Loki Episode 2 Reunites Loki and Sylvie (and It Doesn’t Go Very Well)

Rebecca Iannucci

Within the Loki universe, it wasn’t too long ago that Loki sweetly conjured a blanket to keep Sylvie warm in The Void, or revealed to her through tears how much he’d come to care about her wellbeing.

But all of that kindness sure feels like a long time ago, now that we’ve seen Episode 2 of the Disney+ series’ sophomore run.

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During Thursday’s installment, Loki and Sylvie have a tense reunion after Hunter X-05 brings Loki and Mobius to the branched timeline, in 1982 Oklahoma, where Sylvie is now working at a McDonald’s. It’s noticeably uncomfortable between Loki and Sylvie now — that’ll happen when you push your soulmate through a time door and kick off a multiversal war — but Loki is intent on finding out why he saw a future version of Sylvie coming out of an elevator at a future version of the TVA.

Sylvie tells Loki that as much as she’d like to see the TVA burn to the ground — which is essentially what was happening during Loki’s brief time slip to the future in Episode 1 — she doesn’t want to go back there, even if the TVA is the only defense against the war that He Who Remains warned would approach. Sylvie claims that she’s happy in her new life, and if she encounters any variants of He Who Remains from here on out, she’ll just kill them. (It went so well the first time, after all!)

But when Sylvie enchants Hunter X-05 to see what he’s seen at the TVA, she discovers that General Dox has recruited countless hunters to prune the branches that have been forking off from the Sacred Timeline ever since Sylvie stabbed He Who Remains. (As you might recall from the premiere, General Dox and the rest of the TVA were explicitly told not to prune any branched timelines.) So, Sylvie’s got no choice, really: She heads back to the TVA with Loki, Mobius and Hunter X-05 to try and stop Dox and her minions from erasing any more branches.

Dox is eventually taken into custody, but her damage is done. Dozens of branched timelines begin to disappear from the TVA monitors, and Hunter B-15 reminds us, “Those are people. Those are lives.” And despite Sylvie’s willingness to briefly return to the TVA and join Loki’s fight, she remains thoroughly unimpressed by his and Mobius’ efforts.

After asking Loki if his short, largely unsuccessful tussle with General Dox was really the best he could do, she reminds him that the TVA is still the broken, rotten problem in her eyes, and she has no interest in trying to preserve it. As she opens a time door, she remarks that she’s going back to 1982 Oklahoma “if it’s still there” — and it is, fortunately. But after she returns to the McDonald’s where she’s employed, she looks melancholy as she holds He Who Remains’ TemPad.

It’s also a melancholy ending for those who enjoyed Loki and Sylvie’s intense, occasionally romantic chemistry throughout Season 1, which appears quite fractured now. According to executive producer Kevin Wright, though, their “real feelings” and “real connection” won’t be missing entirely from Season 2’s remaining episodes.

“If you look at the two of them, there is enormous growth in each of them as characters, and that growth only happened because of them finding each other and making each other the better versions of themselves,” Wright explains to TVLine. “But I don’t think you can get past their fatal flaws, coming into this season: She can’t trust, and he can’t be trusted. That is the core of it, and so much of this season is about overcoming that.”

Wright reminds us that Sylvie “is not far removed from being the woman who was growing up and running from apocalypse to apocalypse,” making her exceptionally slow to trust despite her pull toward Loki. And Loki, meanwhile, “is trying to go down this path of heroism,” Wright says, “but there are questions of whether people are ever going to trust him.”

“But their connection is real,” the EP says of Sylvie and Loki in Season 2. “It’s real, and it’s big.”

Loki fans, what did you think of Episode 2? Weigh in below!

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