Loki Season 2's [SPOILER] Is Grosser And Way More Worrying Than Thanos' Snap
Contains spoilers for "Loki" Season 2, Episode 5 — "Science/Fiction"
If there is any opportunity to show up Thanos' (Josh Brolin) half-baked plan to eradicate half of life on Earth, then the MCU should take the bait. He was essentially a one-note villain that the heroes had to stop at any cost. But as Disney+'s "Loki" has proven time and time again, the God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) is going to go in a different direction. After Kang variant Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) shows up to hopefully save the universe, things go awry. The Temporal Loom melts down, making all of time and space disintegrate. The show seemed to be setting up another Kang fiasco, like at the end of Season 1, but in fact, Season 2, Episode 5, turns into Loki's struggle to save the world from itself.
This differs from the Thanos problem because there is no overarching villain in "Loki" Season 2. Loki's conflict is a subtler story, showing how far he has come by insisting on saving all his friends. But what makes this situation even more serious is exactly how time is disintegrating. Unlike Thanos' Snap, which just made his victims blow away like leaves in the wind, "Loki" makes the multiversal shutdown much more visceral. The first to disappear, Victor essentially explodes like spaghetti, unraveling his insides in a display that is closer to body horror than anything in the MCU before. But this isn't the only reason why this is worse than Thanos. In "Loki," there are far more ramifications that hammer home existential dread.
The stakes are higher for Loki and his friends
When the Temporal Loom breaks down, it seems — for a time — that this is as things should be. Everyone except for Loki has been reset to their lives before they were variants. Mobius (Owen Wilson) lives at home with two sons and his beloved jet skis. Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) returns to 2012 as a doctor. Hilariously, Casey (Eugene Cordero) is escaping from Alcatraz. But while Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) seems assured that everything can continue as it was, that is not the case. Victor turning into string cheese wasn't just a TVA phenomenon. It has spread to all timelines — the very ones that Loki and Sylvie had been desperate to save this entire time.
Thanos' attempted destruction of Earth almost seems quaint comparatively. Time is unraveling, and it affects not just one little planet in the cosmos but every single timeline in the multiverse. And where does one go once they are unraveled? "Avengers: Endgame" seems to imply that the transition for those who were Snapped is instantaneous. They are gone one moment and reappear the next. But as many things established in "Loki," it seems that the timeline dangers are much more violent. Like Loki's time slippage, time unraveling is a terrifying inevitability; try as you might to outrun it, there is no saving you. "Loki" Season 2, Episode 5, asks many questions, and it may be better if we don't know the answers.