Mobius Dick is one of my favorite Leela episodes, I love it so much. I’m obsessed with Captain Leela’s corruption arc and her overpowering the crew with ease. We’ve already seen that this woman could kill everyone at Planet Express and get away with it if she wanted to and I really love that.
I can’t stress enough how much I love female characters who are flawed like this. She’s a great heroic archetype but she also has a dark side. I really want to see more of that dark side. Leela can be a little evil, as a treat. Let Leela gain infinite power and become a goddess, so she can become the ultimate girlboss.
[please blacklist spoiler tags: #loki tv series spoilers, #loki series spoilers, #loki spoilers]
On Mobius’s interrogation:
I’m catching up on all the posts I’d blocked to avoid spoilers and there’s a lot about how Mobius’s interrogation is being viewed as therapy? Or is supposed to be framed as similar to a therapy session? I got lost trying to follow the main post I saw (which I think was @nikkoliferous ’s?) so I’m sorry for making a new one.
But, I’m a little confused bc I didn’t see this scene as supposed to be therapeutic at all, and I’m not sure I saw anyone point this out yet. To me, this scene was very straightforwardly an interrogation. Mobius’s interests lay in the TVA and, to him, Loki is a means to an end. There’s a Big Bad out there (who apparently is also Loki, which explains why Mobius is obsessed with him) that needs to be taken down, and Mobius thinks Loki Variant can help with that.
But, in order to get Loki to cooperate (”cooperate”), he had to be broken down first, bc certainly he wouldn’t join their side out of his own free will.
Mobius was tormenting Loki with all of the awful things that Loki believes about himself with the goal of breaking him down. It’s like that really shitty, mean voice that lives inside of your head when you’re depressed and you hate yourself. And while the jury’s out, for me, on whether or not Mobius was exaggerating this perception of Loki as “irredeemable, causer of destruction, murderer of his mother” (what the fuck?!) or if he actually believed it, the scene did show - to me - that Mobius did a better job on his homework than we (I) previously thought bc he clearly knows which buttons to push in order to efficiently break Loki down.
It was a necessary interrogation, from the perspective of Mobius attaining his goal, but it was harsh and harmful and not therapeutic in the least.
Yes, Loki “came around” in the end, but I don’t think it was due to Mobius’s questioning at all. Loki was out of his element. He had been tossed around and stripped and treated like a cog in a machine instead of a person. He had gained this understanding of the TVA as much more superior and formidable than he’d thought (the technology seemed even beyond Asgard and the infinity stones? Being used as paperweights stuffed into a desk drawer??). He had seen not only the death of his mother but his own death at his abuser’s hands and been smacked in the face with the ultimate futility of his “glorious purpose.” And after all that, he still tried to escape! but the Tesseract didn’t fucking work. Loki comes to the TVA’s side bc he has no other options and he’s exhausted and he’s fucking done.
I think that anyone who thinks that this scene was a therapeutic exercise - and a successful one, at that - has probably never been to therapy. No therapist worth their salt is going to manipulate, bully, and gaslight their client into “realizing they can be better.” Like, it’s just not how it works. Like nikko and I think iamnmbr3 mentioned on the other thread, as someone who’s had more than their fair share of therapy, I can pretty confidently say that it doesn’t work that way and agree that it’s offensive to treat blatant abuse as some kind of weird, tough love therapy method.
I think, framed as an interrogation, the scene itself isn’t inherently harmful. I think what makes it harmful is framing it as therapy, framing Mobius as an ally to Loki, and framing Loki’s eventual agreement to work for the TVA as the result of said therapy by said new ally.
