Trust Issues in Loki Ep 2

Each week, as new episodes of Loki release on Disney+, LTN writers will reflect on each episode. You can find what we think about the Sacred Timeline here. Spoiler warning for Loki Episode 2.

One moment Loki is on the verge of conquering Earth, battling the Avengers and opening a gate for Thanos’s army to come and destroy the world, the next he’s captured, but manages to get the Tesseract thanks to some Avengers time-traveling, he ends up in the desert and is then captured again, this time by what’s called the TVA and told he broke the Sacred Timeline and must now come to trial for it. What an hour for our guy Loki!

Now we have settled into episode 2, and so has Loki. He has accepted an offer of not being erased from the timeline and helping track down another “variant” in the time stream, another version of himself. We all know Loki though. He is scheming a way out. Loki is always scheming. That is Loki’s entire character. You can’t trust what he says. Time and time again we saw this in the MCU.

So in episode 2, we see Loki has now joined the Time Variance Authority—or at least is willing to go along with Mobius—to help with the variant. Then in the first mission, he messes with the TVA, or at least we think he does. Mobius calls him out for it and they start back over.

The real question of episode 2, is what can we trust? We can never really trust Loki. We obviously cannot trust the varianti. Can we trust Mobius, who is straight-up using Loki to catch the variant? “Why is it that the people who say ‘trust me’ are the ones you can never trust?” he asks Loki at one point in the episode. This is right after asking his own superior to “trust him.” 

Then there is the TVA. Can we trust this organization? Is anything about the history it gave us about the Sacred Timeline accurate? Why is there a Sacred Timeline? Why is everyone in the TVA so willing to blindly trust the TVA despite not knowing everything? This includes Mobius himself, who has seemingly never met the Time-Keepers. Are the Time-Keepers something that can be met? Are they something that can be trusted? Or even believe to be real?

The story takes an interesting turn when Loki figures out that there can be no time variances when a disaster is about to appear. They test this in Pompeii, Italy, where they darkly mess around with a bunch of people who are gonna die, realizing that the variant is hiding in moments before a disaster. Interestingly they find the variant in a big-box store facing a category 8 hurricane.

Here we see the variant, who can use the ability to enchant people to control them, something we haven’t exactly seen Loki do, to talk through people and stall for time while she sends the stolen, activated reset charges to various points along the Sacred Timeline, creating numerous branched timelines and throwing the TVA into disarray. She teleports away and Loki follows her.

It also seems that almost nobody trusts anybody in Loki. Not even Loki trusts himself as the variant appears to be a female Loki from the future? What exactly is the goal of the variant? Would it be as simple as Loki states in the beginning, to get an audience with the Time-Keepers and overthrow them? Or is it pure anarchy? The only character we’ve seen trust another so far is Renslayer trusting Mobius.

Trust is such a difficult thing to accept. How long does it take you to trust something or someone? If you have had a bad experience on an airplane where you got shook up by a storm, you would probably be hesitant to trust an airplane the next time you had to ride one. The same goes for people. If somebody promises you something, but then doesn’t deliver on that promise, well, how can you trust any future promise, or that person? 

Loki is right to not trust the TVA. He has seen them manipulate each other. They seem to lack empathy and are very detached from the actual timeline they are said to be protecting. He also knows himself and knows that he is not trustworthy. He can trust himself, but nothing else. He is literally confronted with this by having a conflict with another variant of himself. 

We’re often asked to trust things with no questions asked. Cars, machines, computers, and the like. We’re asked to trust other co-workers immediately when we start a new job. We’re asked to trust people we don’t know all the time. Group projects in college anyone?

But there is a reality to the fact that we have to trust many things every day just to live. We trust that air is going to keep flowing through our lungs for example. That air, from some plants, trapped on our planet. We trust that our bodies aren’t going to break down today. We trust that today will be normal. We trust people in our lives, even though often we have no reason to. 

Trust is another word for faith. We have faith in these things. Faith is oftentimes used to say “I trust this thing that is unexplainable.” Trusting the unexplainable is a hard thing, but sometimes thinking about it as faith can make that easier. What do you have faith in? What do you trust? Do you trust yourself? Your family? Your work? Your car? Where do you place your faith at the end of the day to know that everything is going to be ok, even if it’s a hesitant faith?

I place my faith in Jesus. Which seems weird after watching this episode of Loki. Isn’t Jesus just like the Time-Keepers? No, no He is not. We can know him through scriptures, we can know him through the testimony of others. Things have lined up in my life to where I had the experience to test the faith, and every time, logically speaking, it held up. My faith in Jesus isn’t blind, though I will admit to times of it being shaken. I can ask questions. I can challenge it. It’s much different than the TVA and the Time-Keepers. It’s a relationship.

The very idea of Loki wrestles with the big questions. Mobius asked Loki if calling himself a god wasn’t just another grandstanding illusion. A facade. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves if we just see ourselves as gods, in control of everything, or if we’re just trusting that someone or something is watching out for us.