Loki Season 2 Features Marvel's Weirdest Love Triangle Yet

Contains spoilers for "Loki" Season 2, Episode 3

If the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever decides to have a "strangest romance" competition, "Loki" will probably do pretty well thanks to the peculiar relationship between Loki Laufeyson (Tom Hiddleston) and former rogue Loki, current McDonald's employee Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). As weird love stories go, you'd think that a show that's already introduced a romantic arc involving two variants of the same entity could just sit back and rest on its laurels. Yet, "Loki" Season 2, Episode 3 ups the ante with an even stranger relationship mess — and this time, it's a romantic triangle. 

The episode reveals that Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) and Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) are in Chicago, arriving in 1868 and staying until the 1893 World Fair. Their mission is to locate Kang variant Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) and set him on a path to take over the Time Variance Authority. While Timely turns out to be pretty different from what they expect, he does click with Renslayer before betraying her and leaving her behind. 

Despite this very Kang-like deception, there's clear romantic tension between the two, much to the chagrin of Miss Minutes. As it turns out, the artificial intelligence is not only self-aware, but has a very personal agenda. Miss Minutes has become enamored with its creator over the millennia, so her mission is about more than just reinstating a version of He Who Remains on the TVA throne. She also wishes to acquire a physical body so they can be together in a romantic sense. All of this, of course, is a lot to take in for Timely — as it probably should be, considering the sheer oddness of the whole situation.

Miss Minutes' and Renslayer's plan — or rather, He Who Remains' plan that they're executing — seems to hinge on Timely sorting himself out and becoming either the He Who Remains we see in "Loki" Season 1 or a variation thereof. The end goal is to restore the sacred timeline and, as an added bonus, secure Miss Minutes' and Renslayer's places as TVA bigshots. 

However, we've seen how easily timelines branch and fates diverge. That's the whole point of "Loki." Renslayer and Miss Minutes are already treading new territory, and Timely's path could still lead him in extremely odd and unpredictable directions. He could become Alioth, for all we know — simply because he met Miss Minutes and Renslayer. 

Of course, the same applies to the other two. The source material has no shortage of potential futures for Renslayer. In the comics, she's been a supervillain known as Terminatrix and a princess from an alternate Earth. At one point, she even poses as the comic book version of Nebula (Karen Gillan). 

As for Miss Minutes, it's anyone's guess exactly where the AI is headed. The episode seems to indicate that a physical body is looming on the horizon, but since she's a "Loki" original, it's hard to see where Season 2 plans to take her story. The MCU has played pretty fast and loose with the whole "sentient AI gaining a body" thing, especially by changing Vision's (Paul Bettany) comic book backstory by putting Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr.) reliable AI sidekick J.A.R.V.I.S. in a high-tech body Ultron (James Spader) crafts for himself. Who knows? Maybe "Loki" Season 2 will rework an existing comic book android's backstory in a way that enables Miss Minutes to become, say, Jocasta.

The MCU hasn't been devoid of peculiar romances before the "Loki" Season 2 love triangle. Season 1 of the show introduces the aforementioned, understandably complex, but undeniably romantic relationship between Loki and Sylvie. Fans have also witnessed love stories like Captain America (Chris Evans) missing his dance date with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) on account of a few decades of deep freeze, but eventually time-traveling his way into a lifelong relationship with her. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) fall in and out of love surprisingly mundanely until "Thor: Love and Thunder" further explores their personal history and Jane's new Thor powers throw a curveball at the situation. 

Before "Loki" Season 2, the strangest MCU romance has probably been the strange saga of Wanda "Scarlet Witch" Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision — a story of a woman and an android that evolves into a relationship between a woman and a magically-created replica of said android, with a cameo by the rebooted original android. However, even "WandaVision's" level of complexity has nothing on Victor Timely, who finds himself locked in an uncomfortable romantic triangle that involves an animated AI clock that has fallen in love with his variant and is trying to shape Timely into him, and a rogue TVA judge with whom he has some chemistry but who now hates his guts after the betrayal. 

This uncanny, hesitant love triangle has a pretty strong claim as the strangest thing the MCU has to offer on the romance front. Who knows how weird things will get before "Loki" Season 2 is over?