Loki S02E01 Review: Alternate Timeline Up The Wazoo

Loki, Season 2, Episode 1: Ouroboros

It's been some time since the ending of Loki's first season, and what initially seemed to be the introduction to how the MCU will be tackling split timelines and alternate universes. Since then, we've got What If, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania... none of which had anything paid lip service to anything that goes on in Loki. In fact, despite being billed as the 'multiverse saga', there really isn't much interconnectivity within all of these MCU projects, and any connection to building Kang the Conqueror up ended up with two variants that get killed off at the end of their respective debuts.

Which means that, while it's a bit of a disappointment to the audience at large, Loki remains perfectly standalone, with the only required viewing being the first season and a passing knowledge of pre-Endgame movies. Which leads to the season two premiere and... it's not boring, at least. Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson always make for good watching, and the scripting is a bit more exciting than the dreary Secret Invasion, which was our last MCU project. 

And... it's an okay viewing, but it feels like just more of the same. We pay off the cliffhanger of the previous season (the Kang-ruled TVA is just a previous incarnation, Loki travelled back in time, and memory wipes are involved which accounts for the TVA peeps not remembering him), and really not much else beyond that. I admit I've never been a fan of the idea of taking time travel stories too far, and having time-travel within a space-where-time-is-not-supposed-to-work-properly is just making my eyes roll. But the show itself doesn't even really take the time travel all that seriously with how flippant Loki and Mobius are treating it, so eh, whatever.

But more than that... it really did feel like more of the same from the first season. The specifics are different, and Loki and company are after a different bad guy now (Sylvie, who went rogue; and the potential arrival of a lot of Kangs) but ultimately they're still trying to work outside the bizarre bureaucracy of the TVA, while dealing with Loki's new unpredictable powers of shifting and sliding through time, again, within the TVA dimension where time isn't supposed to pass. 

And, again, Loki himself is a delight to watch. Unlike the unfortunately stunted scripting in Secret Invasion, I really do get the feeling that Loki and Mobius's actors are allowed to just ham it up. It doesn't really work all the time, and the titular character of Ouroboros -- the latest in the kooky characters that work in the TVA, a nebbish archivist who is both helpful and confusing to our allies -- didn't work at all for me. But the main characters are going strong, and we're just focusing only on Loki and Mobius. There are some worldbuilding being thrown around, like a bunch of new judges, the Kang conspiracy being shown to them, and some kind of gigantic Time Loom that's overloading. The episode's climax is a pretty standalone one of trying to get Loki anchored in a point in time, which really is a bit too overdramatic for the relative lack of payoff that I felt it gave us. But, again, it's all executed relatively competently and most of the 'episodic' parts of the episode is nicely standalone. I think it's partially just an excuse to have a big glowing CGI setpiece for the climax. 

There's just a bunch of scenes here dedicated to exposition, too, with Loki explaining both to a bamboozled Mobius and to audiences that didn't go and reread a refresher of the first season about the events of the last season's finale. But I do appreciate that it's told rather flippantly between comedic moments of Loki sliding back and forth through the timelines of the TVA.

There are some bits of foreshadowing about the other characters -- as mentioned, we're introduced to a bunch of new judges. The Hunters from the previous season return, though none of them really have much of a personality (B-15 is just more recognizable than anything due to her longer screentime). Ravonna's still MIA. And Sylvie gets a brief short scene at the end just trying to experience regular human life as she stumbles into a burger joint. 

As you can probably tell by the length of this review... I really didn't have much to say. I most certainly enjoyed this more than most of Secret Invasion, but that's a low bar to clear and a good chunk of it was due to comedy more than anything. I'm still unconvinced that with the novelty of the first season wearing off that just repeating the same beats (and not capitalizing on either time travel or alternate variants) are going to be super-engaging. Still optimistic, though!

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Apparently, the podcast that Casey's listening to is the same one that Steven Grant was listening to in order to stay awake in Moon Knight. 
• The mural Loki points to that depicts the incoming war features several Kangs wearing the comic-book costume, which is also the outfit worn by the Kang variant in Quantumania.
• A smaller version of the big Time Loom thing is also seen in the post-credits of Quantumania with "Victor Timely", though that post-credits scene seemed to just be a scene lifted entirely from later on in this show. 
• Sylvie lands in Broxton, Oklahoma, the location of New Asgard in the comics.