Loki never knew how good it could be

polygon.com:

Doctor Whohad it right: It’s better if you don’t explain time travel.

“Blink,” the fan-favorite 2007 episode, famously described time as “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff,” an extremely British way to dismiss the horologists among us and get down to the more important business of telling a story, about a person. This is the biggest pitfall of a time travel tale: Making the time travel more important than the tale being told.

Loki season 2 leaps headfirst into this trap. Across its six episodes, the show’s writers happily dive into the logistics of the rapidly expanding and collapsing Sacred Timeline, with characters talking to each other about the existential chaos they face and running thought experiments and ethical dilemmas past each other as they desperately try to thwart the chaos that seems inevitable. There are attempts to ground this disaster, brief scenes of ordinary people in doomed branches of the timeline frayed into wispy cosmic spaghetti, but we don’t know these people. They are, by definition, branches from canon, the so-called Sacred Timeline. That’s the one we call the MCU; what the audience actually cares about.

This is a colossal bummer, man. Loki, as I’ve noted before, has everything a TV show could want: A great cast, a fun sandbox to play in, a distinct visual aesthetic, a great composer in Natalie Holt, and a built-in excuse to do just about anything a writer can dream up. But instead of an expansive series that cashed in on that potential, Loki turned increasingly inward, becoming a singularity of continuity maintenance, an ouroboros of cause and effect.

“Glorious Purpose,” the season — and possibly series — finale (and also the name of the series premiere) tries to retrofit a dozen episodes