Warning: SPOILERS for Loki Season 2 are in play. All variants who aren’t caught up on this timeline’s events are warned to proceed from this point with caution.
As if the ending to Loki Season 1 wasn’t complicated enough, Season 2 has been making things a bit more difficult for our resident God of Mischief. Among his trials and tribulations, Tom Hiddleston’s fixture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has encountered something called “time slipping,” a phenomenon that’s apparently as painful as it looks.
But how does it all work, and what does this mean for the future of one of the best Marvel TV shows on Disney+? Let’s talk about time-slipping, yet another wrinkle in the fabric of how the TVA works in the universe of Loki, as well as why we probably haven't seen the last of it. Oh, and here's one last call for all of you who haven’t used that Disney+ subscription to watch Season 2 so far, as we need to go deep into the details for this one.
What Is Time Slipping?
I honestly feel sorry for anyone who ends up time slipping in the Loki universe, especially since it’s our favorite trickster god (Tom Hiddleston) who happens to be going through it. In a nutshell, time slipping is exactly what it sounds like, as it’s a person who’s literally slipping through the fabric of time.
Past, present and future are your playground, with the only caveat being that you can’t control it. One minute you're running into friends who think you're a stranger, and the next you've returned to a time that lunch forgot. The intervals are unpredictable and so is the distance between slips.
Not to mention, this is time travel without a capsule or a Tempad. And as The Doctor once taught us on Doctor Who, that sort of thing is a killer! Or at least, it really looks like it.
How Does Time Slipping Work?
Time slipping is immensely painful, both to experience and to look at. Our analysis of Loki Season 2, Episode 1, “Ouroboros,” showed us that reality through Loki’s encounters with that phenomenon. What’s worse is that poor Mobius (Owen Wilson) was one of the people who got to see it several times firsthand. As he described it:
It’s terrible. It looks like you’re being born, or dying, or both at the same time.
Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what to expect. As shown in the photo above, time slipping looks as horrible as advertised. The only upside is that spatial reasoning is still in order when one slips. So if you’re sitting on the couch when you time slip, you’ll wind up on that same couch whenever you jump backwards or forwards in time. So there’s a slight silver lining, even if you'll be too sore to notice.
Is Time Slipping Technically Possible In The TVA?
As told to the audience by Ouroboros, or O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) as he’s called now, time slipping is supposed to be impossible in the TVA. Mobius backed that call himself, stating that “time doesn’t work like that” in the headquarters for Marvel’s Time Variance Authority.
Apparently something happened that’s now rendered that statement a total and boldfaced lie, as Loki seems to be slipping as a result of the events from Season 1’s finale. When Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunni Mosaku) acted like they didn’t know Loki, it wasn’t a lie or an alternate timeline. From what I gather, it was Loki’s anti-hero time slipping into the TVA’s past.
The death of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) seems to have some consequences, and one is that time isn’t acting like it should. Then again, considering how many timelines are being fed into the Temporal Loom at this point, it isn’t the least bit surprising that some glitches have started to present themselves.
How Can You Stop Someone From Time Slipping?
It’s easier said than done to stop someone from time slipping in the Loki realm However, thanks to what we saw take place in the Season 2 premiere, we do have a process to make that happen. Bear in mind, the following involves a bit of time slipping itself and a patient wait to achieve the following steps over two time periods:
- 1. Built a Temporal Aura Extractor.
- 2. Launch said Temporal Aura Extractor into the Temporal Loom.
- 3. Make sure your retrieval subject keeps an eye on their watch, indicating you’ve made a successful connection.
- 4. Have your subject prune themselves quickly, so they’re unstuck from time and can be retrieved.
- 5. Reel in your subject once retrieved, head to the Automat for a slice of pie, and wait for the next crisis to present itself.
Sounds easy, right? Those of you who’ve caught up with Loki Season 2 so far know that it couldn’t be further from the truth. But for the moment, it looks like Tom Hiddleston won’t have to worry about contorting himself in those horrific CGI enhanced shapes. That being said, it's time to face a pretty huge question, for the sake of the audience's curiosity and the sanity of Loki himself.
Is Loki Truly Done Time Slipping?
To be truthful, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of time slipping on Loki. What’s even better is the fact that this isn’t some wild theory, like my thoughts on Ravonna Renslayer’s potential secret in the MCU. I actually have some visual proof I can cite this time, and it comes from the first Loki Season 2 trailer; specifically the moment freeze framed above.
Watching that clip in the footage shared, not only does this look like a time slip, it appears that Loki’s stop at Piranha Powersports might hold clues to a question we saw brought up in Season 2, Episode 2, “Breaking Brad”: what is Mobius’ forgotten place on the Sacred Timeline? His obsession with Jet Skis seems to be a prime clue to this setting's importance, as you can see Loki flanked by two of those beauties above.
Which adds up to the reason we’re still talking about time slipping in the world of Loki and the TVA! As we’ve seen in the first half of Season 2, things are getting rather risky in the name of preserving all of time and space. Plus, there are missing pieces to this puzzle, like what Loki and Sylvie talked about in the future, as well as some other shots of gloom and doom that haven’t been seen in-show just yet.
Whether it's through continued time slipping or revisiting previous slips that we hadn't seen the other sides of, this is something we should be paying attention to. Hopefully all will be explained in time, as Loki still has three more episodes to run in Season 2.
If you’re ready to take the ride, or if you want to keep running the tape back looking for clues, you can experience it all on Disney+. Just don’t forget, new episodes premiere on Thursday nights, promptly at 6 pm PT/9 pm ET, for all time, always... or at least until Disney potentially moves the show to a new night and/or time.
