![]() Their attempts to one-up each other begin to feel petty and powerless, leading to a fun bit of negotiating and a reluctant partnership. Once Loki and Sylvie escape, they find themselves on a doomed planet, whose half-destroyed moon shoots flaming, purple comets in their direction. 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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.Īfter a brief recap of Sylvie enacting her plan, the episode kicks off with an action scene back at the TVA. 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. The episode follows Loki and Sylvie making their way across Lamentis-1, a planet on the verge of apocalypse. However, the key purpose served by this introduction is to colour what might otherwise be a bland series of character exposition. 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. 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. 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. Sylvie, extracted information about the Time Keepers’ whereabouts from Hunter C-20 (Sasha Lane), the TVA Minute Man she kidnapped last week. The opening scene doubles back to show us how Di Martino’s Variant, a.k.a. 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. It is, however, often hampered, and ends up in service of a story that jogs in place and concludes rather abruptly. “ 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.
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