Recently, the second season of Loki finished. Many people, like myself, expected it to be horrible, like the rest of Marvel’s more recent movies and TV shows.
I, however, was pleasantly surprised by all of Loki’s twists and turns, and about how the writers delicately handled real-world topics like free will and autophobia (the fear of being alone.)
(Beware! Spoilers for Loki seasons one and two ahead)
Loki’s second season picks up literally right where the first one left off, with Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) killing He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) and pushing Loki (Tom Hiddleston) into a time door, sending him back into the TVA.
Loki can’t just go back and find Sylvie, though, because he goes through something called “Time Slipping,” a very painful looking process where Loki quite literally slips through time and ends up in other timelines. This makes for some very entertaining scenes, as Loki can’t control it – yet.
In one of these scenes, we get introduced to another one of the things that Loki excels at: Characters. In this scene, Loki and Mobius are trying to find a way to stop his time slipping.
They go to the one person in the TVA who would know what is happening, a interdimensional IT guy of sorts, Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan). During this scene, Loki slips into the past.
Loki has a conversation with Ouroboros and then, in the present, Ouroboros remembers the conversation and relays it to Mobius as it is happening in the past, where it has already happened. Or something.
Normally, scenes written like this don’t end well, with them being awkward or stunted. The way that this was written, along with the actors’ chemistry, makes it an actually entertaining scene to watch.
The banter between Loki and Mobius also makes the show worth watching, as they don’t overdo the amount of it, and they act like real people. This was something that Marvel has also struggled with recently.
Anyway, Loki fixes his time slipping, and the whole gang’s back together (except Sylvie.) In one episode. This was not what I had expected.
I had thought that the season would be about trying to stop his time slipping, with it acting as one of the multiverse McGuffins that Marvel loves to scatter in their show. Instead, it was used to remind watchers of how great the last season was, and of how the second one will carry that same torch.
The second episode revolves around Loki finding Sylvie. Again, this was something that could have stretched out over the entire season, with the main cast going on a highly monetizable treasure hunt, but Loki found Sylvie in one episode.
Again, the amazing characters of Loki come into play here again. Sylvie makes it known that she does not want to help the TVA, only wanting to live her life working at a McDonalds.
She only comes into play after another character erases almost all of the timelines, because it directly affects her. This causes some conflict between Sylvie and Loki, as one wants to stop the multiversal war that is supposedly coming, and the other wants to just let everything grow on its own.
This is where the producers talk about free will, and the extent of which people should have it. They don’t ever present a right or wrong answer to the question, because it is a very complicated and difficult thing to discuss, but it’s there. And that matters.
The characters all seem like real people, with their own flaws and their own things that they are good at. The immersion of the reader is amazing, and it feels like a real story, instead of whatever has been going on at Marvel Studios.
Now, let’s talk about the last episode, to keep the rest of it spoiler free(ish.)
The cinematography comes into play here. There are so many “Screenshot able” moments, things that could easily become a background.
The music is amazing, and Marvel finally avoided one of the pitfalls of their things before.
They made a all-powerful being out of a character, in this case Loki, who can now manipulate time to his will. Thankfully, Marvel didn’t follow in Secret Invasion‘s horrid footsteps. In Secret Invasion, A character gets the powers of all of the heroes and villains in their universe, with zero drawbacks.
This is terrible on its own, but the character that got the powers was a little snobby and a completely flat character, but it gets even worse. Somehow, Marvel messed up on their own story, saying that the reason that there was all of the powers is because they used DNA to do it, that they collected from the big battle in endgame.
The character used powers that were 100% not in endgame, however.
In Loki, Loki becomes an all-powerful multiversal being, but there is a drawback. He essentially can’t leave his chair, or else the entire multiverse unravels and dies. They essentially rounded out Loki’s quest to belong and to have a purpose without making another literal god.
This was one of the big reasons that I loved Loki, and you would too. That, and the costume designs.
They were very very cool.
In conclusion, I would rate Loki an 8/10 stars, because while it was amazing, there is a very good chance that there will be nothing like this for a loooong time. That spoils Loki a little bit for me, at least.
