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Our God of Mischief travels to “1893” Chicago to encounter a confidence man Kang variant.

Finally! Some serious time traveling into the past.

Loki Season 2 Episode 3, “1893,” from writers Eric Martin and Kasra Farahani & Jason O’Leary and director Kasra Farahani takes most of the episode to that titular late 19-century year in the search for Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong), in the hopes that the rogue AI can be convinced to override the TVA’s firewall, enabling OB (Ke Huy Quan) top open the protective shutters and get to saving the whole of existence. However, what they find there is possibly more helpful and almost certainly more dangerous.

Before we get to 1893, though, Loki Season 2 Episode 3 drops the audience into Chicago in 1868. That’s where Renslayer steps through a time doo, searching for someone. It doesn’t take long for the someone in question to show up, the one, the only Miss Minutes. She has a critical but easy mission for Renslayer. Drop a package into a nearby open window and then meet back in Chicago in 25 years. Our former TVA agent knows how to follow directions, so Renslayer pulls it off without a hitch. The thump alerts an adolescent boy using a chemistry set on the other side of that window. Obviously, this boy will become some Kang variant in the future. He opens it and discovers…another copy of the OB-penned TVA guide. Time Paradox! Smash to the opening credits!

After the credits, the action shifts back to the TVA, where Loki, Mobius, Casey (Eugene Cordero), and B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) essentially rehash last episode’s closing moments in the TVA with more detail. The conclusion is the same, though. Without either He Who Remains’ temporal aura to open the blast shields or Miss Manners to override the failsafes, OB can’t even begin to work on stopping the looming (get it?) catastrophe.

Cassey locates two pings from Renslayer’s tempad, one in 1868 and another in 1893. Loki and Mobius don period-appropriate garb and head into the timestream to chase her down. They miss her and Miss Minutes at their first stop, so they leap forward into Loki Season 2 Episode 3’s titular year and find an already very different looking Chicago.

It’s the year of Chicago’s World’s Fair. All kinds of people have gathered to show off their inventions and theories or to witness glimpses of the future. Mobius is excited to be a part of it. However, the fact that he seems as equally thrilled by notorious “first” American serial killer HH Holmes as the Fair and its giant Ferris Wheel is a touch disconcerting.

At first, the duo has no idea what to do, so they wander around eating early cracker jacks. Mobius enjoys them, while Loki claims they taste like ash. Thankfully, before long, a newspaper headline that alludes to Miss Minutes and a sign proclaiming the presence of Victor Timely and his Temporal Marvels points them in the right direction. Along the way, they encounter a trio of Norse-inspired carvings depicting Thor, Odin, and Balder. It gets Loki plenty salty, and seeing Hiddleston get put out in character is always fun.

Loki and Mobius attend Victor’s demonstration, still searching for Renslayer and Miss Minutes, who are there as well. However, when Victor reveals himself, Loki immediately sees what we, as the audience, knew was coming. Victor is a Kang variant (Jonathan Majors). Majors is doing some interesting stuff here with Victor, making him a weirdo like He Who Remains, but a very different varietal. With his consistent uptalking, wild hair, and odd cadence full of misplaced pauses, he cuts quite the figure. Combined with his body language, he seems almost childish, but as the episode goes on, it becomes pretty apparent that he’s a gifted grifter.

Hiddleston continues to do a great job selling what a number He Who Remains did…by reacting with quiet terror.

Hiddleston continues to do a great job selling what a number He Who Remains did on Odin’s stepson at the end of time by reacting with quiet terror to the initially almost buffoonish seeming Victor. Wilson’s disbelief that this guy could be any sort of threat, never mind one of the most dangerous beings ever to exist, helps sell it as well.

His demonstration appears to be a miniature version of the Temporal Loom that’s barely holding all of space and time together back at the TVA. With Victor’s strange speaking style and a massive amount of electricity, he really captures the room’s attention. Then, thanks to a bit of goosing from an audience plant, a bidding war for the machine breaks out. While Victor pointedly rejects partnership offers, he eventually accepts a 1,000 offer for the prototype in question.

Amidst that chaos, Renslayer makes first contact with Victor. While he’s intrigued, the crowd quickly pushes her away before she can make much headway in introducing herself. Loki and Mobius, meanwhile, get waylaid by an unpleasant man in the crowd who knocks off Loki’s hat. Our God of Mischief disappears the jerk in a shower of green sparks, sending him into a cage just outside the venue.

Still, our TVAers manage to get to Victor outside, where they try to explain their position to him. As they do so, a local councilman and the buyer of the Temporal Loom prototype show up to reveal that Victor’s inventions don’t actually work. He’s not a genius. He’s a con artist. He later insists that his ideas are viable, the technology just doesn’t yet exist to make them reality. However, it isn’t clear if he’s still on his hustle or if he simply doesn’t grasp the irony of arguing your tech inventions don’t work because technology isn’t high enough yet for them to truly exist.

While he manages to further fool the councilman, the bushy mustachioed businessman Victor just separated from a thousand dollars remains plenty mad. A brief chase occurs with the Kang variant ditching his pursuer on the Ferris wheel only to run into a sword-wielding Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) on the scene to make good on her promise to kill Kang variants wherever they might pop up. Loki puts himself between her and Victor and tries to explain the importance of this variant to all of existence. Meanwhile, Mobius tries to talk Renslayer into rejoining the fold or, at least, teaming up for this task. Both men fail.

As a result, Renslayer finally gets to him. Together, she and Victor escape while Miss Minutes terrifies the crowd as a distraction. Back in his lab, he shows Renslayer one of the few inventions he has that work, a refrigerated chair, and she immediately gets the giggles. In response, Miss Minutes also gets a bit flirty. This goes on as Renslayer gives Victor an overview of his life to come as she knows of it. The woman and the AI visibly jockey for position his attention while getting miffed when the other briefly claims the spotlight. They’re both fighting for credit and, seemingly, romantic favor. While we didn’t see much of He Who Remains, Kangs do seem loathe to give away either, especially to women.

It’s wild that a talking animated clock can turn in the episode’s best performance, but [Tara Strong] does.

Unable to stay in his temporary lodging, the trio escapes again, grabbing a boat and heading to his “real” lab and home across the lake with Loki and Mobius in pursuit. On the boat ride, things start to feel romantic between Victor and Renslayer until she says the word “partnership.” Majors does some great hand-acting to remind us how he hates that word. Moments later, he tosses her overboard in a lifeboat while he and Miss Minutes continue.

Now that Miss Minute has him alone, she starts the full-court press back at his lab. Strong is so good here, dancing on the line between, “Why won’t you f— me?!” and “F— you for not giving me the attention, credit, and more I deserve!” It’s wild that a talking animated clock can turn in the episode’s best performance, but she does, and I don’t intend that as a backhanded compliment.

Victor realizes she’s way too much for him and shuts her down just as she confesses her love. AI is bad news, folks. Renslayer bursts in at the exact moment, wielding a prototype of Victor’s that will eventually become the pruning stick. Loki and Mobius are not far behind. Then Sylvie shows up. The gangs all here!

Squabbling and fighting ensues. Against her better instincts, Sylvie agrees to let Mobius and Loki bring Victor to the TVA while staying behind to deal with Renslayer. Rather than end her, though, Sylvie sends her to the end of time to see the rotting corpse of He Who Remains and his crumbling castle. Renslayer releases Miss Minutes there and the two begin to develop what sounds eerily like a rebellion.

Moments From the Sacred Timeline

• Miss Minutes turning herself black and white with a more throwback animation style more than 25 years before the birth of film to “blend in” tickled me.
• I appreciate how the costume department incorporates splashes of green into Loki’s outfits when he goes out on missions. Speaking of Loki’s looks, he really resembles a Tim Burton character in this episode when he loses his bowler hat and his black hair gets a little wild. Now that I note that, there’s some Burton to Majors as Victor Timely’s weird, wild haircut, too.
• As the newspaper reveals, Miss Minutes has been haunting Midway as a ghost clock. Given that doesn’t help her mission AND she can seemingly pop anywhere on the timeline within seconds of the proper destination, that means the weirdo was just doing it for her own amusement.
• My friends and I have a decade-plus running joke about the Hippodrome, which, for us, is a long-dead club in Springfield, Massachusetts. As I am a simple man, the reference to the World’s Fair Hippodrome gave me the giggles as a result.
• I like how the series is leaning into how much of a sensualist Mobius is, specifically when it comes to the pleasures of taste. That said, was he this much into alcohol last season as he seems to be now? Did I just not clock it?
• One thousand dollars in the early 1890s is over 36,000 dollars now. Imagine someone just handing you that in a stack of bills in the middle of a crowd.
• This episode moves very quickly from “uh-oh, there’s a thing” to that problem showing up. It happens when the TVA warns Mobius of a weird tempad ping and Sylvie immediately showing up in the next scene and when Renslayer brings up partnership and the next scene where she gets sent in a rowboat into the drink. I can’t decide if I’d prefer they give moments like that some space to build tension, or I appreciate that they aren’t messing about.
• Mbatha-Raw gives Renslayer some real shades of the classic Lucifer myth. A lot of “I should be in charge” energy to her portrayal.

From the Lips of Gods

• “We can hack into the system.”
  “Really?! Oh, that’s such a relief.”
  “No, I’m wondering.”
• “Let’s focus on that cartoon clock.”
• “Why would they include Balder? No one’s even heard of him.”
  “Sure they have. Balder the Brave.”- Well delivered back and forth AND a fun metajoke on Balder getting cut from the THOR films at least once, maybe twice
• “The thief of all free will!”
• “It’s like the Caribbean of the Midwest.”
• “Oh, take your time.” I’ve already said it, but the way Strong pours subtle menace and seduction into lines like that is so impressively effective