After a trilogy of films, his sacrifice in Avengers: Infinity War, and his very own Disney+ spinoff series, what is left for Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to do? If Season 2 of Loki is any indication, the next phase in his screwy life involves running around time and space in a smart TVA tie-and-jacket combo with co-worker/cohort/good cop to his bad cop, Mobius (Owen Wilson). 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 are 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?
In short, no. That could be because he has to share more screen time than ever. After two years away and a cliffhanger that seemingly caused Marvel's timeline to unspool into madness, Loki is back with a full cast in tow. Wilson's genially professional Mobius is hungry for his next slice of key lime pie, Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and Casey (Eugene Cordero) have expanded roles to play, and Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is here in a renegade capacity alongside the floating clock AI thingamajig, Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). Jonathan Major's He Who Remains has also returned, in a way, as the Kang 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 1 was a modest traipse through the multiverse, but introduced memorable variants who 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 Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), whose violent grudge against the Time Variance Authority revealed their godlike founders, the Time-Keepers, to be robotic fakes. Sylvie and Loki formed a romantic bond while pursuing the Keepers' Oz-like creator, He Who Remains (Majors), who had hidden away in a castle at the End of Time, and eventually found himself on the business end of Sylvie’s magic blade. His death scattered the timeline and proved Sylvie’s to be the most consequential arc of season 1. (Think about it: Quantumania is totally her fault.)
This season treads more cautiously; after realizing her purpose, Sylvie has smaller things in mind for her future, 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 McBoat. (Ask Tim Burton about the consequences of doing that.)
The McDonald's thing fudges 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 it 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-paneled take on Men in Black. There's a nice, quiet visit to the TVA's Jestons-esque automat so Mobius can score that slice of key lime pie, and the set shares a 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. (That's a problem, considering there’s only two more after these ones.) 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 Rafael Casal'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’s not the only one shaken by the aftershocks of Syvlie'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 Renslayer 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's sharing onscreen real estate with a few new recurring players.
Chief among them is the TVA's basement-dwelling repair guy Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), whose jovial presence gives Season 2 a much-needed boost from its overall mopey tone. Quan 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 Phase-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.
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 forbidding tone he adopts can be clocked as a ruse from a mile away. That's maybe the most disappointing aspect of Loki Season 2 so far: Nice Guy Loki is so frustratingly predictable.
