When you take a step back, it’s quite easy to see how much we’ve taken the abstract zaniness of the MCU for granted. Nearly 15 unbroken years of movies and TV shows have given us such sights as a hulking green id monster, a sorcerer surgeon and a teenager who uses his ability to squirt sticky fluid for good and we’ve rarely had a change to take a step back and examine how truly bonkers it all is before the next heroic weirdo steps up and take centre stage.
However, talking trees and raccoons aside, possibly the most deranged concept yet is Loki, which happily expects us to accept that a version of a formally evil, dead, Viking space god from another universe has been adopted by a race of bureaucratic time cops who operate outside of known reality to help them try and get a ruined timeline back on track while trying to Woo another, female version of himself. You see? Utterly fucking crackers.
However, in an attempt to wrestle some of those wild concepts into a cohesive whole, Loki’s second season seems to have already hit a slight stumbling block.
While his brief period of time slipping has been brought under control, Loki still finds that the TVA still has its hands full with a ridiculous amount of chono-problems. Not only is the risk of He Who Remains’ war mongering variants hanging over matters like some omnipresent, purple and green sword of damocles, but the TVA is experiencing something of an open revolt within its endless halls. General Dox has decided to go rogue, ignore the countless deaths it would cause and decided to bomb as many of the branching timelines she can out of existence entirely in a desperate attempt to restore order. However, Loki, Mobius and B-15’s current mission is to track down Loki’s variant, Sylvie, in order to work out what Loki’s visions of her in the future mean and the only way they can do that is by tracking down Hunter X-5 and pressing him on her location.
X-5, you see, has taken the information that the entire TVA are all actually mindwiped variants and decided to go and get a life of his own by scurrying off to a universe where he’s reinvented himself as a famous, 70s actor named Brad Wolfe, but after apprehending him, they find that getting the required info isn’t going to be as easy as they thought.
However, after Brad gets under Mobius’ skin with the whole “TVA are variants” thing, they finally get on the right track only to find that Sylvie, currently working in a McDonald’s in Broxon, Oklahoma, wants nothing to do with the TVA, Loki, or any of that time, scrambling nonsense. But even more pressing than rogue hunters, genocidal generals and burger flipping variants is the fact that the Temporal Loom (the thing that weaves raw time) is overloading and the only thing that can override it is the missing A I., Miss Minutes or the very dead He Who Remains.
One of the greatest treasures of Loki’s first season was the buddy cop banter Tom Hiddleston had with Owen Wilson’s Mobius that saw opposites attract in the most endearing ways. Loki’s innate, tricksy nature made a perfect foil for the TVA agent’s childlike love of problem solving, but due to an influx of matter eating cloud monsters, Loki alligators and time controlling hermits existing at the end if time, the time they spent actually solving time crimes was sadly rather brief. However, those who desired more screen time for the professional bromance that no one is calling Lokius, will no doubt be sated by the fact that the majority of Breaking Brad is devoted to that very thing as they jump though a bunch of cop show hoops in order to get the info they need to advance the plot. Thus we get a foot chase through 1977 London as they use Loki’s magical trickery to head off Brad as he flees his movie premier and later we get their version of a good cop, bad cop interrogation as they grill their prisoner. It’s genuinely great to see them revert – no matter how temporarily – back to simply walking the streets of their multiversal beat and we also get to witness a boat load of old school, Loki, fuckery as he unloads his bag of tricks to ensnare his prey. It’s been a while since the God of Mischief last had a chance to stretch his legs and here we get him creating illusions aplenty, a spot of energy projection and even pins his quarry to a wall using some familiarly horned shadows.
Later we also get a taste of Mobius’ mindset when Brad’s jibes about their stolen lives hit a little too close to home and he loses his composure and Loki even gets to try out a little old villainy when he threatens Brad with being crushed alive to extort Sylvie’s location.
However, as fun as that all is, it proves to be a bit of Loki-esque smoke and mirrors itself as season 2 doesn’t actually seem to be about anything as of yet. Despite a tremendously entertaining first episode, Loki’s sophomore season was, all the show is doing so far is take a lot of time cleaning up the fallout from season 1 one by one. The last installment took an entire episode to straighten out Loki’s timeslipping and this one now focuses on the effects on the TVA as a whole in the wake of the recent revelations and pinning down Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie.
While the show doesn’t have the plodding, ponderous feel of Marvel’s previous small screen excursion, the little loved Secret Invasion, it does feel like its jogging on the spot as it isn’t particularly interested in covering any new ground. Yes, the time warping cop stuff is a gas, but all the malarkey concerning Kate Dickie’s bomb-laying general carries a weird lack of weight considering all the lives it takes and the battle to minimise the damage and bring Dox in is noticably substandard. Where the first season forged new ground with over half of its episodes (its finale is still the game-changing catalyst to the Multiversal Saga that the MCU is still yet to do justice to), yet, this episode is content to go over old stuff with no new results. Finding Sylvie doesn’t really accomplish anything yet that I can see and while there are hints that she might eventually aid the TVA in whatever the hell happens next, she’s still adamant that they are the problem.
Still slick, still perky, but Loki season 2 seems to have already lost some of the momentum of that cracking first episode. Still, there’s still a ways to go yet and with Revonna Renslayer, Miss Minutes and at least one variant of He Who Remains lurking in the multiversal wings, there’s plenty of time for Loki to reclaim some of that earlier spark it had, earlier in the scared timeline.
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