How Loki has become even more likable in season 2
After breaking the whole universe in the first season, Tom Hiddleston's MCU series wisely lowers the stakes—and turns on its considerable charms
In a twist befitting the narcissism of its eponymous antihero, the first season of Loki ended by creating the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s multiverse—the storytelling convention that made Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home possible—effectively making it one of the most important stories in the history of the MCU. Loki himself was even seemingly left adrift in the multiverse, arriving in a world that looked like, but wasn’t quite the same as, the one he had left.
But in the first episode of season two, the show took a different approach by reducing the stakes from the multiverse-level heights of the movies to something smaller and more focused on its generally likable cast of characters (plus Ke Huy Quan’s very likable new addition). It is, somehow, just as appropriately suited to the narcissism of its eponymous antihero. After all, what is more Loki than completely changing the universe around yourself (or a different version of yourself) and then ignoring how that impacts everyone but you?
It all started when Loki (Tom Hiddleston) met Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), a different version of himself from an alternate universe that was destroyed, and the two of them went on a quest that ended at the doorstep of He Who Remains, a man who, as he explained to the two Lokis, was the winner of a multiversal war between other versions of himself and had created the time-policing bureaucrats of the Time Variance Authority to maintain control of the “Sacred Timeline” (a.k.a. the regular canonical Marvel Cinematic Universe). That way, he could ensure that no alternate universes could be formed with their own versions of him who might try and question his rule.
Sylvie, face to face with the man responsible for trying to kill her and obliterate the reality she came from, chose to run a sword through the chest of He Who Remains, upending the balance of that multiversal war and allowing for the formation (and flourishing) of infinite other timelines. Thus, the MCU’s multiverse was born, and with it came an infinite supply of highly ambitious variants of He Who Remains—most notably, for now, Kang The Conqueror from Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania.
Loki then returned to the TVA offices where he had spent most of season one, but this time they were different: Not only did his friend Mobius no longer recognize him, but there was a giant statue of Kang/He Who Remains towering above everything. The implication was that Loki and Sylvie had broken the old universe and he had somehow been dumped into a brand new one where nobody recognized him and the bad guy(s) had already won. It was a chilling cliffhanger that spoke to the dangers of this newly birthed multiverse, even before we saw the Scarlet Witch and Spider-Man take more active roles in breaking things.
Season two picked up shortly after that, but rather than maintaining those impossibly huge stakes—it’s going to take the return of the Avengers to deal with that anyway—Loki focused in on its characters by revealing that Loki didn’t actually wake up in a new universe. No, he was just in the past of the regular universe! Bingo, all questions answered, quickly and cleanly, and pretty much any messes that directly impact Loki and Mobius are fixed by the end of the premiere. Now they can focus on finding Sylvie, who, as seen in the episode’s epilogue, is in Oklahoma in 1982 surveying the fabulous choices afforded to her by a 1980s McDonald’s.
We know from the trailers that Jonathan Majors is going to come back as another version of Kang, but it’s telling that Loki didn’t do that in season two’s premiere episode. This is a show about Loki, sometimes more than one Loki, and it just wouldn’t be appropriate if the God Of Mischief was wasting time worrying about how his actions had impacted Spider-Man or Wanda Maximoff or any of the other people in the mainline MCU reality who aren’t named Loki—hell, the Loki of that reality is dead, so it stands to reason that he shouldn’t even care about it at all.
And not only does it seem like he doesn’t, but the show itself subverted the expectations it set with the season one finale by not caring about it either—at least not yet. It’s quietly clever, and with other projects testing everyone’s patience for the MCU, it smartly sets Loki apart from the kinds of shows that necessitated the big change Marvel is making to how it develops TV projects.