A month and a bit late on this review, but hey-ho, I’ve been later with bigger shows! Loki Season 2 is a hard one to get my head around because as it was airing there wasn’t a week where I felt excited to watch the next episode, and in fact several weeks I watched the episode a few days after it “aired” whereas the other MCU / Star Wars Disney + shows I watched the night of the day they’re uploaded, with the only other exception being the recent MCU show Secret Invasion, so… that’s not a good sign for MCU TV projects… Anyway, on the other hand it had some really fun performances and a great end sequence, so it’s not really that bad, I just never felt invested in it… Let’s see if I can actually pull these random thoughts into a coherent review, shall we?
The main crux of the opening episode (and indeed all the trailers leading up to the series release!) is that Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is currently uncontrollably “time slipping”, or bouncing between time periods and timelines after the multiverse-creating hijinx of the previous series and he sees the TVA’s destruction in the near future so tries to warn Mobius (Owen Wilson) about it while popping in and out of existence. Eventually he settles somewhat and the two old buddies head to the basement levels of the TVA to talk to a man named Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), the man who literally wrote the book on the TVA. He comes up with a method to save Loki involving a visit to the massive multiversal loom and it works, eventually, though before he returned Loki sees two things: the Loom exploding and destroying the TVA and countless universes, and his old flame / other self Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who ends up settling on a timeline as a worker at McDonalds for advertising reasons.
“Look, I’m telling you, in another timeline branch I saw you as a kid in a temple with a guy in a fedora.” “… what?”
Loki decides to find Sylvie so he, Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) capture escaped TVA Hunter X-5 (Rafael Casal), who eventually through various means of interrogation reveals not just Sylvie’s location but a plan to prune a whole bunch of other timelines, which everyone manages to stop for the most part as Episode 2 ends. Things then shift again (the series really does feel disjointed at times…) as Obi, as Mobius nicknamed Ouroboros, reveals that the Loom will indeed go critical and the only way to stop it is either with the aura of He Who Remains (the Kang variant from the end of the universe who founded the TVA played by Jonathan “PR Nightmare” Majors) or Miss Minutes (voiced by Tara Strong), the sentient A.I. which went missing at the end of the previous series. Killing two birds with one stone Loki and Mobius end up heading to 1893 Chicago to find one or both, as He Who Remains’ original self Victor Timely is there in his earliest days as well as Miss Minutes. A whole bunch of people then descend on Timely, including Sylvie in order to finish the job she started previously and kill him, Miss Minutes as she is apparently in love with her creator and wants Timely to make a robot body for her, and Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who wishes to bring the TVA back under her control via Minutes and Timely.
Loki and Mobius travelling in time on a mission… really that’s all the series needed to be in order to be, well, more fun.
To cut a long story short Minutes and Renslayer end up at He Who Remains’ house at the end of time (where Minutes reveals Renslayer’s original self was partnered up He Who Remains), Sylvie goes back to McDonalds and Loki and Mobius take Timely back to the TVA to help fix the Loom. Despite best efforts though the Loom goes critical and many timelines are erased (including Sylvie’s) along with the TVA, with Loki being the only survivor. Our former God of mischief comes up with a plan where he heads out through time to re-recruit the TVA members he’s come to see as friends and find a way to fix it between themselves but they all end up destroyed along with that specific timeline, though at the last moment Loki manages to figure how to slip through time at will. Loki heads to the end of time and finds He Who Remains, who reveals that he always knew this would happen as the Loom’s destruction was his fail safe and only he knows how to stop it, therefore to save everyone Loki has to kill Sylvie before she kills He Who Remains. Loki refuses and after countless attempts to verbally stop Sylvie Loki comes up with another plan entirely…
You can’t deny that Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson still make a great pairing and the writing is at times still fun but there was something about the first five episodes (of six!) that just didn’t click with me. It didn’t help that Majors’ Timely was more annoying than endearing either…
Overall Thoughts:
Sylvie preparing to kill a Kang variant, her only real reason to exist in this season… or the original, to be fair!
Loki’s second season gets off to a slow start and never really gets going, held together entirely by the great performance of Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson. The finale delivers in a big way but I can’t give a six episode show a high ranking because half of Episode 6 was great… it’s not bad but it’s not something I’ll be watching again.
Loki uses his time slipping ability to take future knowledge to Obi and Timely before the Loom’s destruction and give them a head’s up but it doesn’t work… so he tries again. And again. And again! Over and over Loki sees the destruction of the Loom and the TVA and each time he tries to overcome it, even learning how everything works via countless re-dos spent learning the know-how.
Just because I normally do four screenshots, here’s another shot of Obi, the only real new character introduced this season, now that I think about it…
Eventually Loki realises that the only way to save the multiverse is to literally do it himself as he walks towards the Loom, intentionally destroys it and then physically grabs all the various timelines and universes (represented by actual threads), weaves them into a tree not unlike the World Tree of his own people’s idealism and then sits on a throne, literally holding the multiverse together himself. Loki has reached the point where he was willing to sacrifice himself for all eternity to see his friends safe. Great stuff. We then get some post finale teases, like everyone back at work at the TVA, Obi creating a new handbook and finally Mobius quitting the TVA to got on a search for Loki with Sylvie, taking a last look at the family his original variant once had before departing.
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