Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of Loki.
Our favorite time-traveling trickster god is back! Loki Season 2 kicks off with new problems, new characters, and a looming threat (no pun intended) that could tear the entire TVA apart. After two years, Season 2 picks up right where the last season left off. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is slipping back and forth through time after being kicked through a time door by Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) and struggles to rush back to Mobius (Owen Wilson) to tell him the events at the End of Time. Meanwhile, B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) has come to accept that she is a variant and wants to protect the timelines from being pruned even as they branch out of control now that He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) is dead.
After Kate Herron‘s stint as Season 1’s director, Season 2 brings in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead as the main directors and makes Eric Martin the head writer. Martin, who wrote Episode 4 of Season 1 “The Nexus Event” and co-wrote the Season 1 finale “For All Time. Always.” with show creator Michael Waldron, has had a hand in writing all six of the episodes in Season 2. Benson and Moorhead are probably best known for their horror segment “Bonestorm” in V/H/S: Viral and also for feature films like Spring and The Endless. The creative duo was also responsible for directing two Moon Knight episodes, Episode 2, “Summon the Suit,” and Episode 4, “The Tomb.” In Loki they’re able to stretch their creativity a little, leaning away from the horror that they’re so known for while also keeping their style distinct. It’s a shift from Herron’s more colorful and bombastic view, but no less enjoyable.
‘Loki’ Season 2 Episode 1 Spends Time Setting the Stage for the Future (and the Past)
At the end of Season 1, it was unclear just where Loki ended up. Was he in an alternate timeline? Or another universe? Neither Mobius nor B-15 seem to recognize him. When the premiere kicks off, it doesn’t take long for us to realize that Loki is in the past, and as the episode continues, we realize he’s in the very distant past, more than 400 years in the past. At this point, the TVA hasn’t gone through its rebranding yet. In the place of the Time-Keepers, we see Kang everywhere, from giant statues erected outside the building to his face cast in gold on the walls.
It’s unclear just how far back Loki has traveled or how he even got there, but it’s clear that the show is instantly setting up roots for the present timeline’s story. While running through the TVA of the past, Loki discovers more truths about the TVA, specifically that Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) was once much closer to Kang. Leaping into the future, he sees the entire TVA in meltdown and is briefly reunited with Sylvie. The series is dropping hints here and there and given the nature of the series and the way it plays with time travel, it’ll no doubt make the show more enjoyable when revisiting it.
‘Loki’ Season 2 Gives Us New Characters and New Faces
With Ravonna missing, Loki debuts two new characters who are in charge at the TVA. Liz Carr plays Judge Gamble and Kate Dickie plays General Dox. Carr has previously appeared in Good Omens as the angel Saraqael and The Witcher as Fenn (as well as being a comedian) and you’ll recognize Dickie most prominently from Game of Thrones as Lysa Arryn, as well as from The Witch as Katherine. While Judge Gamble sees the light on pruning timelines due to B-15’s pleas, willing to change and spare the millions of branching timelines, General Dox wants to take a more militant approach and is eager to hunt Sylvie down for answers.
We only get a bit of Rafael Casal‘s Hunter X-5, but he already seems like a douchebag. Casal, who is known for his collaborations with friend Daveed Diggs in Blindspotting, plays X-5 arrogantly, though it seems that his character and General Dox have a closer relationship than what appears on the surface. Whether that relationship is more familial or toxic is still up for debate.
Finally, Loki introduces its most chipper new character: Ouroboros, aka O.B. Played by Ke Huy Quan, fresh off his Oscar win post-Everything Everywhere All at Once, O.B. is easily one of the most entertaining new characters. He has amazing banter and comedic timing with Wilson and Hiddleston, bringing his own quirky brand of humor to the cast of characters. While O.B. is amusing and seemingly good-natured, his understanding of the TVA and the fact that he literally wrote the book on the TVA (the guidebook that is available on all the desks, which covers every aspect of the TVA) should make us pause and question just how involved he’s been in the organization since the very beginning.
What Happens in ‘Loki’ Season 2 Episode 1?
The Season 2 premiere jumps right back into the action. Loki appears in the TVA of the distant past where neither Mobius nor B-15 not only don’t recognize him, but they send people after him thinking he’s an intruder. Since we know the TVA has been hunting Lokis for a while, the curious fact that they don’t even recognize him should tell us how far back in time Loki has gone. In trying to escape the TVA agents chasing him, Loki jumps into a mail cart vehicle that crashes into one of the buildings, causing one of the timeline monitors to fall and crack the tile on the floor. There, he sees Casey (Eugene Cordero), who also doesn’t recognize him, and sends for more agents to apprehend him.
But before they can arrive, Loki jumps back into the present. This phenomenon, we learn later, is called time slipping. It should be impossible in the TVA, but it’s happening nonetheless. Loki asks our present-day Casey how long the crack in the ground has existed, recognizing that it’s there because of him, and Casey shrugs and replies, “It’s been there as long as I can remember.” Throughout the episode, we encounter a few scenes like this where characters seemingly have gaps in their memory, which Loki deduces is because Kang has wiped the TVA employees’ memories multiple times.
While Loki jumps back and forward through time, Mobius and B-15 are still reeling from the revelation that they are all variants. B-15 is firmly against pruning the branching timelines now that she knows that she could be from one of them and wants to tell the employees the truth, about the fact that they have full lives out there somewhere in the multiverse. When they’re called by X-5 to appear before General Dox and Judge Gamble in the war room, B-15 makes an impassioned plea not to prune the new timelines. As everyone in the room is a variant, she begs them to reconsider, calling their past actions atrocities. Her efforts are rewarded when Gamble decides that she’s right and orders all TVA agents to stop pruning timelines, but Dox is upset by the request.
Loki, meanwhile, in the distant past, realizes through the recording device in the war room that Ravonna and Kang were once very close, with Kang calling her a “marvel” and saying he would be “proud to lead with her.” When he time slips back into the present, he reveals that they should all be aware of the oncoming threat. He shows Gamble, Dox, B-15, X-5, and Mobius the truth by using a time stick to prune away the mosaic veneer of the wall, revealing the gold castings of Kang’s face. Dox remains unconvinced and wants the truth for herself, so she takes her troops and raids the armory, commanding X-5 to figure out what is going on. She wants to hunt Sylvie down and learn what happened at the End of Time.
Finally reunited with Mobius, Loki tells him everything that occurred at the End of Time, his final altercation with Sylvie, and the fact that He Who Remains made sense to him. Freeing the timeline would only bring chaos and more Kangs. The pruning was all a part of avoiding more versions of Kang who would eventually try to conquer. Notably, the TVA has been having power surges all through the episode and when Mobius tries to find Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) for help, Loki warns him that she is also on Kang’s side in all of this.
The two decide to go to the Repairs and Advancements division, hidden deep within the basement of the TVA, and it’s there that they meet O.B. Notably, O.B. remembers an encounter from 400 years ago when he first met Mobius, who has no recollection of it. Everyone else at the TVA seems to have their memories wiped, but O.B. obviously keeps track of time at the TVA, and when Loki time slips into the distant past, the O.B. of the past has yet to get his nickname from Mobius. This implies that Loki is more than 400 years in the past.
With Loki in the distant past having a conversation with the O.B. of that time and Mobius in the present having a conversation with our present-day O.B., the two versions of O.B. figure out that Loki needs a temporal aura extractor in order to pull Loki from time and ground him in one place. It’s dangerous, requiring Mobius to expose himself to temporal radiation (which could melt his skin off) and requiring Loki to prune himself in hopes of grounding himself in the present.
‘Loki’ Season 2 Is All About the Race Against Time
O.B. realizes that leaving the multiple branches of the timeline unpruned is leading to the Temporal Loom being unstable. There’s a lot of MacGuffins in this episode, and the Temporal Loom seems to be the big daddy of all MacGuffins. Basically, the Loom is being overloaded, and it can’t handle weaving together too many timelines, as the Loom is what transforms raw time into a physical timeline. It’s unclear what would happen to the universe without the Loom entirely — since it’s clear that Kang created it — but chaos seems guaranteed.
Everything goes wrong when Loki time slips again, this time into the future, and Mobius must make the dangerous trek out to launch the temporal aura extractor and hope that Loki prunes himself in time. In the future, we can see that the TVA is in total disarray. As the time comes for Loki to be pruned, he can’t find anyone with a time stick and seemingly resolves himself to be lost in time. He approaches a ringing phone in front of an elevator, but he’s surprised when he sees Sylvie, prying open the doors of the elevator, and she’s relieved to see him. Right then, he is pruned by someone unseen — and just in time to land back in our present day.
The episode ends with a mid-credits scene that takes us to 1982. Sylvie arrives in Broxton, Oklahoma, and we see that she is on a branched timeline. Marvel Comics savvy fans will know that Broxton serves in the comics as the new home to Asgard where Thor resides, a floating city that exists right outside the small Oklahoma town. Sylvie walks through a field and ends up at a local McDonald’s. Surrounded by people enjoying their McNuggets (a brand-new item at the time) and Big Macs, Sylvie feels a sense of peace seeing the people happy. When the employee asks what she wants, she replies wistfully, “I want to try everything.”
As far as premieres go, Loki Season 2 has a lot to cram in, though it’s a welcome return to a corner of the MCU that has always done well. We have to meet the new characters, reorient ourselves back into the story, present a new conflict, and kick off the plot of the season. Loki does this the best it can. The highlight of the episode is Quan’s O.B. and the introduction of the Temporal Loom, with Wilson’s comedic timing regarding the whole attempt to save Loki being particularly funny. Who knew that writing the word “Skin?” on a dusty computer would make me actually laugh out loud? There’s a lot to juggle, and Loki crashing back and forth through time creates a kind of chaos that can be disorienting at times. Ultimately, it’s a decent return to the story, but it’s clear that there will be better episodes to come.
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