Warning: this article contains spoilers for Loki: Season 2, Episode 2!
Loki: Season 2 chronicles the ongoing misadventures of everyone’s favorite god of mischief. The new season has already proven to be an eventful one for Tom Hiddleston’s time-hopping anti-hero, raising some key questions about the future of the Time Variance Authority and the MCU in the process.
However, another thing is becoming abundantly clear as the new season unfolds. Loki himself is no longer truly the beating heart of this show. Another Asgardian has stolen the spotlight, namely Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie. She’s not the Loki that was promised way back in the beginning, but she’s the Loki we need right now. Here’s why Sylvie has become the true heart of Loki in Season 2.
Loki After Avengers: Endgame
One of the main reasons why Sylvie has supplanted Loki as the heart of the series is that Loki himself has reached a bit of an impasse where his character arc is concerned. Following the events of Season 1, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of room left for Loki to grow and evolve.
Season 1 picked up one of the bigger loose ends from 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which allowed Loki to cheat his death at Thanos’ hands by setting the 2012 version of Loki free to wreak havoc on the MCU timeline. This set the stage for a very different version of Loki to take the spotlight. This Avengers-era Loki was still a villain who hadn’t experienced the personal growth and tragedies his older self experienced in Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok.
But in practice, 2012 Loki has turned out to not be so different from his other self after all. Loki: Season 1 rapidly transforms Hiddleston’s character into a more recognizable, digestible version of himself. This Loki is exposed to the literal Cliff’s Notes of his future, witnessing all the events of The Dark World, Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War in rapid succession. By the end, 2012 Loki started to feel and behave an awful lot more like his 2018 self. It was as if a switch had been flipped and a more heroic, sympathetic Loki had been conjured into being. And maybe that’s for the best. Do MCU fans really want to devote significant chunks of time to watching Loki undergo the same transformation twice?
The series may have skipped a few steps with its characterization of Loki, but that’s not to say the character didn’t also have a clear arc in Season 1. He still had to fight against his more selfish impulses and embrace the TVA’s cause as his own. He had to learn to fight for something bigger than himself. He also had to learn to truly love another person. The fact that this other person is actually just a Loki from another timeline is simply fitting. Who could Loki possibly love more than Loki?
Loki’s arc culminates in the Season 1 finale, as he comes into conflict with Sylvie over the fate of Jonathan Majors’ He Who Remains. The old Loki would simply do what Sylvie ultimately chooses - follow his selfish impulses and kill the enemy, consequences be damned. But the new Loki recognizes that the fate of existence is at stake and acts accordingly.
The question now in Season 2 is where Loki is meant to go from here. He’s willingly become a part of something bigger. He believes in the TVA’s mission enough to fight for it. He’s become a hero, for all intents and purposes. So what now? What’s Loki’s arc going forward? Season 2 has yet to really address this question. And the more we see of Season 2, the more it seems that the series is less concerned with Loki’s arc than Sylvie’s.
Why Sylvie Steals the Show in Loki: Season 2
We suppose it’s not really false advertising for Sylvie to replace Loki as the emotional heart of the series. She may not be the Loki, but she’s still a Loki. She’s a Loki who grew up in very different circumstances from the MCU version, and she has an agenda all her own.
Compared to Loki’s compressed arc of redemption in Season 1, Sylvie has been experiencing a much more methodical story arc over the course of the series. We’ve learned that she was robbed of a life of her own thanks to the TVA. Initially, Sylvie is out for nothing more or less than revenge, slaughtering TVA agents in her single-minded pursuit of those in charge. But her quest became far more complicated in Season 1, both because of the deepening mystery of the TVA’s true nature and because of her growing attachment to Loki. For someone who has no family and no attachments, love is practically a foreign concept to Sylvie.
All of that culminates in the Season 1 finale, as Loki and Sylvie finally confront He Who Remains and learn the truth about the TVA’s mission. The season ends in tragedy. It’s not so much because Sylvie chooses to kill He Who Remains. There was never really a good outcome to be had there. Allowing He Who Remains to live ensures that divergent timelines continue to be erased, along with countless innocent lives. Killing him, however, forces Loki and Sylvie to take the place of He Who Remains and become the solitary two custodians guarding the MCU against an all-out war between the many variants of Kang.
The tragedy in Sylvie’s choice is that she makes it out of a purely selfish desire to punish He Who Remains for stealing her life. She kills He Who Remains while having no intention of continuing his work. She does so knowing full well she’s sacrificing her relationship with Loki in the process. Loki may have learned to believe in something greater than himself by this point, but Sylvie hasn’t. She killed He Who Remains, and now the newly restored multiverse is going to suffer as a result.
That brings us to Season 2. We’ve so far learned that Sylvie has set up a new life for herself in a version of 1980s Oklahoma. It’s not much. Sylvie passes the time working at McDonald’s and gazing at the stars. But the point is that it’s a life, and one Sylvie has chosen for herself. Yet it doesn’t appear to be a life that can last. We see that Sylvie is still driven by her hatred of Kang in all his many incarnations. She won’t replace He Who Remains, but she’ll certainly kill more of his brethren if given half a chance.
Episode 2 illustrates the fundamental divide between Loki and Sylvie. Loki is committed to the TVA’s cause, flawed though it might be. Sylvie is still ruled by her selfish impulses, her hatred and a lingering love for her alternate self. Can she become something more than fate and upbringing made of her, just like Loki did twice before? That’s really the question at the heart of this series in Season 2. Sylvie is the driving force of Loki, and Loki himself is just along for the ride.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
