This review contains spoilers for Marvel’s Loki episode 3, ‘Lamentis’, now available to view on Disney+. To remind yourself of where we left off, check out our Loki episode 2.
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After a pair of funny but uneven episodes that served to propel the plot, Loki’s third chapter attempts to hunker down for some emotional reflection. “Lamentis” — a shorter episode than the last two, at a mere 42 minutes with credits — hammers home just how much this series is the rare Marvel entry with any real visual panache. It is, however, often hampered, and ends up in service of a story that jogs in place and concludes rather abruptly. Tom Hiddleston continues to shine as a comedic lead, and while Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius is sorely missed this week, newcomer Sophia Di Martino is an adequate straight-faced replacement, as a Variant Loki who may or may not be a Loki at all.
The opening scene doubles back to show us how Di Martino’s Variant, a.k.a. Sylvie, extracted information about the Time Keepers’ whereabouts from Hunter C-20 (Sasha Lane), the TVA Minute Man she kidnapped last week. As Sylvie explains to Loki later in the episode, her mind-control illusion is a game of memory, in which she slips into a subject’s real recollections — in this case, C-20 sipping margaritas at her favourite restaurant — in order to extract information from them. The scene itself feels slightly off kilter even before it skips through time, both thanks to Di Martino’s sly performance, and a backdrop that looks distinctly unreal. Maybe this was intentional, or maybe it was subpar compositing or StageCraft (several later scenes fall victim to shoddy VFX), but accidental eeriness is eeriness all the same.
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However, the key purpose served by this introduction is to colour what might otherwise be a bland series of character exposition. The episode follows Loki and Sylvie making their way across Lamentis-1, a planet on the verge of apocalypse. Along the way, they reveal things about themselves to one another, with each actor’s performance hinting at subdued vulnerabilities — but they’re also both tricksters with their own agendas. Loki wants to learn more about Sylvie’s powers, which she tries and fails to enchant him with, and while Sylvie is hardly explicit about her intentions, there remains a looming sense that her attempts to get Loki to open up are less about making a connection, and more about finding ways to invade his memories.
After a brief recap of Sylvie enacting her plan, the episode kicks off with an action scene back at the TVA. Parts of this sequence fall into Marvel’s usual trap of shooting fights without clarity and constantly cutting on impact (a larger Hollywood problem), though once the obligatory, up-close second unit bits are dispensed with, director Kate Herron’s penchant for revealing character through movement begins to shine through. A wide shot of Sylvie taking out a few remaining Minutemen draws us into an ornate hallway, and centers the golden elevators that supposedly lead to the Time Keepers. When Loki catches up to Sylvie, knives in hand, their fight is more of a careful dance than one of Marvel’s usual beat-’em-ups, the rote and often pre-visualized scenes that — outside the first two Avengers films — generally feel disconnected from the story. Here, the scene is immediately intriguing (thanks in no small part to Natalie Holt’s alluring score), and it’s driven by Loki’s desire to learn more about his opponent. The fight doesn’t last long, since Judge Ravonna Rennslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) soon breaks up the party, but it’s incredibly refreshing in the grand scheme of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Once Loki and Sylvie escape, they find themselves on a doomed planet, whose half-destroyed moon shoots flaming, purple comets in their direction. Their attempts to one-up each other begin to feel petty and powerless, leading to a fun bit of negotiating and a reluctant partnership. It’s here that the episode begins to press pause, and while it eventually affords the characters some dramatic meat, it also spends an inordinate amount of time becoming especially quippy and Marvel-esque, in way that felt novel back when Robert Downey Jr. first played Iron Man in 2008, but now feels like a stale substitute for characterization. “FYI, that wasn’t even a plan” says Sylvie, of Loki’s guard-uniform illusion. “Dressing as a guard and getting on a train is just doing a thing,” she jabs. It feels oddly out of character for an Asgardian Variant, and while Sylvie could certainly end up being a character from Earth (she shares several traits with the comics’ Enchantress), it’s the kind of meaningless snark that ultimately flattens several of Marvel’s characters into indistinguishable mush.
However, once the train departs, Loki and Sylvie are able to share a few nice moments, revealing the personal and romantic pitfalls of life as a prince, and life on the run. Purple light streams in from the windows, and while the palette is a few blue shades short of “bisexual lighting” — the backdrop is appropriately green, for a scene about two Lokis — it’s an overt enough foreshadowing for when both characters casually mention their bisexuality. While a far cry from any overt display of sexuality (the largely desexualized MCU barely does this for straight characters), it’s a nice albeit fleeting way for Disney to finally pull this trigger, making Loki their dozenth or so “first” queer character in recent years, though likely their most high-profile. It certainly took them long enough.
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The show soon resumes its attempts to have Loki be both the villain plucked straight from The Avengers, as well as the “original,” more empathetic Loki of later entries. However this time it doesn’t rely on clips and reminders of existing films. It begins to scratch Loki’s surface by having him recollect childhood memories of his mother, and the way his identity is tied to hers, serving to both endear Loki to the audience as he reflects, and to give Sylvie a bit more power over him, should she need it. Thankfully, Loki’s reminiscing isn’t all moping this time around; a few drinks later, he sings Asgardian folk songs with the rest of the train car, veering between sorrowful verses and joyful ones. This allows Hiddleston to let loose and command the space around him, while also giving him a few subtle opportunities at more physical comedy. He really is a star, and no matter where the series goes from here, watching him will likely be a major highlight of the next few Wednesdays.
After another fun, character-centric fight scene, Loki and Sylvie are ejected from the train, and find themselves walking toward a nearby city. Before long, the MCU’s worst storytelling instincts clash once again with what the people behind this series are trying to achieve (echoing a similar tug-of-war in WandaVision). The episode began by revealing Sylvie’s powers in a visual and narrative sense, but its next big reveal about C-20 and the TVA — that the Minutemen weren’t created by the Time Keepers, but are Variants from Earth — comes about through a dialogue exchange, between two characters on whom this reveal has little emotional impact, since Loki is fully aware of his own past. It’s more of a factoid, edited into the series like a Wikipedia entry, than a skillful twist, since its potential ramifications are both implied and glossed over.
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When Loki and Sylvie arrive at the crowded city, their attempts to reach the rescue ship (“the ark”) are hampered by a riotous crowd and by falling debris, in a sequence that kicks the previous scene’s bland exposition to the curb. Presented as a single take, it follows the characters through chaos as they weave in and out of storefronts and fight local guards along the way. It’s exciting to witness, though it comes to something of an abrupt halt when the ship is destroyed.
Two things stick out awkwardly about this scene. The first is its strange focus on Loki’s concern for innocent civilians. Loki doesn’t need to be a “good guy” to be interesting, and the show’s insistence on making him one leaves him a disconnected place, since he was attempting to take over Earth not long ago, and any emotional changes he’s quickly undergone since then are the result of being shown images of Asgardian death. Nothing in the series has really pushed him to become an altruistic person, and most of this very episode focuses on his scheming nature. The second oddity is the scene’s closing image; after the ship collapses, and the camera turns to face Loki and Sylvie, it pulls out to capture the space around them, when it should push-in to capture the characters’ reactions to this supposed fatal blow. Instead of emphasizing an emotion, it simply presents a plot point and cuts to the credits, ending an otherwise decent episode on a surprisingly empty note.
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It can be tricky to pull off what feels like a side-quest to the main plot, especially when last week’s episode ended with the creation of a multiverse and the promise of infinite permutations. Episode 3 feels small by comparison, and while it uses its scale as a respite from the cosmic bombast, it digs into its lead character only occasionally, and continues to play by the same linear time-travel rules as its predecessors, while also playing by Marvel’s larger narrative rules and prioritizing exposition. It still works, but in the way a car in desperate need of an oil change still works; something’s going to give sooner or later, unless it’s tended to.
If any MCU production ought to let loose, it’s this one. The characters call themselves hedonists, but halfway through its six hour runtime, the show refuses to luxuriate in the infinite chaos just outside its frame. Its visual and aural creatives are incredibly adept — director Kate Herron and composer Natalie Holt especially — though it often feels like Marvel’s production machine needs to get out of their way and let them tell an immersive story, where the characters aren’t defined by a visual and narrative formula, but by possibility.
