Over the last couple of years, some critics of the post-Endgame MCU would undoubtedly wish that something like the Time Variance Authority would turn up a prune a couple of things of this timeline with even the most hardened fan possibly agreeing that the quality of the unstoppable franchise was no longer as solid as it once was. In fact, 2023 alone has seen the release of the rightly lauded Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, the highly divisive Ant-Man: Quantumania and the practically ignored Secret Invasion.
Thankfully, zapping in from the end of time to hopefully address the balance is the second series of Loki, the first of Marvel’s Disney+ content to be granted a sophomore season and the good news is that the gang’s all here as they work to make sense of season one’s massive ramifications. However, the better news is that while Ouroboros may not be as vigorously inventive as the first season’s premier episode, newly transported in directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Moon Knight) make sure that the perky weirdness reigns supreme.
After weathering the horrifying ramifications of his meeting with He Who Remains and his bruising rejection from his vengeful variant, Sylvie, Loki finds himself back at the TVA only to find that Agent Mobius and Hunter B-15 have no memory of him as a statue of He Who Remains (aka. a variant Kang the Conqueror) looms over them. Worse yet, Loki now finds himself violent spasming all over time within the TVA, something that’s supposed to be completely impossible, but after managing to pop up in the correct timeline, matters are eventually explained (sort of).
Loki has become untethered from time thanks to his journey to the end of existence and the statue he saw of He Who Remains was from a timeline long before he ever arrived at the TVA, indicating that its employees are not only variants, but that they’ve all had their minds wiped many times to keep their devious boss a mystery.
Finally reunited with with his Mobius, Loki not only has to help convince the TVA high command that their entire existence is an elaborate con, but he also has to figure out how to stop all this annoying (and exceedingly painful) time slipping.
Enter Ouroboros, the TVA’s version of a interdimentional handy man who possibly has a plan to cure the long suffering God of Mischief.
However, can a plan concocted by a conversation held by three men over two time periods hundreds of years apart and that involves such things as a Temporal Aura Extractor, something called a Temporal Loom and a high risk of skin removal, possibly work – especially when Loki’s attention is still firmly locked on the missing Sylvie.
As season 1 opened with our reformed Asgardian prince spending the entire episode getting acquainted with the bureaucratic nightmare that is the TVA, so season 2 basically does the same, avoiding tugging the majority of all the remaining, dangling threads in order to reorient viewers with its complex and noggin-frying world. To be fair, a revisit to the timey-wimey lunacy of the TVA proves to be a nice breath of retro-futurism wrapped in irreverent surrealism and as bizarre corners of the MCU go, its just as fun to revisit as the sci-fi slapstick of the Guardians.
While the previous seasons premiere focused solely on allowing us to tag along while a Loki variant was given five movies worth of character development in a single PowerPoint presentation, here we have an entire episode devoted to getting things back to a remote sense of “normality”. The best part of this means we get more of the Loki/Mobius double act which still proves that Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson are one of the best pairings in the entire MCU and their back and forth banter continues to be as perky and energetic as it ever was. However, even better is that we now get to add the exuberant presence of Ke Huy Quan’s Ouroboros (or O.B. for short) to the vastly entertaining patter who takes to the stylized oddness like a bespectacled natural and it’s an ingenious, central conversation between the three men that proves to be the episodes most endearing set piece.
While Mobius and O.B. try to figure out Loki’s time slippage in the present, Loki and O.B. have the same conversation in the distant past, but every time Loki informs the clueless handyman about his ailment, hundreds of years onward, Mobius’ O.B. starts to figure things out as his knowledge about a previously unheard of problem suddenly gets centuries of research. It doesn’t matter if what a wrote makes a lick of sense, just rest assured that the actual scene hits that sweet spot between science and silliness that matches similar brain bending jokes from such shows as Futurama and Rick & Morty. The big payoff is that Loki has to violently rip himself entirely from every thread time and space (eg. prune himself) while Mobius dons a startlingly chonky spacesuit in order to brave the Temporal Loom, a place where raw time is weaved to formed the timeline itself in order to recombine Loki’s Asgardian atoms into the correct plane of existence.
There’s a point to be made that after the huge revelations of the previous season, Ouroboros is something of a needless diversion simply designed to hit the ground running while it avoids answering any of the prevailing questions (no Kang, no Sylvie), but it’s so much fun, it actually doesn’t matter one bit. In fact, the show, in it’s more serious moments, brings up quite an intriguing conundrum: while the pruning of endless branching timelines has resulted in countless deaths which ethically should be halted, to do so might result in countless, time travelling, multi-dimensional, space-Hitlers in the form of the Council of Kangs (something that we’ve already witnessed in Quantumania’s post credits sting) that will also result in the annihilation of trillions more. However, the TVA high council chooses instead to target the fugitive Sylvie which obviously makes Loki more than a little anxious.
A cracking start that masks an amusingly ineffectual plotline, Loki: Season 2 launches out of the gate with style to spare thanks to the sublime, comic timing of its leads and writing and direction that marries bonkers science and absurdity to exactly the right amount. Wherever Loki goes from here will no doubt be held under intense scrutiny as anything Kang-related will have huge amounts of impact on future Avengers movies, but as of right now everything is under control.
For the time being.
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