Review of Loki, Season Two: Marvel’s multiverse strains under its own complexity
Andrew Bernard
Disney’s enormous TV and film production schedule often makes me wonder who its intended audience is. For decades, the answer would have been “children” or “families.” But Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox and its decision to take the Marvel and Star Wars franchises in darker directions means it is now making quite a lot that seems more geared for adults, including, most obviously, the R-rated Deadpool franchise.
And its reliance on existing intellectual properties to spin off new series and films makes for some particularly baffling results. Take Disney’s most recent Star Wars outing, the TV series Ahsoka. While the main character makes an appearance in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka’s backstory is based on the animated show The Clone Wars. So, despite looking like a stand-alone series for older audiences, viewers who haven’t seen 133 preceding episodes of a children’s cartoon will frequently be lost amid the writers’ false assumption that we know or care who these people are.
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The existence of The Clone Wars, however, means that there is at least a built-in fan base of now-older children and adults who grew up during the show’s 12-year run who know these characters and want to see what they’re up to. The same cannot be said for the second season of Loki, the time-traveling multiverse spinoff of The Avengers.
One of the charms of the show’s first season was that the show immediately pivots to a fresh setting and doesn’t expect you to have seen or remembered the plots of Marvel’s five interlocking “phases” of 32 films and 15 seasons of television. No homework required.
Most of the references to the wider Marvel franchise are contained within the first five minutes of the first episode and don’t recur. Some comic bookery and multiverse nonsense, though, is necessary to explain the basic plot. Our Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is not the Loki who was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. Having escaped from New York during the events of the first Avengers movie, this Loki is a “variant” from an alternative timeline. Gestapo-like agents from the Time Variance Authority, or TVA, warp in to arrest him for “crimes against the sacred timeline,” the one version of the universe that they permit to exist.
What follows in the first season is often more like a detective show or mystery story in the vein of Lost or Apple TV+’s excellent Silo than yet another superhero plot.
What is the TVA? Who runs it? What is it for? Having been stripped of his powers, Loki teams up with Mobius (Owen Wilson) to track down a female version of Loki who has been killing TVA agents. The viewer is helped in getting through all the plot with well-done casting and structure. Most of the TVA agents have alphanumeric names like “B-15” and “X-5,” but their importance declines as we approach the big bad, known mysteriously as He Who Remains, who lives in a void at the end of time. While the lady Loki is given the name “Sylvie,” the other Lokis dispense with individual names and just go by appearance. There’s a child Loki and an alligator Loki, and Richard E. Grant as a delightfully 1960s Loki with the classic underwear-on-the-outside look.
All of this ties up when Loki and Sylvie alone confront He Who Remains in the Season One finale. It turns out that He built the TVA to prevent war between the variant universes by maintaining a single timeline. Sylvie kills him, Loki goes back in time, and the branches of the multiverse begin to diverge chaotically.
It’s unfortunate that that neat cliffhanger of an ending of the first season leads to whiplash in the early episodes of Season Two. With the big bad having been killed off, suddenly, we’re supposed to remember who all these alphanumeric side characters are and what their agenda is. The homework is back.
Hiddleston and Wilson chase down “X-5,” who is hiding in 1970s London. Who is X-5 again? Why is he in the 1970s? Why London? I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters.
The writers for this season must have thought that time travel and the concept of a multiverse are intrinsically a lot more fun than they actually are. “Our heroes will go to swinging London! The Chicago World’s Fair! An Oklahoma McDonald’s in the 1980s!”
But there’s no rhyme or reason for why our confusingly large cast of characters is going to these places. And with an entire multiverse to work with, the writers really ought to be dreaming a little bigger.
Other recent “multiverse” fare has done this better. Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is exhilaratingly bright and light with a punk rock anarchist Spider-Man, a T-Rex Spider-Man, and an Indian Spider-Man who lives in a Bollywood version of New York called Mumbattan. Everything Everywhere All At Once had kung fu and hot dog fingers and told a surprisingly grounded and moving story about family and belonging. It also had Ke Huy Quan making an Oscar-winning return to acting after his childhood stardom in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies.
Loki’s creators have uncreatively hired Quan for their own multiverse to play Ouroboros, a sort of IT guy for the space-time continuum. Where the fun of Waymond Wang in Everything was seeing Quan as a loser, a kung fu master, and a debonair film star in the space of a few minutes, in Loki, he’s unfortunately made to play closer to type, essentially playing a grown-up version of The Goonies’s Data, pulling gadgets out from under his desk and rifling through exposition.
While Quan at least brings energy, the same cannot be said for Jonathan Majors as the Season Two variant of He Who Remains. In Season One, Majors played He as a megalomaniac, but here, his “character” has a stutter and a Frederick Douglass-like haircut. I couldn’t tell if he was supposed to be good, bad, simple, or just incompetent. One of the best moments of the season so far is his death.
Season Two of Loki does still have quite a lot of good moments, often driven by Wilson, who never acts as though he’s in a superhero show, which is all for the better. Hiddleston, too, has now played Loki for 12 years in seven films and is great as the God of Mischief. Much more so than the first season, however, Season Two of Loki has tried to go for some overplayed superhero notes. When a rogue faction of the TVA blows up thousands of timelines, our heroes tearfully react as though some sort of multiversal 9/11 has just occurred, even though it’s been established that eliminating realities was their job for hundreds of years. Everyone quickly moves on.
Considering that He Who Remains is being set up as a major villain for the next tentpole Avengers film in 2026 — comic book fans might know him better as Kang the Conqueror — it’s possible that the Season Two finale or subsequent seasons of Loki could set up a clearer bad guy or build toward something more exciting. But so far, this timeline just seems a bit dull. As of now, Loki is funny and weird enough that I’m invested for the final two episodes that have yet to air. But given how uneven, confusing, and, at times, plodding this season has been, I can’t recommend that someone pick it up from scratch.
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Andrew Bernard is the Washington correspondent for The Algemeiner.