Trust nobody, people — not even yourself. Remember back in the season 2 premiere, when the TVA was first threatening to fall apart all around Loki and Mobius? On top of the dysfunctional Temporal Loom, Loki was still contending with that pesky case of “time slipping” (which, oddly enough, nobody’s even referenced ever since). Loki put a stop to that with the help of Ke Hey Quan’s Ouroboros, who came up with a precisely mapped plan for Loki to prune himself at the right moment so that Mobius could yank him right out of the Temporal Loom and set things right again. He did just that … but not before Loki was helped along the way when an unseen assailant stepped in and pruned him just in time (another event that, weirdly, nobody has even brought up once in the subsequent episodes).
Well, we’ve finally got an answer to that loose thread, however confounding it may be.
As Renslayer and the traitorous Hunter X-5 (Rafael Casal) wreak havoc while Miss Minutes locks everyone out of the TVA digitally, Loki finds himself in a startlingly similar predicament. Previously, his time slipping brought him to an undetermined future in the TVA where he encountered a ringing telephone and Sylvie trapped in an elevator. This time, he re-experiences those events from his future self’s perspective (which is really his present-day self, of course, but we’ll stop there before this gets too confusing) when he comes face-to-back with … himself. Having picked up a time stick earlier, he knows exactly what to do with it and promptly prunes his past self. Thus, a time loop was born!
It’s all treated a little too matter-of-factly for such a major event if you ask me, but that’s one mystery solved for now.
