Loki season 2 premiere: Loki And Mobius' (Mostly) Excellent Adventure

We return to Loki as we left it, in more ways than one.

For instance: Tom Hiddleston’s errant God of Mischief still finds himself stuck (albeit briefly) in a reality where his Time Variance Authority allies Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) have no idea who he is. He Who Remains is still dead, Jonathan Majors’ stoneworked visage suddenly haunting the retro-gorgeous halls and atriums of the TVA. And Sylvie Laufeydottir (still Sophia Di Martino, in those brief glimpses we get of her toward the end of tonight’s premiere) is still missing somewhere in a rapidly expanding web of time.

Most importantly, we’re back for another era-spanning adventure in what is still one of the most vibrant, fast-paced, and occasionally over-stuffed corners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. More than two years after its first season set a bar that Marvel’s subsequent TV output has struggled mightily to match, Loki remains a show that is at its best when it takes a breath and lets its incredibly talented cast work with each other, instead of wrestling with the script—this is, when it allows itself to be as effortlessly funny and charming as Loki himself, instead of rushing around in pursuit of sci-fi spectacle. And yet, the series also can’t help but pursue that other “glorious purpose”—and that ambition, as with Loki himself, is undeniably part of its charm.

But it’s worth noting that the best scene from this second-season premiere—and one of the best it’s ever offered up, period—is the one that takes all its talk of time looms, rogue variants, and multiversal conquerors least seriously. That’s the encounter between a reunited Loki and Mobius (Hiddleston and Wilson falling easily back into their improvisational, buddy-time-cop rhythms) and TVA techie Ouroboros, played by recent Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan, who continues to display an incredible knack for switching between slapstick comedy and deadly seriousness at the drop of a hat.

The first half of that equation is what mostly gets a workout here, as O.B. cheerfully attempts to diagnose Loki’s sudden bout of Billy Pilgrim-style bouncing through time. After an opening act that mostly consists of running, shouting, and what appears to be a brewing civil war within the now-destabilized TVA, this sequence lets Loki finally slow down to let this talented trio make a meal of these scenes, Wilson and Hiddleston’s varying flavors of smartass each bouncing off of Quan’s smiling deadpan. Things only get sillier (and more fun) once Loki jumps back in time, splitting the conversation between two different O.B.s, and allowing writer Eric Martin to slip in a bit of “don’t think too hard about the time travel” joking, while also confirming that Loki temporal mechanics apparently operate on Bill & Ted-style rules (i.e., Loki convincing O.B. to build a whatsit in the past, leading to it suddenly being close at hand in the present). Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (who mostly stick to house style here, wide shots of earth-tone bureaucratic corridors in abundance) have their most fun of the night with this sequence, stitching the two conversations together to give the whole thing a natural flow. It’s all tremendously silly, and happily so, even as the episode starts speeding up again, instituting a literal ticking clock in its closing minutes to try to convey a sense of stakes.

Because the thing is, that for as hard as its gone in its efforts to lay down some connective tissue for the MCU’s various multiverse endeavors (and despite tonight’s episode coming immediately after one of the most unapologetic exposition dumps this franchise has ever performed), Loki has always worked best as a character piece. That’s true whether Loki and Mobius are busy bickering about tiny details of his mid-jump facial expressions, or when Hiddleston throws himself into the godling’s efforts to make sense of the confrontation at the end of last season’s “For All Time. Always.” (Loki keeps stressing that it was an impossible decision—although Sylvie, the person most directly harmed by He Who Remains’ temporal machinations, certainly didn’t seem to agree.) The plot material—surprisingly scant, at least for now—is mostly just window dressing, an excuse to shove Wilson into a beautifully bulky space suit, or to give Loki a brief moment of connection with Sylvie before getting pruned, in just the right time and place, in order to be saved from his leaps through time.

For now, the plot side of things is loose, ambiguous. That “nobody knows Loki” reality? Simply the past, at a time when one of the Kangs was ruling the TVA more openly, and before one of several regular memory wipes for its staff. Ravonna Renslayer is in the wind, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, like Majors, appearing only as a voice in a recording. (Unless that’s her saving the day by killing Loki at the last minute, which seems like at least an outside possibility.) Sure, O.B. promises to fix the temporal loom, so that the permanently branching timelines don’t destroy reality. But the TVA itself has no idea what to do with its newfound freedom—or B-15's repeated reminders that they’ve spent the last eternity or so committing unprovoked genocide on god knows how many variant universes. (At least one group of Hunters, led by Kate Dickie and new cast member Rafael Casal, appears to be gearing up for full-scale multiversal war.) The stage is set, the music is loud, and the effects are, well, MCU CGI Space Wedgie No. 1,001.

But we don’t end on any of that, because none of that material, for as exciting as it can be, is really what Loki is driving toward. Our after-credits scene, the episode epilogue proper, isn’t about time wars or bombastic monologues or clever tricks with things hiding improbably behind other things. (Seriously, Kangs—you’re just going to spackle over your big bronze faces in the TVA conference room instead of tearing the whole installation out?) No, we end in Broxton, Oklahoma, 1982, where Sylvie has apparently landed after killing HWR. Wandering into a nearby McDonald’s, Di Martino slowly lets wonder sneak into the face of this hardened, bitter survivor as she’s confronted with that thing she’s spent her entire life being so brutally denied. Not the brand-new Chicken McNuggets, no—despite them meeting her criteria for being neither squirrel nor possum nor “having a face.” No, we close on Sylvie taking in regular people living their regular lives, and smiling softly at the presence of that thing that the TVA has denied her for so long, and which the death of her unseen tormentor has finally enabled: a choice.

Stray observations

• Welcome to our second-season coverage of Loki! We’re excited to dip back into this world, and to spend the rest of the season seeing what Marvel’s most aggressively inventive TV show can do.
• The opening action sequence, with Loki throwing himself over a railing at the TVA and landing in some kind of space truck a.) is fun), and b.) feels like a possible homage to The Fifth Element.
• Eugene Cordero’s Casey doesn’t get much to do tonight, but it’s always nice to see him.
• Hiddleston’s sense of affronted dignity and boundless over-confidence remain his greatest comedic gifts; he’s still Marvel’s best living cartoon.
• “I can do anything.” Lovely beat from Liz Carr’s Judge Gamble, as the reality of the TVA’s new situation sets in.
• Mobius, on Loki and Sylvie’s fight: “I’d ask who won, but…”
  “It was a draw.”
  One of the best moments of the episode, just because it reminds you that this frantic guy who’s been screaming for the last 15 minutes is still, y’know, Loki.
• Great camera pan over to the woman in the elevator with Mobius and Loki while they discuss the horrible-looking nature of his time-jumps.
• “Wow, that makes perfect sense! There’s no flaw in that logic!”
• Turns out there’s a TVA Handbook, written by O.B. (It is hilariously thin, and no one appears to have read it.)
• The episode uses lots of little touches, some less subtle than others, to indicate what’s going on with the time jumps. Mobius’ “Skin?” written in dust is easily the funniest.
• Comics Connection: Broxton, OK is familiar to comics fans due to its presence in a multi-year Thor arc, in which the Norse realm of Asgard was relocated to the small community. We can find no evidence as to whether it was also one of the markets where McDonald’s did a limited launch of McNuggets before releasing them worldwide in 1983.
• There’s a new closing credits sequence, looking great as always—this really is, alongside WandaVision, the most beautiful Marvel show—including a diorama of Mobius standing in front of the loom, and the TVA handbook.

Stream Loki now on Disney+