Transcript

Taylor: Hello listeners, and welcome to another episode of Sisters Assembled. We have a very exciting episode for you today because we will be tackling Loki Episode One of Season Two and man, did it start on a real high note. So we have plenty to talk about and plenty to discuss. Without further ado, we’re going to start off with Katie.

Katie: I really liked the first episode. I think it’s opening the door to hopefully what will be a good season. Although I will say, you know, rewatching Season One made me remember how much the first few episodes, I think the first two were really something we really enjoyed and then it lost itself from there a little bit. And I think that’s where my distaste for that season came in. So I really liked this episode though. I want to put Season One behind us for the time being, and let’s just get into it.

Taylor: Yeah, definitely. I think just to start off, one of the things that we talked about a lot in the first or sorry, the Predictions episode was what happened to Loki in the season finale and whether he went to a different universe, whether he was moving across the timeline to a different version or a different time in the TVA. And I think we pretty quickly got that answer. But I definitely think that there’s a lot to unpack from that because it kind of has some ramifications.

Katie: To me, it’s a little confusing, and when am I not confused about Loki, but I guess there are two ways of looking at this, and we’ve been splitting this this way for years now, pretty much since the first Loki season came out and that’s time and universes. I think I understand the time portion very well, and that’s the idea of yes, Loki is being pulled to initially the past and the present of the TVA and we’ll get into some of the past things we’ve seen as well cause I think there are some things on the predictions episode that we touched on that actually seem fairly accurate. But then he also at some point is pulled to the future of the TVA, which kind of is a foreshadowing moment of where things are going to go for the season. On the flip side of it, we deal with them pulling him out of different time branches. And so I guess it’s a little confusing to me how that’s working because we’re seeing him go through the past, present, and future. But at the same time, they’re pulling him out of the branches altogether. So again, this is where you have to marry those two ideas, and I think it’s a little more difficult when you think about Loki in general.

Taylor: Yeah, I would agree. I think let’s break it down the easy stuff, and then we’ll try to parse our way through the hard stuff. So the easy stuff in terms of where he goes after Sylvie takes him through the time door was the past of the TVA. That’s what we saw at the end of the first season, why Mobius didn’t know him. I think the thing that is most important coming out of what we saw in the past was the way that I think we talked about this in the predictions that Kang or I guess He Who Remains to be more accurate, operated out in the open with the TVA. And I think one of the ongoing themes that we saw from this first episode was the idea that the people of the TVA, the workers, those who had been variants were taken out of their timelines, had actually been mind-wiped twice, at least twice. Once to completely forgot their entire existence before being a member of the TVA and then if they had been a member of the TVA prior to He Who Remains making the switch from being the front-facing version of the TVA to operating behind the Timekeepers, they had to have been wiped again because nobody remembered him being the leader of the TVA.

Katie: So I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but this is why I’m going to say that, I do think they were mind wiped obviously, from their lives. They were initially pulled out because they were creating branches and so just like we saw at the very beginning of the first season why Loki is pulled to the TVA. That is why I believe they were initially wiped. Yes, makes sense. But I actually wonder and I think this might be an exploration we end up seeing as we go through the season, because I think we’re actually going to accidentally follow the creation of the TVA. From some of the other scenes, I think we’ve seen the trailer, that’s what it looks like. And we talked about Victor Timely being possibly the version of He Who Remains, who creates the TVA, that was a discussion we had, a theory we threw out. So let’s say we’re going to keep that track going. We did get some knowledge of him having a conversation with Ravonna and we will get into that a little bit as well because there are some implications of her character from Season One now that just sort of blew open, but it sounds like there could be the possibility that the first few groups of people who were getting brought away from their timeline, they were doing the wrong thing as they were trying to, I don’t use the word prune because that’s a different case. But they were snipping those branches using these people. They may have been the first group of Timekeepers and people who work in the TVA. So I think that’s them being wiped initially, right. Otherwise, I wonder if Kang just reached a capacity and that’s when they implemented the actual pruning, when they got to the point where they just started getting rid of the variants because they no longer needed them in the workforce. Beyond that, I think they might get their mind wiped because they get on to something, they remember something. There’s an experience they have that opens a door to something that they shouldn’t know, whatever. I think it’s the news on a case-by-case basis, but I’m not sure if there’s a second time they were actually properly mind-wiped because I’m not sure if they just phased out Kang or how that worked exactly. But I’m not 100% sure I can say that, but I wouldn’t be against, you know, Kang single-handedly saying, hey, we’re at capacity. The rest start getting pruned and these guys who are already wiped and working for us, here we go.

Taylor: I mean, I definitely agree with the second part. The idea that they were pruning to fill basically open roles, not just to fill open roles, but it kind of fulfilled a dual purpose, right? One, getting rid of a branch, and two, to give them more manpower. But I think I disagree because it’s like a wholesale rebrand of the TVA. Because if you think about when Loki takes the time stick and he shoves it against the wall because he’s seen the past and he knows sorry, He Who Remains was on that wall and it’s been covered up by the Timekeepers. That to me indicates a real actual cover-up, like literally they took the statue of He Who Remains and changed it to the Timekeepers. The Timekeepers were made as automatons or robots to show, to be the for lack of a better term, public-facing faces of the TVA. But what do you do with all those people who know He Who Remains as the leader? So I think there has to be some sort of general mind wipe for everyone who is in the TVA and knew Kang. That includes Mobius, that includes B-15 because we saw them in the past with the Kang statue.

Katie: That’s fair. And I think, too, there are many paths to go with to talk about this because, again, I almost feel like the first episode didn’t necessarily open doors in Season Two more than it closed final doors for Season One. I feel like it gave some answers to things or at least gave some context to things that we didn’t fully understand, which was much needed because I think you go back and listen to our reactions to each one of those episodes and each of them ended in a way of us not really understanding what was going on. And I do think we’re getting some answers already from the jump. But I think I want to first talk about a little bit of some of the characters. I’m going to skip Loki for the time being because I think he’s going to be the bigger chunk with the whole timeslipping since that was the main thing that we dealt with in this episode. And Sylvie, we’re going to skip for the time being, but I do want to talk about did Ravonna know, how much did she know? Because I think that to me is something that I questioned immediately when I heard her voice on that recording. We know there’s a different version of her in this season. We’ve seen it in the trailers. And so I think I question immediately what did she know? I mean, she was so loyal to the Timekeepers, but I’m like, was that for a ruse? Was that to make sure everybody stayed on track, that the Timekeepers were the be-all end-all? Or were you also wiped and you had no clue and didn’t remember Kang?

Taylor: Yeah, I think my gut says that she was wiped because I think she also looks genuinely shocked, like in that Timekeeper room. She looked shocked. She didn’t know what she was doing afterward, and she knew that she was going to keep doing what they wanted her to do. And I think that was clear in the way that she manipulated Sylvie. But I think the way that she was able to manipulate Sylvie was by pulling on her own truth of genuinely being shocked and angry. And even when she has that conversation with B-15, you know, she says, like, it doesn’t change anything but I feel like there was an undertone of her being surprised. I don’t know. I watched her like last week, which I know is relatively recent, but for whatever reason, I’m blanking on that. But I feel like the undertone was so that she was surprised by that and just as surprised by everyone else. She just had a different reaction to it. And I think what is interesting is her unyielding loyalty to the Timekeepers because if you think about Mobius right, he has this obsession with jet skis, probably because he really likes jet skis in his actual life. So some things carry through, despite your mind wipe. So if you think about what carries through for Ravonna if she was incredibly loyal and potentially, I mean, pulling from the comics here, potentially romantically involved with He Who Remains, that thread, that loyalty may be what she pulls through despite her mind wipe. So I think she was mind-wiped, I just think she has such strong feelings for He Who Remains. Whether that’s platonic loyalty or romantic feelings that carried through even though she didn’t actually know on a logical level what was going on.

Katie: And I think we might actually have a chance to see that. So that’s a little bit exciting for me because I think that’s the direction that this season’s going to go. But I have to say to, the next person who I want to focus on, because as much as I love Mobius, I don’t have much to say about him yet. I mean, he was Mobius. He was great. Owen Wilson again is how he needs to be in this show so we love him. But my other one is O.B. From the get-go, we should have known, the episode was named after him. I’m not going to go out of my way and say his full name constantly because there’s a reason they said O.B., instead of making us say it all the time and making the actor say it all the time. But I think we’re pretty intrigued by him as a character because I know Taylor and I got the opportunity, we didn’t watch it together exactly, but we were watching it at the same time and we both were kind of reaching the same conclusion of how long has O.B. been downstairs not being wiped? Because he’s just been downstairs in his little repair shop fixing everything, and he might hold some great knowledge. Of course, we’ll get into in a second, you know, the past and present things we’ve seen with O.B. because that was an interesting thing and I was struggling from the get-go to wrap my brain around that. But he was an interesting character and I think he might hold more of a key. And I do want to mention, for those of you who don’t know, the actor who plays O.B. just won a crap ton of awards for Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. So he’s a really good actor, so don’t think he’s a side character. He’s not here to be a side character. He’s definitely going to play a bigger part than just one episode, and then he’ll show up in a couple of the others like he’s going to be around. So I think there’s going to be a big focus on him and what he knows.

Taylor: Yeah, I think in terms of his importance, he could be kind of the equivalent of what Miss Minutes was last season. That person who but like more of a character than Miss Minutes, but serves a similar role in that she kind of explained to us like right like Episode One she laid down the ground rules even when we reached the Place Beyond Time in the Citadel. She was kind of explaining to us He Who Remains and like all of that stuff and giving us maybe not straightforward information but hints that we could start to put together. And I think O.B. so far has given way more straightforward information, but he also is a real font of knowledge. And so I can see him kind of serving in that role. And to your point, if the last person who he saw was Mobius 400 years ago, that means he hasn’t had a lot of interaction. He didn’t even know that the timeline was branching. So there are definitely things that he doesn’t know even when he passes along the paper manual to Loki and he’s like, dude, what the heck? Like, nobody’s used this on forever. Like when he got, you know, his orientation and went through that, he was watching videos like nobody’s using his manual any more. And I think it just kind of shows that O.B. in and of himself is almost a relic of the past but because he is, he has knowledge that all of these people who have modernized, probably lost because they were wiped.

Katie: Yeah, I mean, he and I have to laugh about the pamphlet because it’s like, yeah, they moved past that. But when we actually, like look at all the things in the TVA, it’s still so outdated. And I didn’t remember that as much until I was rewatching Season One. I was like, wow, I am realizing how, you know, you got the big clunky desktops and everything. So it’s really interesting to remember that because I didn’t recall it because I think we got so far away from some of that by the end of Season One, it just was not something I remembered. But it is kind of funny because they move away from the manuals, but they’re not much further along. He, I think, will be a really pivotal character moving forward. I mean, without him, they weren’t able to do what they had to do, which was stop Loki some timeslipping. And I think this leads right into that in saying we now know what timeslipping fully is, which is through time, not universes and or let’s call them branches for right now because I don’t want to get too deeply into the idea of the universe thing. I think that’s where we get convoluted. But he is slipping through time itself, past, present, and future and it seems that they’ve fixed it. That was, you know, the big thing of this episode, which made me also feel really good. There are loose ends. There’s going to be, there’s five more episodes. But, you know, we had a problem and we fixed that problem and it felt really good, so that was a plus to me and no longer an issue is what I’m getting from it.

Taylor: Yeah, I would agree and I think I want to take that a step further and say if you think about the trailers and this is something we talked about in the predictions, we actually predicted that timeslipping would kind of be an early fix, right? We did not think it was going to be the main plotline of the story or the season as a whole, that we would kind of fix that and then move on to whatever was next. And I think we obviously saw that in Episode One. But I think then extrapolating that so much of the trailers were about Loki timeslipping, right? Which means that, yes, there are quite a few scenes that we’ve seen that have not taken place yet in Episode One, but the majority, I feel like, actually did, which means, again, we’re pretty much flying blind. Other than knowing that we’re seeing a variant of He Who Remains aka a variant of Kang later in the episode or sorry, in the season, and a few other characters who relate to the Dark Dimension. Obviously, Ravonna is coming back, and Loki and Sylvie are reuniting, but those were all rehashed and re-edited through all of the different trailers. So we only really know three or four things. And many of them all took place in that time in 18 something or another where we basically saw at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. So there’s not a lot of new information that we have based on the trailers. So again, we’re flying blind.

Katie: I couldn’t agree more. I had the same thoughts and I like this and I’ve said this before on other things. I prefer it when Marvel does this. I don’t want to go into things knowing everything that’s going to happen. I don’t like going into things and I think I want to say it was MoM, was an example in which I did feel like I did this a little bit more. It was like we haven’t yet seen this scene from the trailer. We haven’t yet seen this scene from the trailer. And so I feel like that was one of them. I could be wrong. I’m not remembering, but I don’t like thinking that because that to me puts together a timeline in my head as I’m watching a movie or a show or whatever. So I prefer it that way. I do think it’s interesting to kind of round us back into the timeslipping thing. Marvel does everything for a reason, right? And so, yes, we may have solved Loki’s timeslipping, but the question to me becomes, now what? Why were we introduced to it? Why was it a thing? And clearly, they didn’t need it to be a big enough thing to carry us for five more episodes but it’s important to know because we’ll need it later. Again, it’s our mouse tool that we’ll use later. So I think you know, some of it might be relating to just the journey Loki and Mobius go on, or it also consequently could just be Sylvie could have the same effects at this point. She as we saw at the very end, and we can get into this maybe more in detail, not quite as part of this conversation, but she’s in a branched timeline at the end, so we might see her struggling with some timeslipping as well. Obviously, we know she makes it back into the TVA. We see that by the jump to the future that Loki takes. But this is an important topic that we need to understand and again, it wasn’t supposed to be happening in the TVA. So that’s still, I think, an open-ended question of what was going on and part of it had to do with all the branches.

Taylor: Yeah, and I think you bring up a good point too because I know at one point in the predictions episode, we talked about it potentially being a parallel in live-action to what Miles and all the Spider-people do in their films when they’re in a different universe. Now that we know that it’s just in our case, in the MCU live action, it’s just moving across one timeline, I think we can say that they’re not parallels right now but to your point, there’s a reason for everything. We’re going to see it again. It’s just a matter of why was it important that we understand the basics of it and also that we see a character go through it because whether it’s this show or another show down the road or whatever or movie, it’s going to come back. And so I just want to make that quick clarification because I know we talked a bit about that in the predictions that for right now, based on what we’ve just learned, it does not seem to be the same thing that the Spider-people go through. But it’s still, to your point, going to be very, very important.

Katie: Right and I know I said I don’t want to confuse this, but you made a comment and I don’t want to say it’s a for sure thing, how you said we know it’s him moving past, present, future only on one timeline. I don’t want to say that for a for sure thing only because as I was saying, when I kind of brought up the topic, we do see him, to solve the problem, they have to pull him out of the specific branch, meaning he had to prune himself completely and yet recreate it almost. It was definitely a little bit of an iffy, I didn’t fully understand the process of it, but regardless it was to allow him to be pretty much zapped out of every other branch that he was in. So I do think there’s definitely because there’s two sides of it, there’s still a factor with the branches that I don’t want to say we know- we physically saw him only moving across one timeline past, present, future in the time itself. I just don’t want to say solidly that it had to do with one branch just because the fix didn’t deal with only one branch.

Taylor: Yeah, I’m still I can’t even respond to that fully because I’m still trying to process exactly like I didn’t understand O.B.’s explanation, to be honest, because he was talking about, to your point, multiple branches. But then it seemed like you were saying he’s only moving across one. So I’m not really sure why removing him from every other branch was necessary. It should have been that they were moving him across every piece of existence or every time he was existing on that one timeline, right. So that’s where I got a little confused. I think my other question is when he saw Sylvie and he had moved to the future, who pruned him? He got pruned from behind, but who pruned him?

Katie: I didn’t even think about that. I mean, I did initially, but then I saw him be saved, so I didn’t think I kind of fast-forwarded through there but that’s a valid point. To be fair, it looks like the TVA is in disarray. Remember right now there’s a group going after Sylvie, Sylvie is now in the TVA. So I wouldn’t be shocked if somebody went after him. And I think this opens a complicated door, which was something I was trying to I had to pause the show at one point and I was talking to Taylor about it, trying to figure it out, trying to wrap my brain around it, because it was almost the butterfly effect, almost, but not directly. In the sense that we saw past Loki talk to O.B., telling him that he needs to have something ready, and while that wasn’t technically a past memory of O.B., it became a past memory of O.B. as Loki was doing it. So then when we cut to Mobius and O.B. in the future or in our present, but for them, it’s the future, he now has all these memories from interacting with Loki years ago. And so I think we see a similar fact with the future in the sense that somebody had to prune Loki to get him back to the present.

Taylor: Yeah, it’s almost like maybe someone else is moving across the timeline. Or they could just be a foe and be like, I’m going to kill this dude because remember, not everybody knows that pruning isn’t instant death.

Katie: True, but then also that was confusing to me too, because I was like, so when he’s getting pruned, where is he going?

Taylor: I don’t know.

Katie: That’s why I didn’t understand. He got pruned. He had to be pruned to get pulled back to just the present but I was confused because I was like, wouldn’t he have gone to the End of Time? But now is there an End of Time?

Taylor: Well, maybe that’s why they did that temporal…

Katie: Yeah, that got sciencey.

Taylor: Yeah, that was a little much for me.

Katie: But I mean regardless, understanding timeslipping itself I think is important and I think getting into the gist of understanding it all is where we hit our crux every time. So going into this I even said to Taylor, we’re going to try and keep the step back. We’re going to try and just understand the episode as a whole and not inherently everything they’re teaching us. Because I think too, we struggle with that as we apply it to the MCU. Not everything appears one-for-one, and our understanding isn’t always correct either. So just knowing this episode, we understand what timeslipping is. We’ve seen the past and how when Loki goes into the past, he can affect the present/future because at the time, obviously, again, it’s going to be the future. He can affect things. Do we think we’re going to see him doing that moving forward? No, I think we solved his timeslipping. But again, I think it’s going to come back later and this is good knowledge to have. Plus, we found out some great nuggets going to the past and the future.

Taylor: I wonder if the implication of timeslipping is that they realize that they can affect the future. Loki’s lesson coming out of that is if I do something in the past it then affects the timeline in the future because we saw that happen with O.B., we saw it happen with the crack on the floor, and that’s how they end up going after Victor Timely in the past because they’re trying to get rid of any variant of Kang who would build the TVA. Now to your point, because you were talking about the butterfly effect and we’ve talked about this before, the butterfly effect was directly renounced in the MCU. Endgame taught us the whole idea, I bring it up every time because I think the joke is hilarious, but the idea of killing maybe Thanos, right? They nixed that. They said absolutely not, that is not how it works. It creates a branched timeline, which is the whole idea of the Multiverse. But if you’re going back and you’re affecting the future, would that not then create a branched timeline instead of- really what should have happened if you’re going towards the rules of the MCU if you’re following them because remember rule follower Taylor. If you’re following the rules of the MCU, what should have happened with Loki speaking to O.B. or going back in time to speak to O.B. is that that would have then created another timeline in which he is saved because O.B. already has all the instruments and all of the knowledge, but instead, it was literally rewriting his memories as Mobius was speaking to him.

Katie: But remember, we’re in the TVA.

Taylor: But then I guess, okay, you know, I guess I’m trying to extrapolate that into my theory that wouldn’t work then for the variant of Kang who becomes He Who Remains.

Katie: Well, I don’t know. I don’t think so because here’s my thought process. They couldn’t physically have told us differently that the TVA was outside of the Sacred Timeline. They physically I mean, if you didn’t understand that point in the first season, they slapped you in the face with that during this first episode. Because when you are looking when Mobius is trying to pull Loki out of his timeslipping and everything, and he’s out on that bridge and you are looking at the whole timeline being sewn together and stuff, you see all the branches coming into the thing, into the little loom. And you see one solid timeline coming out, which is the Sacred Timeline. Again, slap in the face, telling us they are not in a timeline. They do not exist in a timeline. They are outside of it. So I think it’s different in the TVA and so I don’t believe if Loki and Mobius were to go out into one of those branches and try and go after Victor Timely or go to the Sacred Timeline saying that this is 100% how this happened, although again, then I still am trying to figure out how, if the TVA has a past, present and future, they shouldn’t touch the sacred timeline, theoretically, because the TVA has its own.

Taylor: Well, I guess you have to wonder at which point Kang comes off the Sacred Timeline to create the TVA, right? So if you’re looking back at what He Who Remains said in the season finale, he talks about the Multiversal war and all that stuff and how he selected his timeline to be the survivor. At some point, he stepped off the timeline and stopped living to maintain it, prune it, and start the TVA. So the TVA does have a past on the Sacred Timeline through the existence of He Who Remains. And then it almost has its own parallel timeline, parallel to the Sacred Timeline or the Sacred Circle, once He Who Remains stepped out of time and moved into the Citadel because He Who Remains has a past, He Who Remains was on the Sacred Timeline. That’s why it was selected as the Sacred Timeline during the Multiversal Kang War.

Katie: Yeah, I think that’s just where it gets a little blurry for me because then you kind of are like, yes, the TVA is out of time, but the TVA, we have now confirmed, has its own timeline.

Taylor: Which I mean in essence probably starts during the Multiversal war, because if you go back to the conversation that Ravonna and Kang were having on that recording, it sounds like he’s kind of thanking her for her service in following him and helping him conquer the other Kangs on the other timelines. So it sounds like the TVA was kind of created, I guess on one hand you can interpret what He Who Remains was saying in the season finale as, okay, great, I pruned all the other timelines, I killed every other version of myself. I did all these things. Then I created the TVA for maintenance. But now coming back, hearing that conversation with Ravonna, it almost sounds like he created the TVA as his own personal time army to demolish the other timelines and then to maintain.

Katie: Right, because they definitely that is what seems like going to be a big crux of this season is there’s a split coming to the TVA and I shouldn’t even say coming. I think it’s here and it’s the fact that the TVA is about to go through its own civil war almost in the sense that one side wants to continue what they’re doing, go after Sylvie, who caused the problem, and put it all back together. They want to go back to what they knew what to do and just move on. Versus the other side, which is a side of Loki and Mobius, and B-15 who are all saying what we are doing is wrong. And remember, if you guys don’t recall, B-15 was one of the people who had her mind restored to her by Sylvie so she’s aware she lived another life. And they all are saying, you know, we lived a life and then it was destroyed because we were snipping these timelines. And so they want to just let everything live again because they’re realizing that they were killing people. You were killing entire lives and civilizations and just everything when you snipped these timelines. And so, you know, we’re seeing that battle. We obviously see the other groups ship out to go after Sylvie. That’s going to come to a head in no time, I’m sure. But that’s going to be a big thing we’re going to see and I think that’s going to decide a lot about how time moves going forward. We have Loki and Mobius, who are going to try and go to the source or what we think is going to be the source with Victor Timely. But we are going to have this alternate group of Timekeepers trying to restore what the TVA is known best to do.

Taylor: And I think what’s interesting, is you mention the scene where we see them all going through the time door, supposedly going after Sylvie. But I think B-15 gives us a hint that maybe not all of them are going after Sylvie because she says all of this for Sylvie. 

Katie: I think the other Timekeeper with her says that but yes, you’re right.

Taylor: Oh well, yeah, one of the people who’s on our side says it because I think what was interesting is they actually brought the Timekeeper who killed Mobius, who pruned Mobius back, and now he’s on our side because he feels really bad, which is hilarious and also kind of a nice continuity that like as people learn more information, they start making decisions on their own. I think it’s kind of an interesting theme there. But whoever says it basically is hinting to us that maybe their stated goal of the other side is not just the only goal, because how rare or how often do we see or a villain have just one motive, right? They might have the front-facing motive and the motive behind it. My question is, are some of them going after Sylvie because we know she’s a threat, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a large force going out for her. She was able to survive from a very, you know, for a very long time from a child up until now and basically only got caught because our Loki got in her way. But then if there’s another side group going to actually start pruning again because I think that while they’re trying to get to the source, they’re also trying potentially in parallel paths to mitigate the problem because they see these branch timelines as a problem. So that’s why I think they were kind of hinting to us they’re not just going after Sylvie, some other things are going on here.

Katie: I don’t disagree and I think there wasn’t a second in my mind that I didn’t think that that’s what they were going to go do. I mean, listen, we saw it with Ravonna in the first season. There’s a loyalty, you know, and so there are some people who don’t want to get a life back and I get that. And quite frankly, imagine living one life, you’re entire mind only remembers one life, one purpose and you’re being told you have a whole other life. And then beyond that, you know, I don’t really know something B-15 said stuck with me where she was like, everybody should have the right to be able to go back and live their lives. And it really threw me off because I didn’t know what that meant in the sense of can these people go back to where they were? That didn’t make sense to me because those branches were lost. If there are other versions of them in the branches, it’s not the versions of them that are Timekeepers.

Taylor: Right. It’s almost like when Wanda dreamwalked in her own body. You know, obviously, they wouldn’t be dreamwalking because that’s a whole lot of dark magic that really is not involved in the show. But it’s the idea that, like, you could in theory, step in for yourself in another timeline, but you have to do some seriously bad things to yourself, like either dreamwalk, kill yourself, not kill yourself, but kill the other version of you that’s living in that universe. We saw just to bring back to the other really big Multiversal project we had this year in Across the Spider-Verse, you know, Miguel when he stepped into his own life and that guy died, not in Miguel’s hand. He died, the other version of Miguel just died and he caused an entire like basically an incursion. So there’s that whole thing, too, like what is the ramification? Even if your counterpart, you find a universe where your counterpart died naturally, how do you step in when everybody else thinks you’re dead? There are so many questions so it is interesting because B-15 is fighting for something that may not even be possible.

Katie: That’s what I was trying to understand and or also understanding as I was watching it, where I understood her point, I understood trying to take back the free will, essentially to actually live a life that you were sort of abducted from. Because honestly, at that point, I was like, maybe it would have been better just to be pruned and call it a day because you wouldn’t have known at that point and move on versus being put to work, mind wiped. And not only that, the work you were doing was advocating towards killing people, which you didn’t know and even now you think about it and I didn’t think about it once. That entire first season went by and two and a half years later, and I can tell you, I never once thought about the fact that they were avidly out here killing people. Didn’t cross my mind.

Taylor: I think now is the time since we’re all about other universes, to tackle the big thing that we don’t really have enough information to give solid theories on but let’s talk about the timeline because we got a real glimpse of it in this episode. It’s not quite what we predicted in the predictions. We talked about the tying of the timelines being what causes incursions. That clearly is not what’s happening. I think where I’m getting lost is it seems like it’s almost the beginning of time that’s being basically woven into one singular timeline. Where does that temporal energy come from? And then you start getting into like, where does all energy come from and creation and things like that. So it may be an answer that we’re never going to get. But it is interesting to me that we’re looking at the creation of the timeline, and now there’s- where I’m getting stuck is if there are that many branches to begin with and there already was a Multiverse, but what is allowed to survive is the Sacred Timeline? It just kind of is a little contradictory to me. I don’t know. I was real confused by that.

Katie: Yeah, this is an area I’m definitely also confused in. What else is new? But to your point, we weren’t correct about we thought it was the other way around. We thought, you know, they were putting together the future that they were currently putting together in the timeline to continue while instead, we’re actually seeing it put together the past. I think it gets into a little bit of a gray area because we have all these branches and you were talking about then there had to have been a Multiverse already, blah, blah, blah. So we have all these branches, I see the concern on why they don’t fit in, because at the end of the day if a branch doesn’t fit in, it can’t be considered. I mean, think about it, if you have a deadline for an application, you don’t get it in, you’re not going to be considered for whatever the application was for, right? Like common sense. So if that branch doesn’t make it into getting pulled into the loom, it doesn’t get considered to be a part of the Sacred Timeline and, you know, does it go off and make itself its own timeline? Maybe that’s where we’re going to start reaching the concern of incursions because maybe Loki’s going to open that door of showing us there are going to be branches that aren’t making it into this and those branches start to create their own, I don’t want to say Sacred Circle, but almost. These infinite possibilities begin more because they’re not getting pulled into what we know is the main timeline and so they start the downward spiral of the Multiverse. That’s where the concern lies. Do I think that’s true? I don’t know, I’m throwing that out there. But beyond that, you were talking about some of the other concerns of, okay, if it’s writing the past, what does that mean? I don’t know. I had assumed it was writing the future. To me, that made the most sense. But if it’s making up the Sacred Timeline, which again was also a question I had because I had thought time is fixed, but if these branches are new, it’s changing the Sacred Timeline as they’re being pulled in and rewritten.

Taylor: Unless, you know, we’re interpreting their words wrong and it is writing like it is moving to the future and it is as the loom, I guess because we could interpret it visually. I don’t know if this exactly goes in line with what they were saying, but we can interpret it visually by saying or as it writing the future by saying, okay, because if you’re a knitter, I’m a knitter, I like to knit and I like to knit with the loom. You add the yarn and then you it comes together as one, right. And so if you’re doing that, you’re making it longer, right? So you start with a little bit of yarn as you add more yarn to the weaving I guess is probably a better word for it, it’s not really knitting as you add it to the weaving, the string itself becomes longer as you add in the individual pieces of yarn. So that’s kind of what that looks like and I’m sure that’s why they call it the loom, right? If you’re doing that and you’re making it longer then I guess what’s going on is you’re moving further down the timeline, right? The loom will either continue to stay fixed, but the timeline will move or the timeline will stay fixed and the loom will move and you’ll just keep moving forward. So, for example, if you were looking right now, say they’re at year 2090, but what is happening is as more individual pieces of yarn, which in this case are the timelines or the universes are being input into the loom and woven into the Sacred Timeline, then the Sacred Timeline moves out of the loom and what is just outside the loom now is 2091, right? And then as you keep going, 2092. So it is possible based on what they’ve shown us visually, that it is writing the future but now there’s too much like what O.B. was saying, there’s too much and it’s overwhelming the system. And that would then it kind of explain a little bit more why Loki’s being pulled out of all the branches cause he’s not being pulled out of the past he’s being pulled out of all of the infinite futures.

Katie: Yeah, this is a weird area for me. I’m struggling and I’m going to put that out there. I again, as I said, we’re going to avoid for right now talking about implications to the MCU because I think that gets some things muddied and we don’t want to do that, but it obviously should stay in the back of our minds just as we go through this to understand, you know, Loki opened the door to works like Multiverse of Madness, like No Way Home. We talked about this in the predictions. So what happens in this and remember, this is directly after. It might have been two and a half years for us, but we are seeing this come directly after the end of Season One. What does that mean? I don’t know, because the TVA has its own time. It doesn’t move with us. But regardless, we don’t have that two-and-a-half-year gap that all these other projects were coming out in. This Loki season follows directly up to what we saw before. So I think that we have to keep in mind, too, of how, you know, we open the Multiverse. We’ve seen all these implications, but directly after technically, all the other works we’ve seen have been taking place during Season Two of Loki is what I would get from this.

Taylor: Or after, depending on what they fix.

Katie: Right or even further after, so keep that in mind. I don’t want to get any further into it, but I do want to throw that out there. That’s a very important thing to keep floating somewhere. It doesn’t need to be any sort of a priority thought process because it’s certainly not. But, you know, Season Two is quite literally a direct effect of Season One as far as time and everything else but the MCU is not floating in that same realm.

Taylor: Right and just to go back quickly to the timeline conversation, I think we kind of have to cap it here because realistically we’re going to get more information on it right. The whole point from what O.B. was saying, step one, fix Loki, step two, fix the loom, and make it fit all the branched timelines right? Which means we’re going to have more conversations about how the loom works. And I think something Katie and I were talking about as we were, you know, separately watching it on our phones but next to each other is how did the Timekeepers select right? If there’s a Multiverse already and the the loom creates the Sacred Timeline out of the Multiverse, we always were told the Timekeepers, a.k.a. He Who Remains, was selecting what was right and what was wrong, what was part of the Sacred Timeline, what was not. So if you’re taking that a step further, your look and applying it to what we’ve seen graphically in the show or visually in the show, they are selecting what pieces of each separate universe are going to be a part of the Sacred Timeline. So then what you’re looking at and we talked about this in the predictions episode, I think is that Loki and Sylvie’s job will be to play God and step into that role and say, we’re going to take this piece from this universe and this piece from this universe, and they will then be deciding, using a bigger loom what will fit now there are branches. Now is that going to potentially put them in the crosshairs of B-15, who believes that the Multiverse should exist? The other question, and I think this is important to just to make as a distinction, is that you have what is the Multiverse being condensed into the Sacred Timeline, but then you have the Sacred Timeline on the other side of the loom also branching.

Katie: That’s where I think I was getting confused for a second but you just clarified it because I was trying to understand. I mean, I think I’m still a little confused, but if we go to the very beginning where we’re seeing all the branches come in, where are they coming from? Because to your point, this all focused on the Sacred Timeline, Season One. Anything that came off the Sacred Timeline was supposed to be pruned, gone, never remembered. It was just an everyday work kind of thing. So those are the ones that they never wanted getting out of hand, obviously, they were all out of hand. If you looked at any of the screens, they were all over the place. Cool. That means these are all branches, these are all reaching universe potential where they can have their own timeline. Then I don’t understand how do we make it go back to the beginning of the loom and be like, here are all the options. That I don’t understand because also visually, it didn’t look like that was really happening. It just looked like they were all feeding into the loom, coming from different, coming all from the left side. But if you think that there’s an entire right side, that’s all Sacred Timeline, what about all those branching off of there? That is not what the timeline looked like in Season One, Episode Six, when the Multiverse was opened.

Taylor: The front part or the back part?

Katie: The front part right.

Taylor: Right. We only saw the part that had already gone through the loom and was branching off. We’ve never been privy to any of the information pre-loom.

Katie: Right, but that’s why I guess I’m confused just because why is there more, I don’t understand why more branches are going into the loom when there should be more- okay, so think about it this way. We have say 20 branches going into the loom. They all make one nice Sacred Timeline. The TVA was pruning the Sacred Timeline, keeping it all together. At the end of Episode Six, Season One, we see because He Who Remains is killed, dead, gone, the Multiverse is open. There are branches, the TVA can no longer stop the pruning and because it’s too much happening and branches are coming off the Sacred Timeline, we see a crap ton of them. We have a very iconic picture from the end of Season One. I guess what I don’t get is what was initially feeding the loom and how did it increase? Like, what are the branches feeding the loom?

Taylor: I have no idea. That’s what I was saying. It’s almost like you’re getting into like, what is the temporal energy? Because I think that’s kind of what it looks like becomes each individual universe slash timeline, which then feeds into the one Sacred Timeline. But then you get into questions like, where does time come from? So I have no idea. Like, I don’t know if they’re going to expect to see and understand that on a meta sense of, okay, well, time comes from this being who created or are we going to get something a little bit more along the lines of, you know, during what we talked about when the Infinity stones like during the Big Bang created the Infinity stones. Are we going to get something along the lines of during X amount of time when this was created, it created the Multiverse and the Multiverse existed for many years. And then He Who Remains came and kind of shook it all up and created this loom like, I don’t know. And also, you know, how does he get to the Place Beyond Time where the Citadel is? Like what created that? Clearly, that exists, but did it exist before the Multiversal war and he used it as a safe house or did he create it to be the person who was controlling everything across time and universes? I have no idea. I think we definitely need more information on that beginning part of the Sacred Timeline because I think up until recently and basically still, based on what we’ve seen today or in this new episode, we have a still pretty decent understanding of the mechanics and the logic behind the Sacred Timeline as it relates to everything post loom. The loom, and before all the new information that we definitely need to figure out and we can’t do that without more information. Like I can’t go any further until they start to really give me more information. And I liked what you were saying earlier, like at the beginning of the episode about how we might be going across the creation of the TVA, because I think going back in time is the only way to get those answers. And so if we do that, then maybe we get a little bit more understanding of Kang and well, He Who Remains is more specific, but basically be able to pick the brain of He Who Remains because he understood all this stuff. I would basically like another 20-minute explainer from him because I think looking back and rewatching Episode Six from Season One, that’s actually really helpful. So I need either him or O.B. or a variant of Kang to give me the same level of explainer for now the beginning new section of the Sacred Timeline that we’ve never heard about before.

Katie: Well, we did, but we didn’t in this sense, because what we were told always was the Timekeepers, a.k.a. Kang, would sit there and sort through all of them, because that’s what we’re even, even in Season One that it’s talked about a couple of times. I know when Mobius is saying, you know, will I ever meet the Timekeepers or something to Ravonna, and Ravonna says, I think he says, you know, what are they even doing right now? And she says, you know what they’re doing, they are building the timeline or they’re working on the timeline or something of that nature, which obviously, again, we know they were a facade. We know Kang was behind or He Who Remains was behind that curtain and everything. But at the end of the day, that’s the explanation we were getting. So saying we run with that, saying that’s what we understand. Cool. So He Who Remains was sitting here working through the timeline, creating it, making sure it was whatever version of it needed to be, because apparently time is circular and that’s what we’ve been going off of. But he was creating it to be whatever version he needed it to be to come out on top every time to move the proper way for him. Remember, Sacred Timeline only exists because he is the version of Kang that won.

Taylor: Right. 

Katie: We could have had the version of Kang in the Quantum realm and the Sacred Timeline could look very different. So he is still building the timeline or was still building the timeline only to continue it to further himself and to further his need to not have other versions of himself appear, but also to make sure if it’s circular, everything continues to happen the way it’s supposed to happen at all times. Again, it doesn’t answer where these branches necessarily were coming from, but they’re whatever he was sorting through, which is also hairy because like you said, now we had the loom, which is supposedly the same thing.

Taylor: Well, I think it’s my understanding is that the loom is like the actual mechanism. He would make the choice, the loom would pluck it out of like, I don’t think he had the physical power to actually touch a timeline, right? Like look at what it was doing to Mobius out there, it was literally ripping his suit. It would have wrapped his skin off, which O.B. said about 60 times, which was hilarious. But I think even a being as powerful as He Who Remains cannot be out there with all that temporal energy. So I think the loom was built to literally be his hands selecting the pieces of time to include after he made the decision.

Katie: Right. Either way, I think it’s going to be one of the bigger problems we suffer through during the season. Just like understanding the opening of the Multiverse was something we struggled with for a while. But all in all, I mean, the first episode, as I said earlier, opened with a problem, closed with a problem and I felt or closed with a solution to the problem. And so it feels really good. I think the last thing I just want to talk about really quick is Sylvie to a degree and that’s only because we did have an end credit. If you missed that, I would go watch it now. I don’t want to say anything that’s going to spoil anything for you but go watch it now. It’s only one. But we see her, she does appear in a branched timeline and they make that very specific that she is not on the correct timeline. And so not only is she in a branched timeline, but she is in, I think, the eighties and we see her walk into a McDonald’s. For those of you who have watched the trailers, you know she ends up working there. So that’s, I assume, where we’re going to find Sylvie. We obviously also know she ends up back at the TVA. I don’t think we’d see that until the very, very end of the season or at least episodes four through six second half. But it’ll be interesting because that’s where she came right after the end of killing He Who Remains and I think she obviously is just as important as Loki is in all of this. And who knows? I don’t really know where she’s going to come from, but I do think we all know everybody is looking for, and we’ll just have to see what happens in Episode Two.

Taylor: Yeah, I would agree. I think, you know, I didn’t mind having the first episode really focus a lot on the ramifications as it relates to the TVA. I think when it comes to Sylvie, she’s kind of moved beyond the TVA, right? Like that’s why she was so excited to be in that branched timeline, to be at McDonald’s, because now in her mind, she’s vanquished the beast, right? She has done what she set out to do. She got her revenge and now she can just go live her life and knowing that she ends up working at the McDonald’s, she’s just happy to have the quiet life that she never had before but obviously, she’s going to get roped back into all of this. And I think what we saw today is really just the little hint that, hey, Sylvie is coming back. She’s going to be a big part of this. We’ve seen some other scenes with her and Loki and the gang really doing their thing and trying to solve this on a grander scale but it was cool to see kind of how she got there. I think one of the things that I was most excited to see and you pointed this out as well, was how they very clearly marked that it was a branched timeline, which is going to be super helpful because, you know, even when we were watching MoM, when they were labeling the different Earths and things like that, anytime I can get a label, I know Across the Spider-Verse did this too, and I loved it. Anytime there’s a label it really, really helps and so I’m glad that that’s something that they’re going to bring into this season to help us understand Sacred Timeline or not Sacred Timeline because that is now really the big question.

Katie: Agreed. I think it was a great thing to do to label it, and it’s going to be important and I hope, you know, that’s something we continue to see prominently. I hope it’s not just a one-off thing, but as they go to different timelines, if that’s what the show holds, it’s very clearly shown to us. Just so that we as viewers know what is going on most of the time.

Taylor: Yep, definitely. I think that is pretty much the highlights of Season Two Episode One. Obviously, there’s going to be a lot more to discuss and dissect as we move forward in the season and continue to get more and more information but for now, we’re going to call it a wrap on this first premiere episode of the season. As always, if you’re excited to follow us for the rest of our coverage and you haven’t yet done so, please make sure that you’re following on your podcast platform of choice and also checking out the website where we have blog posts for every episode and lots of good information and links to the socials and all that good stuff. You can also help support the show on the home page, which is not required, but very appreciated.

Katie: Follow us on Twitter at SisAssembledPod and Instagram and Threads at SistersAssembled just so you can keep up with the show and the fun things that we’re doing, you know, just together in general, but also what the show is putting out there and some great new content. And we said it already last week, we’ll say it again. We are obviously deep already into our Loki coverage. So come back next week because we will be covering Loki Season Two Episode Two and I know one of these days I’m going to screw that up but today I got it right and we’re going to have a ball because so far so good. And that’s coming for me. So one of six is a thumbs up from Katie and we’ll see where this goes in the future. But until then, keep up with Loki and Marvel and keep up with us as Marvel just blew your mind, so let’s talk about it.