‘Loki’ Season 2 review: A fun ride through space and time

With no one at the Time Variance Authority (TVA) remembering him, including his best buddy TVA agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), Loki is in for a lonely time. He realises there is no time for maudlin meanderings as the branching timelines, with no pruning, will lead to the collapse of the temporal loom and other disasters. With the death of He Who Remains, (that’s slightly ironic) everyone has free choice and can choose to live out their preferred version of themselves, resulting in further splitting of timelines.

The cute cartoon clock and mascot of TVA, Miss Minutes (voiced by Tara Strong), has gone rogue as has Judge Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Loki himself is time-slipping — slipping through time, popping up in the past and present till he is able to reach a time frame where Mobius recognises him.

The two go to meet Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), who works in the Repairs and Advancement Department of the TVA and knows everything about every machine in the TVA, which he keeps in working order, apart from writing the TVA Official Handbook.

After guiding them to the relevant pages in the manual, which Loki and Mobius struggle to make sense of, Ouroboros (that pun rocks) tells them the only way to stop Loki from time slipping is to use the temporal aural extractor, rip Loki “violently from every thread of time” and do it right or else all Mobius’ skin would peel off.

In the meantime, in 1982 Oklahoma, Sylvie finds a version of her life that she might get used to. There is however not much rest for the wicked as the branches are getting too great to pass through the loop that holds the temporal loom and unless drastic measures are taken, all will be lost. In a swinging 1977 London, there is a TVA agent who is an action movie star, Brad Wolfe (Rafael Casal). Loki and Mobius end up at the premiere of his latest movie, Zaniac, which Wolfe sniffily explains is an “elevated thriller.”

An inventor/confidence trickster, Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), who we saw in that end-credit sequence of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is showing off his inventions at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 where he grandly proclaims “all science is fiction until it is a fact.” Though he shows Renslayer his refrigerator chair, he has to make a precipitous exit when the person he sold the mechanical trousers to, comes calling. Apart from being an inventor of fabled machines, Timely is also an inventor of words including “schadeocracy”.

A still from ‘Loki’
| Photo Credit:
Disney+ Hotstar/Marvel

There is a connection between Ouroboros, Timely and the “knot of unrefined time” which Loki, Mobius Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and a reluctant Sylvie have to sort out. There is some help from fanboy Casey (Eugene Cordero) who wants his TVA Official Handbook signed. Incidentally, there is a lot of autograph swapping on various copies of the said handbook.

The writing is sharp — as Mobius wisely observes, “There is a lot to unpack when you are basically in a relationship with yourself.” Time travel fanatics can hug themselves with joy at lines such as “a utopia at the end of time.” In Season 2, Loki as Hiddleston has said is beginning to understand himself and make connections. He tells Sylvie, “Annihilation is easy, trying to fix what is broken is hard, hope is hard.”

Mobius is charming as ever, always on the lookout for a good pie — every iteration of that key lime pie looked delicious.. The production design, while not on the planet-destroying scale of season 1, is gorgeous nevertheless.

Even while the God of Mischief has exchanged his prankster togs for a heroic skin (he does admit to throwing Tony Stark off a building), the second season of Loki is fun all round.

Loki Season 2 premiers on Disney+ Hotstar on October 6, 2023, with fresh episodes dropping every Friday till November 10, 2023