Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Loki’ Season 2 on Disney+, Where The Trickster God And His Allies Traipse Through Time And The Marvel Multiverse

Loki returns to Disney+ in the midst of new threats to the sacred timeline. Last season, Tom Hiddleston’s mischievous god linked up with Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie, one of any number of Loki variants but a super powerful one at that, and the duo slipped the bonds of time to ultimately face an all-powerful being. He offered them a stark choice: stifling order or cataclysmic chaos. And while it could be said that the dedicated civil servants down at the central timekeeping department integral to Loki were already wrapped up with mitigating chaos – a group that includes Owen Wilson, Wunmi Mosaku, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Eugene Cordero – things got even more precarious. If everybody’s a variant, what is real? What can be saved? And how can anyone really live their life? Lots of questions. But Loki’s on the case. A quick warning: crossing the threshold of this Stream It or Skip It review will increase your likelihood of spaghettification by 7000%.

LOKI – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: He’s known by many names. Kang the Conqueror, or maybe just problematic, if we’re talking Jonathan Majors and his presence in the MCU. But inside the new version of the Time Variance Authority established by the temporal-jumbling events of Loki season one, he is He Who Remains. And it’s his granite statue which now towers over the TVA. 

The Gist: Last season, when Loki arrived back in what he thought was the place he had left, he gazed out at that giant statue and knew nothing would likely ever be the same again. Worse, Mobius (Wilson) and Hunter B-15 (Mosaku) no longer knew who he was – his and Sylvie’s tense encounter with He Who Remains had shifted everything into disarray. And that’s what he’s trying to outrun as season two begins. Separated from Sylvie – she booted his ass through a time door, seemingly to choose her own side against HWR – Loki is trying to make Mobius and the TVA understand the rift in their reality. But that’s difficult to do when your physical self keeps pulling a Steve Miller Band. As time keeps on slipping into the future for an appearing and disappearing Loki, the TVA observes its temporal branches multiplying, and General Dox (Kate Dickie) has decided to do something about it, with or without Mobius and B-15’s help.

Where’s Sylvie? That’s a question on everyone’s minds, but how they answer it depends on which version of reality they think they’re in. B-15 wants to tell all of the people who work at the TVA the truth, that what they believe has been manipulated and warped, their brain pans literally wiped, and then wiped again. Mobius wants to sort out a more rational solution, even if “rational” has never really had a leg to stand on in something as nebulous as their workplace. Remember when the Time-Keepers were revealed as frauds and lots of people just shrugged? At the Time Variance Authority, it’s always business as unusual. What’s occurring now is just another version.

Can any of this be fixed? Well, that’s where Ke Huy Quan comes in. As Ouroboros – his friends in the future, or the past, call him “O.B.” – he fulfills TVA work orders that arrive in his cluttered nook of an office via pneumatic tube. Got a problem with your temporal loom? He can build you a temporal aura extractor. He can even show you where raw time itself is refined. You just gotta trust that whatever changes are made won’t rip your skin off. And if everything works out, someone like Loki might be reunited with Sylvie, and maybe He Who Remains doesn’t permanently remake existence. Or something like that. 

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? WandaVision was so great at keeping its characters forward even as the storyline’s mechanics of weird kept shifting the realities that surrounded them. And The Umbrella Academy, which is set to return for a fourth and final season, had its own fun with superheroes and alternate timelines.  

Our Take: Tune in to Loki to find out what Tom Hiddelston looks like as stretched and pounded chewing gum. The visual effect employed to represent Loki’s trouble with time slipping is very arresting. (Or terrible, from Mobius’s point of view. “It looks like you’re either being born, or dying, or both at the same time. It’s freaking me out.”) But it looks so cool as to make all the confusing talk in this series about pruned and branched timelines and its titular trickster existing in the past and future and everywhere in between extremely worth it. Loki’s dynamic visual aesthetic acts as a backstop to its terrific cast, who have a lot of fun bouncing phrases that have no end and no beginning off of each other. Gugu Mbatha-Raw makes us believe in Ravonna Renslayer as a whole person, with emotions as tortured as a lot of the time talk can get in Loki. Owen Wilson is doing Owen Wilson – doesn’t he always? – but he works wonders with Mobius, who is jaded as hell but still a believer in people. And the evolving relationship between two Lokis, one himself and the other known as Sylvie, is sure to escalate in season two as the decisions they’ve made in this forever fraying universe become even more significant. As bananas as things get in Loki, its cast keeps putting down roots. And for that matter, Key Huy Quan is already a wonderful addition to it.  

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Everybody knows Marvel adores a post-credits scene, and in Loki, Sylvie walks through a time door to find herself in 1980s Oklahoma and the bustling idyll of a brown and yellow plastic McDonald’s. In which branched timeline does the McRib perpetually exist?

Sleeper Star: Kasra Farahani gets the gold star here. Thanks to the Loki production designer, the environs of the Time Variance Authority always appear as this intriguing mix of bizarre and utilitarian, and Farahani really makes that concept sing here in the early going of season two, especially since so much of it is occurring in deeper and weirder parts of the TVA. It’s like, imagine the control room of a decommissioned Soviet nuclear reactor. Now imagine that crossed with Herman Miller’s “Action Office” concept from the 1970s. And then imagine all of THAT crossed with Marvel’s established palette. In short, every visual in Loki stands way, way out.  

Most Pilot-y Line: [Owen Wilson voice] “‘Hey, everything you’ve been doing is wrong and all your gods are dead.’ How are people gonna take that?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The storytelling chaos that Loki sews can cause headaches. But this series remains worthwhile and entertaining because its cast is so great. Tom Hiddleston, Wunmi Mosaku, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Owen Wilson, and Sophia Di Martino keep us in this thing even as the premise sometimes skids along the edge of a deep, unknowable chasm.   

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.