA, directing her faithful servants to do the will of the almighty, which only she is fortunate enough to know and then, as she says, disseminate to those less fortunate. So whose will is being done here? While we haven’t seen him yet, it becomes harder and harder not to believe it’s Immortus as the little bits of evidence start to accumulate.
So halfway through the series, we certainly can’t question the TVA’s power and authority but we absolutely should be questioning at whose behest they are wielding those things. If it Immortus behind the curtain, we should also question whose interests he’s protecting by directing the Sacred Timeline in one very particular direction. If he’s truly doing so to prevent another Multiversal conflict, that’s all well and good and fits the very nice narrative of the Time-Keepers; however, if he’s up to something else, something that’s more personal, such as making sure he’s the guy on top of things at the end of time, then we’re looking at another narrative entirely. And that’s where Loki, or some Lokis, can really do their thing(s). What makes a Loki a Loki? Spreading mischief and being an agent of chaos has to be one answer and it would seem that these two Lokis have begun to unravel the thread of the Great Lie and either Immortus or the Multiverse will be at risk because of it.
