Loki Season 2 & The Dismantling of Fascism
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Loki is a show about time and space, specifically, the cost that comes with trying to keep something as entropic as the fabric of the universe in place. A variant of the supervillain Loki finds himself serving the Time Variance Authority (TVA) — the entity meant to keep the status quo that is existence chugging along.
The story of an entity that, by its very essence, is conservative naturally pushes the show to deconstruct authoritarianism and fascism. The TVA, as it was presented in the first season, is a very regressive institution. While that was not challenged much in the first season (much to my chagrin), as the second season ended, I found myself pleasantly surprised by its handling on this topic.
Loki not only gives us a look into the inner workings of a fascist institution but also shows us the day after fascism dies (and the stumbles it takes to get there).
When fascism resists the truth
The definition of fascism has been debated for decades. From newspeak to hero worship, Umberto Eco famously lists fourteen points in his piece Ur-Fascism. Robert O. Paxton gave us nine in Anatomy of Fascism. Roger Griffin defines fascism in a single phrase: "palingenetic ultranationalism," or a uber authoritarian rebirth of a time that did not truly exist. These theorists' components may vary, but most talk about a group concentrating power in an authoritarian, anti-democratic fashion, using myth-making and scapegoating to justify the movement's existence.
The TVA in the first season of Loki follows this template. The organization has created a hierarchical culture governed by a mythical trio known as the Time Keepers. Every action members of the TVA make is allegedly in the name of preserving the "Sacred Timeline," which is the base timeline the Time Keepers claim will be destroyed if the other branches are allowed to grow.
The organization preserves "order" through the murdering of deviations in the timeline, which, left unchecked, the TVA believes will destroy all of existence. This makes the enemies of the TVA not only ever-present but somehow can be killed with little effort, fitting the fascist concept that your enemy is both strong and weak simultaneously.
There is a lot of simplistic terminology meant to dull the senses — what Orwell might call Doublespeak. When a person or branch is destroyed, this is euphemistically referred to as "pruning." People slated for execution are not people but "variants." And, of course, everyone is judged in a sham trial with only one conclusion: execution.
When we learn the truth in Season 1 that all the people working for the TVA are the very variants they were charged with pruning from the timeline — men and women pulled from the timeline and given false memories — I found myself frustrated that many of the TVAs adherent suddenly abandoned the ideology they had been indoctrinated in all their (false) lives. As I write in The TV Show 'Loki' Gets Fascism All Wrong:
“The revelation that TVA agents are variants in the show leads to a domino effect of dissent once members learn the truth. People like agent Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) almost immediately defect, abandoning eons of propaganda in a very short period of time. ‘That’s not going to work out the way you think it is,’ Mobius tells TVA High Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) when she tries to call guards to her office, indicating that the truth was enough to cause an open revolt among the rank-and-file of the organization.”
Yet the second season takes pains to make clear that indoctrination doesn't simply go away because "the truth" gets out. Braced with the possibility of a fraying timeline, a rogue general named Dax (Kate Dickie) takes soldiers to all the branches and "prunes" them, killing an incalculable number of people. General Dax does this because she is still operating under the logic of the TVA before the revelation, believing that the atrocities she commits are "protecting" the Sacred Timeline.
It was quite clever to show how organizations fracture when confronted with challenging information. Even when fascist people are exposed to the truth, it doesn't always do away with their brainwashing. The TVA is in the process of shedding its identity. However, that is a process more complex than simply flipping a switch.
The day after fascism dies
If the first season was a deconstruction of fascism, the second season is about how we move beyond it. The TVA is in the middle of an identity crisis as it debates how it should move forward in the absence of the mythology and leaders that once guided it.
We have three main perspectives on how to proceed. On the one hand, there is Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who believes the TVA must be dismantled. She is a victim of the TVA, forced into a lifetime of hiding, and she wants it gone. "The TVA is the problem. It's broken. It's rotten," she tells Loki.
We also have those who want to preserve the status quo. This perspective comes from the genocidal General Dax as well as regime holdouts such as Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). They want the TVA to return to what it was before (at least initially).
Finally, we have the perspective of Loki himself, who spends most of this season trying to prevent the TVA from falling apart. He holds the reformist perspective. He wants the institution to change, not be abolished. As Loki tells Sylvie: "Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what is broken is hard. Hope is hard."
I was worried that when Season 2 resumed, the narrative would come down hard on Sylvie, and we would get a frustrating plotline where her decision to kill He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) is depicted as "going too far." Season 2's plot point of various branches of the Sacred Timeline blinking out of existence in the wake of He Who Remains’ death made me extremely nervous that Loki would have to kill Sylvie and reset everything back to the status quo. Indeed, the show does make a false pivot in that direction. Loki even has a conversation with He Who Remains, discussing this very idea, but that turns out to be a red herring.
The fight to preserve the TVA's dominance is eventually tossed aside as we learn that the device that allowed the TVA to create the Sacred Timeline — i.e., the loom — is causing this problem. When the loom loses the capacity to sort all the various branches, it deletes them. Loki spends an excessive amount of time in the second season trying to keep the loom operational because he's worried the multiverse will lead to a new war and, consequently, the destruction of everything.
Ultimately, he has to come to terms with the fact that he cannot keep this remnant of control in place, and the loom is destroyed. I found this to be an excellent metaphor for how you cannot keep the mechanisms of fascism in place if you wish to move past them. The phrase "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" has been used extensively in Internet circles, but I believe it rings true in moments like this. When you build a big gun meant to destroy worlds, realities even — and that is what the loom effectively was — keeping it around guarantees its use. The best thing to do is to let it die.
And yet, while the loom is destroyed, the TVA is not. It is reformed. They push for an incrementalist direction for what to do with the dying remnants of fascism, and that is an interesting conclusion worthy of reflection.
A mischievous conclusion
As the second season ends, the TVA still exists, but it has been transformed. The other branches are not only “allowed” to exist, but the organization has taken an active stance of non-interference. The TVA is now an observer who has committed to being a final line of defense if and when things spiral out of control: peacekeepers on a temporal level. The reform perspective has won out, and it's hard not to believe this is the perspective the show believes is morally correct, given that all significant tensions have been resolved.
Now you can have a whole other debate on whether you can "reform" fascist institutions or, like Sylvie says, you need to burn them down. Loki claims this is the easier approach. However, you can argue the opposite, as doing the dual work of dismantling an institution and building a new one is much more complicated than simply working with “what you have,” especially since “what you have” makes it easier for you to default to older, more fascistic patterns.
Again, we can go around in circles here, and that's a sign of this being a good narrative: one that makes you think even if you do not always agree. Loki season 2 tackled something much more challenging than depicting the black-and-white rigidity of fascism: it talked about its end.