In the season 2 premiere of Loki, the titular God of Mischief finds himself flung back to the Time Variance Authority, where a new problem is brewing: power surges are occurring throughout the TVA. Why? It turns out it has something to do with a device called the Temporal Loom.
A lot of stuff happens very fast in episode 1, so don’t worry if you didn’t quite catch what the deal is with the Temporal Loom and the other gadgets associated with it. Here’s a rundown on what it is, why it matters, and what Loki and his friends plan to do about it.
What is the Temporal Loom?
In episode 1, O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) is alarmed when Mobius tells him about the power surges occurring throughout the TVA. O.B. leads Mobius and Loki to an observation room, where they see a huge row of metal rings floating in space. The rings are pulling together shimmering strands of something, and weaving the strands into a rope. O.B. explains that the Temporal Loom is where “raw time is refined into a physical timeline.”
That’s the only explanation we’ve gotten about the loom so far. But it seems to be how the TVA takes a multiverse with multiple branches and compresses it into the Sacred Timeline. Presumably, the TVA only prunes branches when they grow too long to be to be woven in with the other strands.
But, O.B. explains, all is not well with the Temporal Loom. Now that the TVA isn’t pruning timelines anymore, there are too many branches to fit through the loom, and it’s overloading. He has to come up with a way to retrofit it to fit the newly budding multiverse.
But first, O.B. has a more pressing problem to deal with: Loki’s time slipping.
What is the temporal aura extractor in Loki?
Here’s where the already-wacky science of the TVA gets even wackier. Loki is being pulled back and forth through time, and O.B. explains that in order to stop it, they need a machine called a temporal aura extractor. This machine will pull Loki’s temporal aura out of the fibers going into the loom, and then reassemble him at the TVA. The catch? Loki has to prune himself first, and if he messes up the timing, then the temporal aura extractor will have nothing to latch onto. Loki will be lost forever.
In one of the best scenes in the season so far, O.B. builds the temporal aura extractor with Loki in the past, while coaching Mobius on how to use it in the present. When Loki rejoins Mobius in the present, they get ready to go. O.B. sticks Mobius in a protective suit that will prevent him from aging into nothing and getting all his skin peeled off by the radiation from the loom. Then he sends Mobius out on a long walkway to insert the extractor into a machine that will catch Loki’s temporal aura.
Things get tense when Loki time slips again, and can’t find a time stick to prune himself with in the future. But when he’s mysteriously pruned from behind, Mobius is able to catch his aura at the last second, as O.B. is closing the blast doors to protect the observation room from radiation. Loki careens into Mobius, knocking him back inside and saving them both.
Luckily, things work out with Loki’s temporal aura. But what about the Temporal Loom? Will O.B. fix it, or is the time stream doomed? We’ll have to keep watching to find out.
(featured image: Disney+)
