EgonSpengler
Deity
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2014
- Messages
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Loki finale:
I'm not sure how much attention you pay to the meta story, or to the comics. Majors is set to play Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania. "He Who Remains" was a Kang variant, but I think he was not Kang the Conqueror. I think the statue in the remade TVA at the end might have been Kang the Conqueror. I think Sylvie - and Loki, I suppose, to a lesser degree - may have unleashed Kang the Conqueror upon the MCU.
Incidentally, there's a funny alt-history novel written by the actor Stephen Fry called Making History (1996), in which the protagonists are able to meddle in history and prevent Adolph Hitler from being born. That's not a spoiler, though, because that's just the first act of the book. The characters spend the rest of the book desperately trying to undo the damage they've wrought, because the person who filled the historical void left by Hitler's absence turned out to be worse.
Spoiler :
The only other thing I've seen Jonathan Majors in was Lovecraft Country, and I was impressed that this character seemed so clearly different from that one. Good stuff, so far. I'm looking forward to seeing him play other variants.I thought the guy who played "He Who Remains" was really good. Just an eccentric, over the top performance that for some reason fit.
I'm not sure how much attention you pay to the meta story, or to the comics. Majors is set to play Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania. "He Who Remains" was a Kang variant, but I think he was not Kang the Conqueror. I think the statue in the remade TVA at the end might have been Kang the Conqueror. I think Sylvie - and Loki, I suppose, to a lesser degree - may have unleashed Kang the Conqueror upon the MCU.
I agree, the final battles between Wanda and Agnes/Agatha, and between Westview Vision and White Vision in WandaVision were only good for its importance to the characters. The actual battles were just alright. The final battle in Falcon & The Winter Soldier was a little better. That this 'final' confrontation between Loki & Sylvie and "He Who Remains" wasn't a fight at all was sort of a nice change, and it fit what had come before. I had mixed feelings about the final confrontation in Black Widow too, but I don't want to spoil that here. Of the four, I thought Loki's climactic scene worked the best.I also appreciated that the final episode wasn't just an epic battle.
Until this final episode of Loki, I couldn't decide whether I thought these series should have a direct connection to the ongoing MCU, or should require that the viewer be familiar with it, or whether they should stand alone as self-contained stories. Loki tied into the ongoing story more explicitly than Wanda or Falcon, and I think it benefited from that. I wonder whether people who don't know who Jonathan Majors was playing would say the same, though.Instead it was the realization of Sylvie's goal and it also finally revealed what the heck this show was about, a bridge to what's to come in the MCU. I guess I expected this show to be a self-contained story which still fit in the larger narrative the way WandaVision and TFATWS were. Instead it's all about the larger narrative. Not really good or bad, just caught me off guard.
You're right, it is fuzzy. But I'm not sure the free will thing ties directly into who's a variant and who isn't. From Kang's point of view, everyone from a timeline other than his own is a variant, and because he had won the war with the other Kangs, his timeline was the 'sacred' timeline. The reason he had to stamp out every alternate timeline whenever there was a Nexus Event was to prevent any other Kangs from appearing. As for why the Loki variants were all so different from one another, I think that has to do with the nature of Loki. He's an agent of chaos. I bet the myriad Kangs are all going to be played by Jonathan Majors, and won't look real different from one another. I think the various Lokis are more variable than most people's variants.I'm still not fully clear on what makes a variant, a variant and not a different person. The show seems to be saying that free will is the determining factor. When somebody makes a choice that goes against "the sacred timeline" a branch forms. That's why the Loki we've been following is a variant, he took the space stone and got out of NYC. That's also why young and old Loki from episode 5 are variants, because they killed Thor and escaped Thanos respectively. But then there is Slyvie and a bunch of the other Loki's from episode 5 like alligator Loki who seem to be variants just because they were born different. Being born different isn't a choice. It's a biological thing. It's science.
I don't think he really controlled anybody's destiny, in a literal sense. I think that's why he had to remove people's memories, to make them think they'd been created by the "Time Keepers." He controlled people the same way mundane autocrats do, by lying to them. His 'super-power', so to speak, was that he knew everything that was going to happen, until he didn't.And if "He Who Remains" really is the controller of all things then that means he is the one that makes people born different. And he is the one who created the TVA in order to send them away to be pruned. And that is just a really dick move to create someone just to torture them for a bit then kill them.
Incidentally, there's a funny alt-history novel written by the actor Stephen Fry called Making History (1996), in which the protagonists are able to meddle in history and prevent Adolph Hitler from being born. That's not a spoiler, though, because that's just the first act of the book. The characters spend the rest of the book desperately trying to undo the damage they've wrought, because the person who filled the historical void left by Hitler's absence turned out to be worse.
) and the related plotline regarding the Power Broker was uneven as well. The theory about an entire subplot being amputated and backfilled with reshoots in post-production fills at least some of those holes. And reshoots in post-production are so common it's news when a film or series doesn't do them, so they wouldn't even have needed to be stealthy about it. Like I say, the showrunner has denied it.
Great Scott!! Holy flux capacitor Batman!
