Loki has always been a bit of an outrageous outlier in the Marvel-verse. Whereas other spinoffs – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Secret Invasion – have taken place very firmly within the world we all know and are getting vaguely tired of, Loki chose instead to tread boldly where no series has ever trodden before.
Unfortunately, that also meant drawing on a library full of lore, so buckle up and let me refresh your memory. Series one introduced us to the Time Variance Authority (TVA): aka, if the Matrix was made out of paperwork. Here, Loki (who managed to escape the Avengers after they went back in time and changed the timeline) found himself captured by the TVA and at odds with an army of nattily-named Minutemen soldiers, charged with making sure that the ‘Sacred Timeline’ is protected; that is, that nobody messes with the flow of things and creates alternate timelines where they’re not supposed to.
Of course, that went down the pan spectacularly, as these things do, when it turned out the person in charge of the TVA was a raging psychopath. With a name like Kang the Conqueror, it’s impossible not to be.
Still with me? Bear with, it’s going to get messier. At the end of season one, perhaps typically for a raging narcissist, Loki managed to fall in love with one of his parallel-timeline selves, manic pixie scheme girl Sylvie, played by Sophia di Martino. Did I mention he’d escaped? And convolutedly got into cahoots with TVA Agent Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson), from whose eyes the scales had fallen on the benevolence of his agency’s activities?
Anyway, now Sylvie’s missing, much to Loki’s dismay – oh, and Kang’s death at her hands means the Conqueror™’s zillions of parallel-timeline selves have been unleashed upon the multiverse. Why? Best not to think about it too hard. But basically, the universe is in deep trouble, whichever version of it you happen to be in.
With this much narrative gristle to chew on, Loki Season Two has an awful lot of plot to fight its way through. And for the most part, it succeeds in making things palatable. A mild narrative snafu in which Loki is being yanked around through time is fixed neatly in episode one, leaving him free to fixate on what he really wants: to find Sylvie and stop the timeline from imploding.
The only problem is, this isn’t actually very exciting. Despite them being essentially the same person, Sylvie and Loki’s romance never quite felt convincing, and while Hiddleston, trained at RADA and with stage appearances as both Hamlet and Coriolanus under his belt, sells the pants off every scene he’s in, screaming “We have to protect the Sacred Timeline!” with a straight face (a tall order in anyone’s books) – God of Mischief? Please. He’s the God of mild slaps on the wrist and longing glances.
And how do you solve a problem like Kang the Conqueror? Jonathan Majors, who made his debut in the role last year, certainly hams it up creepily in the role as a stuttering, alternate-reality version of the multiversal lunatic, but with the knowledge that his big screen MCU leading-debut, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, has been kicked down the road to 2026, with the actor’s future with the franchise possibly depending on the result of his forthcoming trial related to charges of domestic violence, all of which he denies, it’s oddly difficult to engage in his quest to remake the universe in his image.
It’s a shame, because this plotline also sucks the oxygen away from other, better parts of the show. Ke Huy Quan (he of Everything Everywhere All At Once megastardom) makes a sweet, if truncated, appearance as general TVA fix-it man O.B., while Wilson’s agent Mobius is mostly relegated to running around after Loki and telling him to “staaap” doing whatever he’s doing (spoiler alert: he doesn’t).
It’s all a bit wearying. When half the appeal of watching the show is hunting for Easter eggs that hark back to previous shows (in one scene, Loki smashes a cocktail glass on the floor à la Thor, shouting, “another!”) and the story’s predictable enough that you can call every twist, it begins to feel like the wheels are coming off. Does the Sacred Timeline really need protecting? Perhaps it’s time to let it wind down.
