Episode 5 of Loki season 2 really gives us so much room to explore Loki (Tom Hiddleston) as he’s trying to get the “team” back together to fix the Time Variance Authority. But when Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) does the fiction thing and asks him “why” he’s trying to save the TVA, he’s finally honest with her.
When Loki is assembling his crew, he’s finally taken to Sylvie through his time slipping. There, she takes him to get a drink. As he’s explaining his “plan” to her, she keeps forcing him to tell her the truth. Every time he says he wants to stop He Who Remains or fix something, she cuts him off. Finally, he tells Sylvie what is really forcing him to do this.
“I want my friends back. I don’t want to be alone,” he says after Sylvie orders them two bourbons at the bar, and that moment really hit in a millennial sense. Loki has always felt incredibly relatable in the millennial sense. While I do think he is a Scorpio based on how he reacted about Sylvie at the start of the season, this reaction is very much tied to how many millennials feel currently.
In a post-COVID world, we feel a little lost. We’re certainly not alone, but millennials are in a unique place in our lives. Many of us lost the end of our 20s, lost the last years of our “youths,” and are forced into this weird place of loneliness without a way of finding new friends or love. Loki feeling alone and afraid of that loneliness hit in a way I wasn’t fully expecting—especially given how his loneliness isn’t new. He’s always been afraid of it.
But this particular line is rooted in something deeper.
Loki’s fear is one we all know
There is a unique place many millennials have found ourselves in. We are the generation forced into dating apps, dedicated to finding love on them, and without them, we’re either alone or left hoping our friends will set us up with someone—that is, if we have friends who have figured their lives out or don’t have lives of their own. The position that Loki is in, where all his friends have lives of their own and can go and live them without him? That’s a feeling that many of us know all too well.
The millennial struggle of trying to maintain friendships when most of your friends have families but you’re still single or alone is one that hurts. The fear that you’re behind but recognizing you lived through a pandemic and lost 3 years of your life to it isn’t an easy pill to swallow. So, Sylvie helping through that moment, showing him that he cannot force his friends to stay with him but that he does have to face that fear of being alone and move on from it?
It was a bit too real and a moment that really stuck with me. Loki was me in that moment, and while we know that he was right in the end about the TVA, it’s still something he’s going to have to deal with, just like the rest of us single millennials.
(featured image: Disney+)
