Loki S2E3-4 Thoughts: Loki Flirts With Being The Doctor Before Reverting To His Old Self (Spoilers)

These episodes picked up a bit better from where episode two left off, partly because we saw two characters coming back into it that the show has somewhat been missing: Ravonna Renslayer and a variant of He Who Remains, under the identity of Victor Timely.

We are discovering how important the character chemistry, both romantically and humorously, between the two Loki variants was to the initial installments of the show. I’ve gradually rewatched the first season while I’ve been plowing through Lost You Forever, and the combination of rivalry, identity crisis of who and what Loki is, quasi-incestuous and narcissistic romantic tension, the inability for either of the two to show vulnerability or self awareness of their flaws, even as the recognition that they’re both different from the Loki archetype while still painfully recognizing the limitations in themselves when they meet one another, was all a complex relationship and reflection on arguably the most interesting long term character in the entire MCU that was vital to the first season.

And now… it seems like they’re still finding their way back to that.

Victor Timely, I’m reading based on the directors’ comments, is inspired a bit by an actual black inventor by the name of Granville Woods, who was contemporary to the period that Timely is depicted in. Woods, as the history goes, invented many, many things but frequently had his patents challenged or stolen by white inventors, including but not limited to Thomas Edison. As a parallel here, Timely is shown demonstrating a fabulous prototype of the Temporal Loom — immediately recognized by Loki and Mobius on sight — and is accosted by numerous white businessmen insisting they must have it and don’t seem very interested in taking no for an answer.

Timely’s own fate is caused by a divergence created when Renslayer drops a TVA technical manual in his window when he’s a youth, and then comes back to reap what she’s sown in 1893. Mobius and Loki find Timely, and Loki immediately recognizes him as soon as he sees him in good light as a He Who Remains variant. Timely speaks with a pronounced speech impediment. He Who Remains was always more than a little eccentric rather than actively cruel, a cold realist who had a few screws loose. Timely is a mistrustful fellow who quickly gets eyes for Renslayer, but is reflexively opposed to being in any kind of equal partnership with everyone — Renslayer inadvertently presses his trigger button by even using the word, and he dumps her overboard in a lifeboat as soon as possible once she does.

However, the show ultimately all comes back to the critical character flaws of Loki and Sylvie: he’s ultimately arrogant and thinks he should be in a much higher place in the multiverse than he deserves, and she’s wildly mistrusting of everyone around her and wants to kill everyone who even remotely looks like someone who’s wronged her.

The action of these two shows first involves a semi-comical chase for Timely, and then dealing with the revanchist hunter caste among the TVA while they’re trying to sort out how to fix the Temporal Loom. Renslayer and Minutes are in a bit of rivalry over first gaining power over Timely, and then ultimately decide to band together when it becomes clear that Timely is ultimately not interested in working with them. At the end of episode 3, Loki finally convinces Sylvie that they need Timely to at least stabilize the timelines of the multiverse without seeking to rule them after an episode-long argument, but she’s still unwilling to accept that the TVA isn’t itself the problem.

And then in episode 4, we get something like a mid season climax before the end: Timely and Ouroboros have a bit of a bromance once each of them discovers that the other inspired them tremendously in their own work, and come up with a way to fix the Loom. However, they ultimately find that they’re too late, and even attempting to physically approach the Loom’s controls is immediately fatal. Ouroboros’ evasive description of “spaghettification” and comparison to black holes is not entirely a parallel: where a black hole’s gravity would stretch an object into a noodle like shape in its final plunge past the event horizon, the “temporal radiation” around the Loom literally turns Timely, hazard suit and all, into a flying heap of spaghetti like noodles as soon as he steps out to fix it.

And there’s a telling foreshadowing that Loki has reverted to his former self, good and bad: when Sylvie challenges him that he’s “playing God,” his immediate response is that they are gods.

And that, as much as anything else, should be a glaring hint that he’s about to have everything come apart very badly. Because the last time he protested that he was a god when things were going sideways went like this…

And this time, it was even worse. In fairness, Loki is not quite so naked in his ambition for power this time. He’s doing what he thinks needs to be done, to save himself and a large cross section of the multiverse. However, he’s still messing with forces he doesn’t understand more than on a rudimentary level, and he’s come far too late to the party to stop it from melting down.

That said, there was a ton of wrapping up the last of the time skipping questions from the earlier episodes of the series: why was Sylvie in the elevator in the then-future in episode 1, and who pruned Loki at that point to save him from time skipping? How did the TVA personnel get their memory erased?

Sylvie was in the elevator because they were working together to prevent the Loom from melting down, and Loki’s episode 1 self skipped to this episode’s events and saw Sylvie’s episode 4 self along the way. Episode 4 Loki recognized the parallels of what was going on, and when he saw his own episode 1 self coming up to the elevator while he had a time stick in his hands, he immediately recognized that he had to close the time loop and save his own past self. Episode 2 Sylvie didn’t know why she was there because it hadn’t happened to her yet, either. Episode 4 ties all these threads together.

We also now know that He Who Remains was working openly with Renslayer during the Multiversal War, and then decided he needed to wipe their memories. It’s a bit of a call out to Timely’s refusal to work in equal partnerships — He Who Remains has only servants, not partners. It’s an area where Timely grows past his variant self when he’s willing to work with Ouroboros and the others.

However, the fact remains that there were multiple He Who Remains faces on the conference room wall. My interpretation of that is relatively simple: He Who Remains created the TVA along with something like the Council of Kangs, and eventually decided that the Council itself was still too dangerous and needed to turn on them as well.

That said… we have a cliffhanger now. Because the ending of this episode strongly implies that everybody died. Renslayer killed Dox and her people when they refused to join her in taking over the TVA again, except for Brad. Miss Minutes proved strangely vulnerable to a simple system reboot at the office. Sylvie enchanted Brad and used him to prune Renslayer. Timely got shredded when he sought to fix the Loom. And then the Loom blew up and seemingly killed all the other main characters.

However, we’re only four episodes into what is supposed to be a six episode season. Frankly, it was a bit startling to even see the protagonists fail this spectacularly… but then, our title character was never truly a hero. He was a tragic figure who ranged between antihero and outright villain. He’d been hinting at his more villainous side for multiple episodes now, and that side of him eventually returned to his arrogance and swiftly failed when he bit off more than he could chew. He was never Thanos, he’s Sisyphus. He’s destined to reach for more than he can handle, and fail.

So the question is, how do they live? Unlike Loki’s pruning this time last season, there was no post credits reveal with Classic, Boastful, Kid, and Alligator Loki finding him in the Void. There’s just the frame going white, and then it goes black in sudden Soprano’s like fashion.

My two possible theories: the Loom’s temporal meltdown disperses them all in time and space rather than killing them outright, or else someone in the room (or elsewhere) fires up their TemPad at the last second and gives them an escape.

We’re on uncharted ground here. The TVA as we know it appears to have been conclusively destroyed at last, and in that sense, Sylvie got her wish. (My prediction is that she uses He Who Remains’ TemPad to get herself and Loki out.) It makes some sense that the Temporal Loom might well have never been truly necessary to regulating the flow of time — this was, instead, He Who Remains’ means of usurping control of it in order to make his variants’ existence impossible by coalescing all of time into a single timeline, and as soon as that control began to break down, it was always going to blow up. While this means that the Kangs can now likely run even more rampant (and we may well be headed for a Secret Wars like ending that, if the comics’ mold is going to be followed, will end with Doctor Doom as a key villain), we are likely heading for a reveal that Sylvie was right in the end. Ergo, the TVA was never necessary, and their entire existence was part of He Who Remains’ efforts at total control of time and space. They were the problem, and Loki’s effort to gain control of it, out of greed in the first season and an arrogant perception of necessity in this one, was always doomed to fail. It could only exist as a means of absolute domination, and it was always going to fall apart.

So now we’re about to find out what happens after it falls apart.

I’m very much here for it.

Thanks for reading.

Loki S2E2 Thoughts

This one was a bit less profound than the first one, partly because it didn’t really have anything quite as interesting as the introduction of Ouroboros.

There was a somewhat drawn out interaction with a former hunter who apparently took on his original name of Brad and became a movie star, giving rise to the episode’s pun-laden title, “Breaking Brad.” Loki and Mobius are determined to find Sylvie to find out what happened at the “end of time” after she shoved Loki through the time door, and Brad is, for whatever reason, not willing to talk. To be honest, it’s never quite made clear why Brad doesn’t want them to find her beyond basic stubbornness and, likely, a desire to prevent them from finding out what General Dox is really doing with all the hunters she marched off with in the first episode. Loki ultimately winds up tormenting him with the idea of being crushed in a box made up of time walls while he and Mobius sort of pretend Loki has lost his temper and has decided to stop dithering around.

Loki eventually finds Sylvie at the McDonald’s. She doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere, weirdly content to be somewhere that isn’t a disaster for once. Of course, Brad reveals that it IS going to be a disaster soon, as Dox is planning to prune all the branching timelines en masse.

Ouroboros isn’t quite as interesting here, running around like his hair is on fire trying to fix the technobabble time machinery from the first episode, and B-15 insists that they can’t prune the timelines to reduce the strain on the so-called Temporal Loom, because this represents tons of lives.

However, Dox eventually has a great deal of success before Sylvie joins forces with the others to stop her.

There’s a brief soliloquy where Mobius tells Brad that, unlike the latter, he’s not really all that interested in finding out what his real life was like. This is a change of heart from his sentiment expressed before Renslayer had him pruned, although that might well have been a fit of pique. He’s decided he’d rather not try to reclaim that life — if it was worse than what he has at the TVA, then he’s been done a favor, and if it was better, he’d rather not know what he’s lost. It’s an interesting, but understandable perspective.

Somewhere near the end, it’s brought out that they’ve gotten a read on where Renslayer is, and it’s revealed that Sylvie still has He Who Remains’ TemPad.

It’s a little hard to tell what to think of the series after this episode. It was interesting, but a bit of a step down from the first one. Loki’s turn back towards being an antihero with somewhat villainous traits was interesting, and in some ways it was nice to see him finally beginning to use his own abilities again. Of course, why he doesn’t simply pull out some of the Infinity Stones the TVA has in a drawer and use them against Dox isn’t clear, other than perhaps all the Stones are from pruned timelines and thus don’t have power any more.

In some ways, this series is basically casting Loki as an even more divinely mischievous version of the Doctor fighting his own existential time struggles. And once that role starts to seem clearer, the series almost begins to suffer from the frequent comparisons I’ve been making to Doctor Who now that I’ve become more aware of the parallels. At some point, it’s hard to do much with a series like this that Doctor Who hasn’t already done, although it’s possible that this is eventually going somewhere to introduce more of Kang, or some other villain.

Which is, of course, perhaps a bit hampered by Johnathan Majors’ legal problems.

I’m hoping my mild disillusionment with this episode isn’t longer lasting, and it’s still certainly less aimless than Ahsoka was for most of its run. It has entertainment value, still, and the first episode was good enough that it’s perhaps not shocking that anywhere from there was going to wind up being a step down.

Thanks for reading.

Loki S2E1 Thoughts: Fresh Air And Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff (Spoilers)

I didn’t mince words yesterday: the disappointing finale of Ahsoka, together with having plenty of episodes of Lost You Forever to binge, left me very lethargic about wanting to catch the premier of Loki‘s second season as soon as possible. It let it go until halftime of the Sunday Night Football game, and even then, only when it was so clear that the game was completely out of hand and that I wasn’t going to miss anything competitive by skipping over.

The episode promptly restored my faith that at least someone under Disney’s creative umbrella still knows what they’re doing.

Non-spoiler note: I was today years old when I realized that the Loki theme music has a ticking clock mixed into it. Subtle and clever.

So, with that…

We more or less start the episode finding that Loki himself is more or less time-skipping, jumping to and from various points in time with his body twisting in a rather painful-looking way as he does it. He doesn’t have control over it. The final scene of the first season saw him in the TVA, but instead of the Time Keeper statues, Kang himself was represented. The implication was that Kang had re-emerged after Sylvie killed He Who Remains, and now has control of the TVA. Mobius and Hunter B-15 don’t know him, and as this season starts he’s running from them.

He jumps out a window, and winds up on a mail hover cart that crashed through the window as Casey, the desk clerk he threatened early in the first season, is cleaning. A large monitor falls from the ceiling, making a significant webbed crack in the marble floor. Then Loki warps again.

Now Casey recognizes him. He’s back in the version of the TVA he’s more familiar with from the first season, and obviously he’s recognized here. However, the crack from the monitor falling is still in the floor. Loki asks Casey if it’s always been there, and Casey says it’s been there as long as he can remember. Loki deduces from this that the Kang-statue version of the TVA was in the past.

Mobius and B-15 are exactly where they were things left off, but from their own perspective. As was evident when Sylvie killed He Who Remains, the timeline is branching everywhere. Mobius asks what they should do, B-15 says they should tell everyone the truth they learned — that all the workers are Variants, and that they had lives on the timeline. Mobius has enough time to express skepticism that that’ll go over well when first Casey tells him that Loki was just looking for him and disappeared, then another Hunter comes and informs him that a new Judges’ Council has convened to replace Renslayer and wants to see them. Amidst all this, the lights are flickering periodically.

This leads to a series of conversations where Loki ultimately lands in the judges’ chambers as Mobius and B-15 are trying to tell the new judges that everyone there is a Variant and that the TVA hasn’t been doing what they thought they were doing. Loki’s previous presence in the chamber was in the distant past, when multiple Kang busts filled the wall, with a recording of He Who Remains telling Renslayer that she was a marvel, and he would be honored to lead with her. It is implied that they had fought a war, and won. Then Loki hops to the TVA he knows, when the presentation is going on. After he regains his bearings, he sees the mural of the Time Keepers where the Kang faces were, grabs a pruning rod, and prunes the mural. The busts of Kangs (or multiple He Who Remains, as he knows him) are still there beneath the mural. Loki exclaims to the group of judges that this is who built the place and stole their lives.

The judges order pruning stopped, as Mobius takes Loki to a being called Ouroboros. In a phenomenal bit of meta casting, given his role in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Ke Huy Quan is playing Ouroboros.

Loki and Mobius are speaking with Ouroboros; Mobius himself was apparently the last person to talk with him. Mobius clearly doesn’t remember it, but Ouroboros still does — the memory wiping that was done on Mobius (several times, Loki verbally assumes) hasn’t been getting done on Ouroboros. Mobius is obviously embarrassed that Ouroboros recognizes him and he doesn’t remember it, so he’s faking it like he still remembers him. Loki looks at him oddly, knowing he’s faking it, but Ouroboros doesn’t pick up on it. And when Loki time skips back again, he winds up speaking to Ouroboros’ past self, and Ouroboros remembers the conversations in the past in a paradoxical fashion.

Ouroboros makes a technobabble device (Temporal Aura Extractor) to stop Loki from skipping — the fact that he’s doing so isn’t unheard of, but it’s not supposed to be happening in the TVA facility. Ouroboros states that the Temporal Loom — a large device that takes raw time stuff and threads it into the timeline — must be getting overloaded from all the branching, and Loki is in the middle of it. The extractor device will snatch him back, but he Loom has to be first recalibrated to pull him in and stabilize him, and once it does, he has to be pruned from whenever he is at that meta moment to where and when the extractor is. If he isn’t pruned at the right moment, he might be lost forever.

Now Loki suddenly jumps to the future as the moment is about to become right. But the pruning rod doesn’t go with him. In this future, the TVA is needing to be evacuated from some threat. Loki sees the indicator he was carrying turn green, indicating he needs pruning soon, but he doesn’t have the means. He frantically starts looking around for a rod, when he hears a land line phone ring. He goes to it, and in a surreal moment, Sylvie pokes her head out and says “There you are!” Then some unseen person prunes him, and it’s still timely enough that the Loom retrieves him into the dramatic scene where Mobius was doing a fancy reset, and they’re saved.

Meanwhile, one of the generals is marshaling tons of hunters to go look for Sylvie. B-15 wonders why so many; D-90 mutters that he doesn’t buy it.

In a post credits scene, Sylvie finds herself in a McDonalds in a branched timeline’s 1982, and basks in the normalcy of it all. For the first time since she escaped the TVA as a child, she gets to hang out in a place that isn’t about to be destroyed as part of her serial-apocalypse cover from the TVA, and it’s sublimely wonderful to her.

So… implications.

The past moment that Loki went back to at the end of the previous season wasn’t, as strongly implied at the time, an alternate time where Kang had taken over the TVA. It was a past time when He Who Remains had apparently pruned most of his own Variants in the time wars, and appointing Renslayer as his lieutenant to oversee the TVA. As was strongly implied by her lack of reaction other than cold fury when Mobius told her he wanted to go back to where he was really from in episode 4 last season, this corroborates that she was always in on the ruse that He Who Remains was playing.

What isn’t clearly known is whether the TVA was created as part of He Who Remains’ efforts to destroy the other Kangs, or whether a past iteration of it was actually ruled by the Kangs. It seems possible that the giant city architecture outside the TVA windows was always the other Kangs’ domain, and He Who Remains conquered it and covered up the evidence of the others’ existence, then wiped their memories one or more times since. The other possibility is that Mobius was actually working for the Kangs, and HWR wiped their memories so they wouldn’t remember that.

Either way, the TVA obviously dares to at least the end of the wars, and at least two of them — Renslayer and Ouroboros — were not mind wiped at the end of the wars. Whether they switched sides, or whether one Kang simply gained control over all the others and then used them to prevent their re-emergence is not clearly stated here.

However, at some time in the future, the TVA’s systems go critical, and Sylvie is there when it happens. Someone is also there to prune Loki from behind — it isn’t Sylvie herself, she’s in front of him when it happens, so she isn’t alone. The Sylvie we see at McDonald’s probably has not yet had this happen to her… but who knows?

As the post title says… wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. Amusingly, I don’t believe I’d started watching Doctor Who yet when the first season of Loki came about, or else I’d have used that term then. That said, it’s clearly appropriate now.

And I’ve managed to get this writeup done finally a whole seventeen hours and twenty one minutes and change before episode 2 drops!

Thanks for reading.

Pre-Loki Roundup: Lost You Forever S1E1-21, Lord of War, Woody Woodpecker Movie, Ahsoka Followup Thoughts (Rant)

I’ve had a busy week with a new job and family stuff, so between that and just generally not finding the thought of starting a new series as appealing, I’ve procrastinated on getting around to watching the premiere of Loki‘s second season. I’ll get around to that some time today, but I’ve got a backlog of other stuff to write about for starters.

Lost You Forever, S1E1-21

Characters from the show. From the right to left… Xiang Liu, Tushan Jing (“Ye Shiqi”), Xiaoyao (female appearance), Cang Xuan, and Chishui Fenglong

I’ve been binging this one of late, which is a big part of why I haven’t started on Loki. Whenever I’ve got a spare hour or two, I’ve been knocking down an episode or two of this a night. It’s been talked about a lot in Asia, so I started on it lately.

It’s hard to categorize for a US audience, but it’s basically a Chinese fantasy political soap opera, performed in live action. The main character’s real name is a woman named Haoling Jiuyao, nicknamed “Xiaoyao” (rhymes with “bow wow”) by those close to her, but has (for reasons unexplained at the beginning) been shapeshifter into a male alias as Wen Xaioliu. Xiaoyao is a demigoddess princess of a powerful house that walks among humans, but whose spirit power has diminished badly over the last 300 years, and she doesn’t care because she’s decided she’d rather live a fairly common life as a physician anyway. A female actress plays the role in both the male and female phases as an adult, with clothing, hair, and makeup done differently to perform as both Xiaoliu early on and Xiaoyao later.

However, her childhood cousin (who, in this world, is not romantically off limits) Cang Xuan comes to town with a small entourage of spies and special forces to deal with an ancestral enemy of their house. Along with him comes Xiaoyao’s spoiled half sister Nian. None of them know Xiaoyao is Wen Xiaoliu, and due to their own undercover efforts and the amount of time it’s been since Xiaoliuhas seen them, she doesn’t recognize them either. Nian was born after Xiaoyao’s estrangement from her family, so she’s completely in a “spoiled princess who everyone roots to get taken down a peg” role.

Xiaoliu soon encounters a badly injured and tortured soul he/she nicknames “Ye Shiqi” (translates to “seventeen leaves”) when he initially either can’t or won’t remember who he is, and nurses him back to health. He is actually a greater spirit of another divine family named Tushan Jing, and since Xiaoliu is one of the few who actually seems to care about him as a person instead of a demigod, he takes quite a shining to him. He also deduces quickly from Xiaoliu’s reactions to him that this is originally a woman who appears as a man.

As if that’s not complicated enough, Xiang Liu, whose true form is a nine headed demon, but whose human form owes more than a little bit to Sephiroth of Final Fantasy game, also takes an interest in Xiaoliu for various reasons, and also figures out relatively quickly that this is a gender bending woman. There’s more than a little element of danger to this relationship, which takes on some serpent-and-bird or vampire-and-Lucy overtones without actually making Xiaoliu actually subservient.

So…. that’s the setup. Diminished divine princess has at least three suitors and both an identity and family trauma going on, and this goes on for roughly forty episodes of a season. I’m about halfway through it so far. I like it. Enough that I’ve stalled on starting Loki after Ahsoka wrapped up in lieu of watching (and enjoying) this. It’s more than a little entertaining, and I’ll have more to say on this when I’m done.

Lord of War

I’ve been aware of this for a couple decades, and finally found it for free streaming and decided to watch it. It’s one of those movies that seems just interesting enough to watch but maybe isn’t a true classic, but the subject matter is different enough to get me curious.

It’s about an underground arms dealer (played by Nicolas Cage) from Ukraine who capitalizes on the fall of the Soviet Union and some family connections in the crumbling post-Soviet military to make a living smuggling weapons around the world. It’s a very, very sordid life, gets him mixed up with drugs and more than a little bit of worry he was going to catch HIV in the pre-PEPFAR days of sub-Saharan Africa with all the women various dictators and warlords threw at him, and more than a little unwelcome attention from an Interpol-connected American agent (played by Ethan Hawke).

There’s a lot of rumors that this was based more than a little on the story of Viktor Bout, who was recently released from US prisons in a prisoner exchange. It also does more than a little bit of sleight of hand in how it tells the tale of the international arms trade, because in many ways the movie is more than a little bit of a veiled criticism of the degree to which the major powers of the world fuel all sorts of trouble spots with arms dealing, but it hides it in a portrayal of all the shady stuff that goes on in this world before making the comparison more explicit.

When Cage’s character is eventually caught by international law enforcement, he openly tells his captor that he’s not going to go to jail or even ever see the inside of a courtroom, because a general is about to knock on the door, walk in and tell him that this small time arms dealer is too useful in providing weapons to places the country would like them to be but can’t get its own hands dirty, so they’d rather he was filling that role than have him in prison. Sure enough, there is indeed a knock on the door, and his character is set free to return to his very dirty business.

At the end of the movie, the veil is ripped off the critique, as there’s an overlay text at the end stating that the five biggest arms dealers in the world just happen to be all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. It’s a bit ham handed in its pivot, and it isn’t very well executed. The movie itself settles into more than a little bit of repetition in trying to shock with the dirty world this guy lives in, and I won’t lie and say that I found it a little dull once I settled in to watch it all and didn’t finish it in one sitting.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Woody Woodpecker: The Movie

My son wanted to watch it. It’s bad enough that it was only theatrically released in Brazil, where the cartoon is still pretty popular. It’s not hard to see why. It has a few amusing moments, but a few decades of Pixar fare left me surprised a bit that a kids’ movie this bad still gets made. If you’re not a die hard fan of the cartoons and don’t have kids, you will lose nothing out of your life by never watching this.

Rating: 1 star

Ahsoka Post-Mortem Reflection (Read: Minor Rant)

And now, the other reason I haven’t gotten around to watching Loki: I was disappointed enough by how this ended that I was simply in no hurry to start another Disney+ series, even when it’s a second season of the no-real-arguments best Marvel series on the service to date. This, on the heels of the third season of The Mandalorian and Secret Invasion, simply has me wanting to step back from Disney+ for a few days and not rush to see the latest thing.

As I said, I’ll get to Loki, but it was not a first day appointment for me.

First things first: this wasn’t as bad as The Book of Boba Fett. But it wasn’t particularly great, either. If Fett didn’t exist, this would be pretty easily the weakest entry Lucasfilm has put on this service. And the sad thing is, it didn’t have to be.

Ray Stevenson did a pretty dang good job of acting the role of Baylan Skoll, and drawing interest in where this character was going and what he was really after. And that makes the fact that Stevenson didn’t live long enough to actually see this story through all the sadder.

So now that the series is over, what we do we really know about Baylan Skoll?

• He is a survivor, in some fashion, of the old Jedi Order
• He chose neither to take up arms against the Empire nor join either the Inquisitors or the Sith, instead just acting as a mercenary
• He knew Anakin Skywalker, and that he became Darth Vader. This implies strongly he probably was at the temple during the purge and saw him there (much like Reva in Obi-Wan Kenobi), but likely did not fight him directly
• He is strong enough to fight Ahsoka head to head and survive
• He was mainly interested in hitching a ride to find statues of the Mortis gods because… power reasons
• He evidently has a thing for hot blonde stoners as apprentices, but not enough that he won’t ditch them in a heartbeat when he wants to do something else

Okay, it’s possible I’m being overly harsh in that last part, but… let’s be real. Shin Hati spends the entire series looking around with a vapid stare (I don’t feel like going back through the series again to see if she actually blinks or count how many times she does it on camera if she does), she has no independent personality of her own except as an extra warm body with a lightsaber for action scenes, and while she has a moment of apparent (and justifiable) resentment when Baylan cuts her loose with orders to fight without him, it doesn’t really stop her. We have no idea where she’s coming from or where she’s going or why.

And while I didn’t immediately grasp that the statues Baylan settled on were of the Father, Son, and Daughter, now that I’m aware… I still don’t care. This whole character arc feels like Filoni either didn’t have enough for them to do and just needed lightsaber guys while giving Stevenson something to do that was cheaper than the CGI it would’ve taken to use him as Zeb. So much was left on the table with these two characters in the end, that while I wanted to be interested in them, and they did a good job acting out the scenes they were in… I’m at a loss for why these characters were really there. It’s very, very unfortunate to me that this wound up being Stevenson’s last role before Baylan Skoll gets recast like Dumbledore whenever this picks up in the future.

Thrawn. Oh, Thrawn. Lars Mikkelson did a fine job acting the role, and was not given enough to do. Thrawn wins, but there’s no particular moment where it’s clear he’s done something particularly brilliant enough that we’re left saying, “that’s a villain that accomplished something really smart.” He gets away, and technically wins, because that’s what the plot needed him to do. There’s no brilliant traps, no great swerves to let us know this was his fiendish plan all along. He just tells us he’s winning because he knows Ahsoka, and we’re supposed to just take his word for it. These various action scenes totally weren’t just seene filler, they were his plan all along to stall Ahsoka until he could leave.

In the mean time, it’s not at all clear why Thrawn needs to bring the giant hyperspace ring down to the surface instead of simply flying his ship up to it as soon as his mystery cargo is loaded and leaving the heroes behind, like, you know, someone who’s supposedly really smart would do once he knows his enemies have no further means of getting off the ground beyond Jedi leaping.

Ezra’s reappearance fell flat. I kept waiting for why I should start caring about a fifth season of Rebels any more than I cared about the first four when Darth Vader wasn’t on the screen. They didn’t give it to me. He’s been hanging out with alien snails. After they find him, they inexplicably keep traveling with the snails to chase Thrawn down instead of doing crazy things like, I don’t know, flying their ship back to go after him as quickly as possible so he doesn’t get away, instead of traveling at… um, a literal snail’s pace.

Seriously. They failed to get back to Thrawn quickly enough once they reunited because they decided they wanted to travel with the snails instead of leaving them behind.

And Sabine? Oh, dear, Sabine, what have you done?W

Well, to paraphrase Thrawn’s words earlier in the season, here’s what I see: Sabine completely undid Ezra’s sacrifice that was made to remove Thrawn from the main galaxy, stranded the most experienced light side Force user (and second most powerful, after Luke) known to still be alive in frack-all-knows-where, out of a purely selfish desire to see Ezra again, when she could have destroyed the map and prevented it all four episodes ago. And when Ezra asked her what’s going on and how all this happened, she conspicuously never has the guts to tell him. No, really. That conversation never takes place. “Hey, Sabine, how’d all these bad guys get this giant hyper ring out here to rescue Thrawn?” “Uhhhh…. uhhhhh….”

Wanna know how much sense that makes? Roughly as much sense as whatever conversation had to have gone into the modeling for this painting, captured in a meme I saw lately:

No, really. That’s how much sense this made. At least I can laugh about it a little this way.

So that’s where we are. Filoni gave us a prelude series where absolutely nothing got settled, the ending of Rebels gets completely undone, the character most responsible for it never is made to face up to the consequences of her actions, and the most interesting new characters created for the show came off as almost completely pointless and largely wasting the last performance of one of the principal supporting actors due to his untimely death. Along the way, we got one truly good episode that’s memorable, where Ahsoka meets the ghost of Anakin.

That’s it. That was the show. Thanks for coming, folks, please come to Star Wars Episode VI.V: Return of the Grogu, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Thrawn, due in theaters in 2024 no, 2025 REAL SOON NOW, DAGNABBIT!

Sigh.

I can put this much energy into it because I really wanted to like this show. But I don’t, much. And I’m kind of disappointed.

So, aside from having better things to do, that’s part of why I’ve waited three days to watch the premier of Loki. Now, perhaps, I can do so in greater peace. I’ve heard it’s pretty good, actually.

Because if they screw up Loki‘s second season, too? I may have to think good and hard whether Disney+ is still worth the money at this point. I mean, it’s nice to be able to pull up any scene in any Star Wars movie or show whenever I want, and that’s probably valuable enough to stick around. But… I’m at near zero confidence that the new material is going to hold up its part of the bargain, and I don’t know if the monthly subscription is worth the convenience of not just getting Blu Rays of everything I care about and forgetting the rest.

I’m not even sure if this kinda exposes that the streaming services are starting to struggle to justify their existence, in general. Disney+ always struck this Star Wars nerd who owns some double digit number of T shirts that get worn constantly as the least likely one I’d ever rage quit on. But right now? It’s in play.

No pressure, trickster god. Don’t let me down.

For those of you actually reading, thanks for bearing with me.

Ahsoka Finale Immediate Reaction: Meh

…Well, I called it, more or less.

That’s about it for now. Don’t have much to add at the instant that I didn’t already write earlier today. 😕

Ahsoka Pre-Finale Thoughts: More Likely A Cliffhanger Than An Ending

The Ahsoka finale is dropping tonight. Last week was episode 7 or something. I was so excited for that (deadpan) that I plum didn’t write a thoughts response for it. So here’s my thoughts on that:

Lightsaber fights. Pew pew fighter chase. Ezra fighting with bare hands. Thrawn being oily chessmaster who is willing to sacrifice short term material for long term gain. Oh noes, he’s got cargo! (What’s in the cargo? Who knows?) He’s almost loaded! Ahsoka will be too late to stop him because plans! Oh, and he seems to have a much-dissected-on-social-media pause when he discovers she was Anakin’s apprentice.

Yeah, that about covers it.

So with one episode left to go, here’s where we appear to be.

I don’t think Ahsoka is going to stop Thrawn from getting back to the main galaxy and the New Republic. The way this series feels paced, this feels more like an introduction than a one-off fight and the end of it. Thrawn, in the original books thirty years ago, made most of his hay by threatening the post-Imperial order, and I think we’re headed the same direction here. All of his appearances in Rebels were just a prequel to this, which is an introduction to that.

We might see her settle her scores with Baylan and Shin. At risk of being indelicate about it, we do have a bit of an “actor existence failure” problem with Baylan, though, so if he’s going to also survive this series, they’re going to need to recast him. Ray Stevenson has been more than interesting about the role, and his untimely and apparently somewhat sudden death was more than a little unfortunate. Buuuuut… the show must go on, as they say.

That said… Baylan is not exactly standing in for Darth Vader here. The clear best episode of this series, to me, was episode 5. The rest of it has been a bunch of vague hinting and maneuvering and plotting and not a ton of resolution. I hope we find out what Baylan actually wants out of all this trouble, but I’m not 100% sure we’re going to get it. That said, I think we almost have to, or this whole series will have been relatively pointless except as a reverse coda to reintroduce us to live action Thrawn. We’ve had more disappointing series than that would be (The Book of Boba Fett exists, after all), but not a lot.

I have a suspicion that this series is going to end in a bit of a whimper, and then we’ll forget all about it in a couple days when the second season of Loki gets started. And, if that’s the case, then I guess that’s all right, but I’m somewhat hoping we don’t wind up in a situation where Star Wars series start getting into a habit of being preludes for movies and other bigger things, the way many Marvel series are getting these days.

Thanks for reading.