Nightmare Fuel / Loki (2021)

Nightmare fuel pages are for post-viewing discussion; they assume you've already seen the work in question and as such are spoiler-free.

"We're in a shark tank. Alioth is the shark."

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Season 1

Episode 1: Glorious Purpose

• Loki comes to the end of his Sacred Timeline's life in 2018 when he ultimately died senselessly trying to take down Thanos. Loki is just as fearful of Thanos as he was in the Sacred Timeline, and perhaps even moreso now that he now knows two things: one, Thanos succeeded in making good on The Other's threats and punished him for his failure in New York, and two, even Thanos is a small fry compared to the power of the TVA. And by extension, everything Loki knew and was is considered a small fry to the TVA, meaning even his fateful demise at Thanos's hands is just another clip in the TVA's vault. Not only is Loki watching his gruesome demise, but now he knows that it ultimately meant nothing "in the grand calculus of the multiverse."
• The end of the episode, where we get a glimpse of The Variant luring a team of Minutemen to their death. The Minutemen arrive on scene in the 1800s to find a futuristic artifact in the middle of a field. One of the Minutemen smells oil and assumes someone went back in time to try and get rich off of it. The audience then gets a glimpse of The Variant standing out in the field wearing a cloak, before slowly lifting a lit lantern and dropping it – igniting the oil soaking the field. Hunter U-92 desperately tries to get to the reset charge his team planted before he's suddenly pulled away off-screen, all set to the sound of his teammates screaming as they burn alive. It definitely goes on the list as one of the most violent deaths in the MCU.
• As Loki waits in line for his turn to see the judge, another Variant who refused to take a ticket is casually vaporized by the soldier at the front desk, as though his life were no more significant than that of a bug on a windshield. A harsh, but effective way of showing that the TVA is not screwing around when it comes to maintaining The Sacred Timeline.

Episode 2: The Variant

• The opening shot of the Roxxcart scene, where we witness an entire town slowly being swallowed by the storm surges caused by the hurricane. Added to that, the fact that in the future, hurricanes can reach Category 8.
  • The prediction of how bad climate change gets in general. The next few decades are full of one terrible climate disaster after another. Plus a supervolcano eruption for good measure.

Episode 3: Lamentis

• This episode sees Loki and Sylvie land on a moon that's about to crash into a planet, dooming everyone on it to certain death. There's meteorites and explosions everywhere, and pandemonium and violence reign in the streets as the poor everyman workers are left behind to face extinction while the rich are given premier access to an evacuation ark... which then promptly explodes anyway.

Episode 4: The Nexus Event

• We see Sylvie's abduction as a child. She is alone in her room, playing, and she is kidnapped and subjected to the same treatment Loki got in the first episode. Where it was somewhat comical then, it is much less so now. Making it even worse is that Sylvie wasn’t even doing anything in particular. For all intents and purposes, her apparent crime was existing.
• The Time Cells. The TVA use advanced technology to put their victims in an endless loop, replaying their worst memories on repeat without any means to escape. While Loki being beaten and humiliated over and over again is Played for Laughs, the experience itself is chilling and is in fact Cold-Blooded Torture, feeling like something you’d see in Black Mirror.
• Whatever place Loki ends up being transported to after being pruned eerily resembles a post-apocalyptic New York with overgrown plant life and ruined skyscrapers — one can even see the destroyed Avengers tower in the background.
• All the employees at the TVA are variants. Mobius is always pining after jetskis he can never ride because once upon a time he was a blasé surfer dude and some part of him remembers that. All the TVA employees have their own quiet little And I Must Scream buried inside themselves.

Episode 5: Journey into Mystery

• You thought all timeline branches and variants pruned just cease to exist? Think again. That is the purpose of the Void, the place at the very end of time where the future has yet to be written by the TVA. Since branches and variants can't actually be wiped out, they are instead moved to the Void which basically acts like a giant time abyss garbage dump. And once you're there, you're trapped with no way out. From then on, you have to scavenge up what meager resources you can find and hide as best you can from the outside. And if that wasn't bad enough, you also have to deal with surviving variants who might be a little less than cordial with you, many of which have resorted to cannibalism to survive. And then there's...
• Alioth. Picture an enormous living storm that scours the world in search of any poor soul that happens to appear in its vicinity with no clue what happened to them. It then attacks its victim by surrounding them in a thick purple cloud that immediately decays them until nothing is left in all but an instant. Now imagine that creature has a giant glowing face that looks like a bear's skull, and you have this monstrosity.
  • To elaborate: Alioth is, as Sylvie puts it, a guard dog for the mastermind of the TVA. Any and all variants who are pruned are sent to the Void where they are expected to be killed by this beast. If you ever encounter it, your best bet is to just run like hell and hope it gets bored of you. Otherwise, there's no escape.
  • In the following episode, we learn Alioth was born from tears in reality from the first Multiversal War, and has devoured entire universes before He Who Remains weaponized him to end it. This thing is basically the MCU's version of Azathoth.
• Even after learning that she was duped, Renslayer still apparently believes that the TVA is in the right, and wants to protect her unknown masters from Sylvie. That is what you call a fanatical Knight Templar.
• After getting his hand bitten off by Alligator Loki, President Loki raises it to show the entire stump with exposed flesh and all. There's even a small splash of blood when President Loki rips Alligator Loki off of him. It's shockingly gory for the usually-PG-13 MCU.

Episode 6: For All Time. Always.

• Loki and Sylvie enter the castle and it's completely empty. As they start to walk through the halls, Miss Minutes suddenly pops up in an effective Jump Scare. Her chirpy Southern Belle demeanor is suddenly a lot creepier for how out of place it is in such a spooky environment, especially with the shrunken pupils and evil grin she has when she first appears. The result feels like something out of Five Nights at Freddy's.
• He Who Remains is himself a fairly harmless Non-Action Big Bad on his own. But this, which he himself lampshades, begs the question: if this is the variant who was benevolent enough to want to maintain a proper timeline, then what the hell is a bad variant who wants to rule it all like? The ending gives us a rather terrifying peek at the answer: Loki returns to the TVA, trying to warn Mobius of the war that is coming. His voice is shaky with every passing word, letting us know that this entire threat of "countless different versions of a very dangerous person" has left him completely scared. Unfortunately for Loki, Mobius doesn't recognize him, so Loki looks over to where the statues of the Time-Keepers once stood. Instead, he can only see one lone statue bearing the likeness of He Who Remains clad in a distinctive set of armor. He's too late. Kang the Conqueror is here.

Season 2

Episode 1: Ouroboros

• The scene where Loki timeslips into the past and comes face to face with giant busts of Kang and his variants. It's a chilling reminder of just how powerful this multiversal threat he's up against truly is.
• Loki's timeslips are deeply unsettling to watch. Each time it happens it looks like he's being violently ripped apart into strands of flesh that quickly snap back together. There's no pattern to when it happens, so neither he nor the audience can brace themselves for the next time. He tries to assure Mobius that it doesn't hurt that bad, but the look on his face says otherwise.
  Mobius: It looks like you're being born or dying or both at the same time.
• When Loki slips back while inside the Judges' meeting room, he takes a few moments to listen to an old reel-to-reel recording...between He Who Remains and Renslayer. The entire recording comes off as incredibly creepy and foreboding, with him coming off as almost doting while her tone of voice comes off as almost scared. For anyone who knows the comic history between Kang and Renslayer, at best he comes off like an extremely obsessed stalker, and at worst a borderline rapist. This is a very different He Who Remains from the one we met at the end of his life.
  He Who Remains: You are quite a marvel... I will be proud to lead with you. You made a difference in this war. Thank you for being on my team.
  (Loki rewinds the recording a bit)
  He Who Remains: For us. For aaaalll time...
  Renslayer: ...Always.
• Loki revealing Kang as the true leader of the Time Variance Authority through pruning a mosaic of the Time Keepers to show Kang's face behind it as he is shown to be more frightened of the Conqueror since learning of his existence.
  Loki: That's who built this place, that's who stole your lives! That's who's coming back!

Episode 2: Breaking Brad

• After Brad's "The Reason You Suck" Speech, Loki eerily seems to actually revert back to his villainous ways and threatens to torture Brad, only stopping once Mobius intervenes. Later, he interrogates Brad by making it seem like he's taken the role of the villain once again, this time succeeding in getting the latter to talk. It was an act between him and Mobius, but in that moment, one could see that Loki could very well backslide.
  • While hunting X-5/Brad down, Loki proves how nightmarish he can actually be to an ordinary human, never losing track of his quarry while clearly controlling and ending the chase when he chooses to. His utterly calm and implacable demeanor during the sequence only adds to it, as the pursuit almost completely lacks Loki's usual showmanship or talkativeness.
• Claustrophobes found the scene where Loki traps Brad in a shrinking cube of energy very hard to watch.
• In an act that makes Thanos' infamous universal culling look positively tame by comparison, Dox mass-bombs all the new branching timelines to restore the Sacred Timeline. In what's only a few minutes from the perspective of the TVA, at least dozens of timelines and trillions of lives are ended. Everyone present at the TVA can only watch the monitors in abject horror as virtually all of the branches dissolve, leaving only a few remaining as the Sacred Timeline begins to stabilize.
  B-15: (tearfully) Those were people... Those were lives...

Episode 3: 1893

• Miss Minutes revealing her, pardon the pun, true colors to Victor Timely. We get a pretty uncomfortable conversation between Miss Minutes and Victor about how she's always loved her creator and wanted a body to be with him. In a nutshell, it comes off less like a declaration of love and more like an obsessed stalker meeting her crush. Tara Strong gradually going full-on Yandere while speaking in Miss Minutes' folksy Southern Belle voice does not help.
  • As she emphasizes that she wants to be Victor Timely's "girl", she fades into the head of a mannequin. The "face" she gives looks incredibly off and glitches.
• After Sylvie dumps Ravonna through a Time Door leading to He Who Remains' citadel instead of killing her, we're treated to an unsightly shot of He Who Remains' decaying corpse still slumped in his chair.

Episode 4: Heart of the TVA

• When Dox and her goons refuse to follow Renslayer and Miss Minutes, the two activate the cube machine Loki had previously used to interrogate X-05 and crush them to death. We don't see it, but we can hear their cries of agony as their bones are crushed, which may actually make it scarier. And all the while, Miss Minutes is grinning like it's Christmas morning. After the screams end, we can also hear the sound of something dripping... and judging by Brad and B-15's reactions, the condition of the corpses can't be pretty.
• The Nightmare Face Miss Minutes has as she’s deactivated and tells Victor in the most menacing tone, “You will never be him.”
• In the climax, Victor suits up, ready to fix the Loom, the heroic music swells... and the second he walks outside, he immediately spaghettifies with a scream of pain, with a Freeze-Frame Bonus revealing that his skull briefly remains intact among the strands from his muscles, blood and skeleton. Everyone in-universe is just as stunned and horrified as the audience, finding out that the temporal radiation is too powerful now, and there's nothing anybody can do to stop the Loom from collapsing in on itself.
• Our heroes lose. In the final scene, the only thing Loki and his friends can do is watch helplessly as the Loom is destroyed, engulfed in a bright explosion that heads toward them. The white light surrounds them and then... just silence. There isn't even a stinger like in "The Nexus Event"; just a sudden cut to black.

Episode 5: Science/Fiction

• Loki wandering the abandoned halls of the TVA, utterly alone.
• While not played up as horrifically as Victor's death in the previous episode, numerous characters are spaghettified. This time, objects and even locations are caught in the effect too, leaving nothing but a dark cloudy void once the strands have faded away. At least with Thanos' snap, the deaths were painless... here, people would be able to feel at least some amount of pain from their skin, blood, muscles, and bones just unraveling into strands, which arguably makes it even more disturbing.

Episode 6: Glorious Purpose

• He Who Remains casually freezing Sylvie so he and Loki could talk, whether he's just freezing her or time itself in place. We already knew she was playing right into his hands, but this just emphasizes how powerless she truly was.
• He Who Remains' true contingency plan, the Loom. It cannot be expanded to maintain the exponential growth of branches and will delete all but The Sacred Timeline when it overloads, ensuring everything will happen the same way over and over again. Simply because He Who Remains cannot see another path, particularly one where his ego doesn't reign.
  Loki: What a waste of time...
  • Without the Loom, the branches of time start to die. Either this is the result of the damage from the Multiversal War, or He Who Remains fundamentally altered/damaged the ability of the Multiverse to exist due to his creation of the Loom.
  • When Loki demonstrates that he has learned to freeze time and is genuinely weighing his options on how to proceed, that's when He Who Remains drops his silly act and starts taking him more seriously. To see such a goofy character we were led to believe was the lesser evil compared to his other variants like the Conqueror, becoming dead serious and showing actual annoyance and malice, is very unnerving. His wary, cold eying of Loki as he condescendingly tells him to "walk it off" when he claims to have him in his trap shows that he's not quite as confident as he claims, and suggests we don't want to see him when he's feeling threatened.
• Renslayer's ultimate fate: sent to the End of Time, along with the remnants of the old TVA. And the last scene of her is defiantly staring down a hungry, angry Alioth...

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