Loki Season 2 Episode 1 Review : New Characters and Race against time continues!

After a trilogy of films, his sacrifice in Avengers: Infinity War, and his very own Disney Plus spin-off, what’s left for Tom Hiddleston’s Loki to do? If Loki season 2 is any indication, the next phase in his screwy life involves running around time and space in a smart TVA tie-in jacket combo with a good cop to his bad cop, Owen Wilson’s Mobius.
Season 1 laid a wobbly foundation for this time-displaced Loki variant, where the character’s new adventures proved to be amusing if not conceptually interesting. But our multiversal shenanigans, the pinnacle of ambition for Thor’s complex, chaotically neutral adopted brother. Does season 2 provide the God of Mischief a newfound and much-needed sense of glorious purpose?

No, they could be because he has to share more screen time than ever after two years away, in a cliffhanger that seemingly caused Marvel’s timeline to unspool into madness. Loki is back with a full cast in tow. Mobius is hungry for his next slice of key lime pie. One, Wunmi Mosaku as Hunter B-15, and Eugene Cordero’s Casey, have expanded roles to play, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer is here in a renegade capacity alongside Miss Minutes, the floating cartoon clock with the voice of Tara Strong.
Jonathan Majors, he who remains, has also returned in a way as the King Variant, Victor Timely. The only person who hasn’t made the leap between seasons is former director Kate Herron, replaced by Moon Knight’s Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. It seems Herron has taken Loki’s ‘anything goes’ approach with her. Season one was a modest treatise to the Multiverse, but it introduced memorable variants that spiced up what was otherwise six episodes of cosmic softball and gooey character reinvention, with Alligator Loki and Richard E. Grant’s Classic Loki being awesomely irreverent additions to the Marvel canon.

Most prominent among these was Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie, whose violent grudge against the Time Variance Authority revealed their god-like founders, the Timekeepers, to be robotic fakes. Sylvie and Loki formed a romantic bond while pursuing the Keepers’ Oz-like creator, He Who Remains, who hid away in a castle at the end of time and eventually found himself on the business end of Sylvie’s magic blade. ‘See you soon.’ His death scattered the timeline and proved Sylvie’s arc to be the most consequential of season one. I mean, think about it, ‘Quantumania’ is totally her fault.

This season treads more cautiously. After realizing her purpose, Sylvie has smaller things in mind, like working at a rural McDonald’s in 1982. Considering the corporate coziness of Disney and Mickey D’s, seeing the chain’s golden arches gobble up the screen as Sylvie works through her existential malaise feels exceptionally gross. It gives the impression that Loki has willingly devolved further into an obligatory money-maker that plays safe with its otherworldly mischief and keeps its characters as one-note as possible so as not to rock the MCU boat.
The McDonald’s thing budges other aspects of Loki, like its production design, which otherwise remains the strongest element of the series. The meticulous recreation of the chain’s circa ’82 decor and uniforms is distracting and pales in comparison to the inventiveness of the TVA’s stiflingly bureaucratic clockwork layout, which in some spots of season 2 resembles a vintage wood panel take on Men in Black.

There’s a nice quiet visit to the TVA’s Jetsons-esque automat so Mobius can score that slice of Key Lime Pie, and the set shares the color motif with the commissary’s surroundings that makes the scene visually pleasing. While Mobius at least gets his pie, season 2 doesn’t provide much for Loki to sink his teeth into. At least not in the four episodes available for review.

Spoiler mandates forbid getting into the season’s nitty-gritty, but it’s safe to say Loki has become more of an ensemble figure as other characters get a chance to, well, not grow exactly, but hit their one-note loudly and often. It’s all in service to the central thrust of the season, which focuses on the potential for these rogue variants, represented by Sylvie and Raphael Casel’s Brad, to live their lives unpruned. That potential is dangled in front of characters like Mobius, who claims contentment with the TVA, though Wilson is a strong enough actor to convey the bit of doubt concealed by his hilarious mustache.

He not the only one shaken by the aftershocks of Sylvie’s actions. Hunter B-15 is appalled by what the TVA has done to these variants over the ages. She was, in effect, an unwitting pawn in Kang’s scheme to maintain the sacred timeline. She compels her judges, seen scrambling for order following the sudden absence of Red Slayer last season, to halt all pruning and change the TVA’s purpose. ‘Those are people,’ Hunter exclaims repeatedly. What B-15 feels about her role in the TVA’s rampant pruning has yet to be explored, but to be fair, she is sharing on-screen real estate with a few new recurring players.

Chief among them is Ki Hui Kwan as the TVA’s basement-dwelling repair guy, Ouroboros. Juan is a conspicuous casting choice following his exploration of the Multiverse in ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ but he can’t lend any emotional gravity to the series’ dutiful face setting because he’s too busy feeding Loki and Mobius an endless stream of technical jargon. It’s a glaring contrast to the poeticism of his Oscar-winning performance that also illustrates the algorithmically structured nature of the current MCU times.

Now, to Loki. He enters season 2 with a new temporal malady that we can’t really get into but bears mentioning because it furthers his increasingly stale function as a plot device. If nothing else, this new dilemma gives Hiddleston plenty of opportunities to flip his hair back, which seems to be his new thing.
This Loki variant is a strange fit for Hiddleston, who has lost the villainous spring in his step that originally made the character so disarming.

Season 2 makes an attempt to conjure a glint of malice in Loki’s eyes during one-off-the-book moment of TVA space-time cop procedure, but his redemption arc from last season has nerfed his animus. Any villainy is clearly a put-on from the start. That’s maybe the most disappointing aspect of Loki season 2 so far. Nice guy Loki is so frustratingly predictable.

Alright, those expecting a new multiversely manic season of Loki should temper their expectations. The absence of director Kate Heron has seemingly removed the series’ wily ‘anything goes’ possibility, effectively turning season 2 and shockingly looking himself into an obedient, uninteresting cog in the MCU’s increasingly unwieldy megastructure.