This review contains spoilers for episode 4 of Loki.
Loki is now more than halfway through its run on Disney Plus. It's continued to build from promising beginnings and has happily become more an investigation of characters than a typical Marvel action/sci-fi romp. In fact, last week's "Lamentis" slowed plot progression to a crawl as Loki and Sylvie found themselves trapped on a planet in the midst of an apocalypse. This week "The Nexus Event" makes some plot advancement, but it, too, is mostly powered by quiet moments between characters.
Sylvie takes center stage in the opening minutes, which show the TVA first coming to arrest her as a child. Loki repeats the beats of its title character's first entrance to the TVA but with a clever inversion of perspective. From young Sylvie's point of view, everything that played for laughs through Loki's eyes – the color scheme, the robot scanner, the oddly formal courtrooms – feels intimidating. Then, little Sylvie escapes by snagging a TemPad, which she's luckily capable of using, from a younger Ravonna Renslayer.
The episode turns to adult Sylvie, stranded on Lamentis-1 with Loki. Her lost fight against the TVA takes on more weight with its elaborated context. The TVA stole her life as a child, and now it seems she'll never even find out why. As Silvie and Loki sit and stare at the incoming asteroid, she asks him if Lokis are destined for failure. He tells her that they're destined to live. The two share a warm moment loaded with romantic tension. Their connection causes a massive nexus event that lets the TVA track them inside of the apocalypse. The two variants are saved from death by being brought into custody.
The biggest takeaway from the episode is the developing relationship between Loki and Sylvie. Mobius, ever the shrewd observer, calls Loki out on it in their first conversation since "The Variant". "You like her," Mobius says, adding that falling in love with an alternate version of himself proves Loki's narcissism. On the contrary, Loki proves he's capable of loving someone other than himself by loving Sylvie. The episode's opening quietly reinforced the idea that Loki and Sylvie are not the same, though they share some overlaps.
Loki goes a step further in proving his lack of narcissism in a moment all to himself. Mobius locks Loki in a time cell that loops one of the god's worst memories. Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander) approaches Loki after he's apparently cut off her hair. She slaps him, kicks him, and tells him that he'll always be alone. The memory plays over and over, until Loki makes a self-realization and tells Sif he plays tricks to become the center of attention because, he's "scared of being alone."
Through its run, Loki has deconstructed its title character. For the first time, Loki seems to acknowledge the growth that he's been experiencing over the past four episodes. Sylvie has made that growth visible to him in a way that it wasn't before. The episode doesn't explore Sylvie's feelings towards Loki as thoroughly. Instead, it leaves a bit of mystery which further solidifies that Loki and Sylvie are in different places, though they may feel a mutual attraction.
Unfortunately, the action of the episode doesn't impress as much as its character work. "The Nexus Event" spends most of its runtime getting characters on the same page with each other and drawing a line between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" within the TVA. Throughout most of the episode, Mobius and Hunter B-15 try to determine whether or not to trust their superiors, or to trust what the Lokis are telling them. They each end up siding with the demigods for their own reasons. Loki inspires trust in Mobius. Sylvie restores B-15's human memories.
Meanwhile, Ravonna Renslayer transforms from an upper management official following unscrupulous orders to an outright villain. She kills three characters in the course of the episode and has a mustache-twirling answer for Sylvie when she asks Renslayer what offense caused the TVA to originally arrest her. The shift feels sudden and unearned, especially because there have been few hints to her crueler nature up until now.
The episode's final moments are packed with surprises, but they are almost all underwhelming. It turns out some other entity was controlling the three alien Time Keepers, but the show has hinted that from the beginning. Two major characters die, but the episode doesn't let those deaths have any weight. Within minutes of Loki's "death," a mid-credits scene reveals that he's fine, and in the process it implies that Mobius will be fine as well. Of course, no viewer would believe that Loki actually dies in the fourth episode of his own show, but letting the tension ride for a week would have allowed it to have some level of impact.
Loki set a high bar with its previous episodes. "The Nexus Event" doesn't quite meet the standards of what's come before, but it still has plenty to offer.