Loki Season 2 Is a Delightful Adventure Across Time and Space
It's quite okay if you've forgotten most of what happened in the first season of Loki. Most of the multiverse has, too, including all the folks at the Time Variance Authority (TVA) and even Loki's frenemy-turned-bestie Mobius (Owen Wilson). The first episode picks up where the last season left off, where Sylvie (Sophia di Martino) kills He Who Remains at the end of all time and tosses Loki through a Time Door. The second season hits the ground running and never lets up, as Sylvie's actions threaten to unravel all of reality and it's a race against, well, time in order to stop the end of everything.
Tom Hiddleston's Loki has been a runaway favorite character from the Avengers films. Likely intended to be a minor villain in a build up towards Thanos, Loki has instead outlasted practically all of the original Avengers themselves, now with two seasons of his eponymous television show. The reason for that is Hiddleston's unrelenting charm, which is not only perfect for the God of Mischief but also the formula to be such a fan favorite that Disney Marvel has no choice but to write him into an antihero.
Three episodes in, Loki's good guy turn is in full effect as he tries to save reality with the help of his TVA friends old and new, including the timeless Ouroboros, played by Academy Award winner Ke Huy Quan. Ouroboros, or O.B. for short, appears to be an entirely new character written for the television series and not based on any existing material from the comics. It's interesting, though perhaps purely coincidental, to note that the term ouroboros, which denotes a serpent eating its own tail, is the same symbology for the Midgard Serpent or Jörmungandr from Norse Mythology.
With all of Loki's time-hopping shenanigans, it's quite easy to forget that he's actually a Norse God. Whether or not O.B. is related in any way to the world-ending Jörmungandr of myth remains to be seen, but Quan's impossibly endearing character is already one of the best things about the second season of Loki. O.B. is a vital cog in the daily operations of the expansive and powerful TVA, practically single-handedly keeping the entire place (and time) together from behind the scenes. In killing He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), Sophie believed she was giving all the beings of the multiverse free will, which also resulted in an ever-fracturing timeline that birthed constantly branching realities, threatening to overload the TVA's Temporal Loom, a machine that shapes raw time into a physical timeline.
We've come a long way from friendly neighborhood superheroics and even rainbow bridges in the MCU and Loki's high concept science fiction is part of why it's such a delightful romp. The TVA existing outside of known reality means that it's literally everything, everywhere all at once, which only makes Quan's casting absolute perfection. Even if some of the concepts can get cumbersome—that's just what you get when trying to tell a story that has all of time and space at stake—Loki is carried aloft by the irrepressible charm of its cast.
There's already more likability between Hiddleston and Quan in just three episodes than there is in three seasons of other shows. Add a sprinkling of Owen Wilson and Sophia di Martino and you've got a series with heroes you just can't help but cheer for. When they finally locate Victor Timely, a variant of He Who Remains, in one version of Chicago during the 1800s, Loki and Sylvie are at loggerheads once again as Loki needs to bring him back to the TVA to fix the Temporal Loom while Sylvie wants to kill him. The irony isn't lost on anyone that Sylvie, who values freedom above all things, would be willing to kill a person for crimes he hasn't committed yet and might never do.
The stakes of Loki are considerably higher than any MCU story arc before it, which is saying a lot considering the last Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, and Spider-Man films have all gone whole hog into multiverses and quantum realms. Loki ups the ante by putting all of Time on the proverbial line but never quite conveys the gravity of the situation because of the comedic pace and tone. Quan is a wonderful addition to the story but he's too busy spewing out technical gobbledygook to deliver anything with the gravitas and emotional weight of laundry and taxes. The closest we get to an emotional core are the glimpses of Sylvie's life as a fast-food worker in 1982, and even that is somewhat undone by the shameless product placement. When Mobius wolfs down a burger and says the words 'great meal', it's cringeworthy shilling that takes you out of the moment.
Unbridled commercialism aside, Loki promises to be an enjoyable trip that continues to lay the groundwork for the MCU's next big bad, the time-traveling Kang the Conqueror. Viewers invested in piecing together the puzzle should also pay attention to dates whenever they're shown on screen as some indicate whether they're on the Sacred or Branched Timeline. Loki is a fast-paced watch that's fully loaded with all the worldbuilding bells and whistles the MCU is known for. The production design is topnotch, and the frequent excursions to the, or a, past grants ample opportunity for manufactured nostalgia.
It feels less and less important to invest time and effort into the MCU's interconnected storytelling, but that's only a good thing. With Marvel fully embracing the multiversal concept, they've given themselves some leeway to break continuity as well as open the door to MCU stories that don't necessarily fit anywhere on the timeline. Phase Five of Kevin Feige's unprecedented, ambitious roadmap is well underway and Loki gives us all front seats to the show. There are plenty of reasons to subscribe to Disney's streaming service and Loki Season 2 is definitely a compelling one.
