Loki Season 2 Episode 2 review: A long-awaited reunion amid destruction

❘ Published: 2023-10-13T01:00:00

Marvel/Disney+

Loki Season 2 Episode 2 continues to ramp up the action as characters finally reunite only to suffer a devastating loss.

Just two years after its explosive first season, Marvel‘s Loki has finally returned to give fans an action-packed Season 2.

Though the first episode of Season 2, fans were reintroduced to Loki, Mobius, and other TVA hunters, along with some fun, quirky new characters.

However, Episode 2 raises the stakes exponentially as some fan-favorite characters endure a tense reunion while the good guys lose their biggest battle yet. Warning: spoilers ahead!

Loki and Sylvie find their way back to one another, unfortunately

In Episode 2, it’s revealed that Hunter X-5, or Brad Wolfe as he’s known in another timeline, has found where Sylvie is – but he didn’t pursue her as he likes his life on this version of Earth as a movie star.

Thanks to some mildly horrifying torture that includes a mime-like box, Loki and Mobius manage to figure out where Sylvie is hiding and it happens to be in the 1980s where she’s working as a McDonald’s cashier.

Understandably, the reunion between Loki and Sylvie is incredibly tense as she’s still angry with Loki for trying to stop her revenge quest against the TVA and Loki is upset that she kicked him through a time portal that ended with him having to prune himself out of space and time altogether.

Honestly, while anyone can sympathize with Sylvie’s hostility to He Who Remains and the TVA, her anger towards Loki feels a bit misplaced as he was trying to help her see that her actions would affect billions of people.

While Sylvie is angry that she was taken from her timeline, her murdering He Who Remains only doomed billions of innocent lives to be lost and she was just too stubborn to realize that – which makes sense when you remember that she is, at the end of the day, just another version of Loki.

But the reason why their reunion is so fantasticating is because it feels like Loki is meeting a past version of himself; specifically the version of himself we saw in the Thor and Avengers films.

Back then, Loki was incredibly angry and lashing out at the world as he thought his father, Odin, didn’t love him as much as Thor and he felt like he was the one true ruler of the universe. He didn’t care how many innocent lives he doomed by his actions, as long as he was on the throne, that was all that matters.

And that’s still where Sylvie is as she’s still reckoning with her trauma from the TVA, so she thinks her decision to kill He Who Remains is correct. And, thanks to the classic Loki stubbornness, she directs her anger at Loki instead of herself for doing the same thing the TVA did to her.

It’ll be interesting to see how Loki and Sylvie’s relationships reforms as they both hold a lot of strong, negative feelings towards one another, though Loki seems to just want to bring Sylvie back onto the team while Sylvie just wants to stay in the ’80s.

Loki Season 2 sets a new MCU body count record

The Temporal Loom, aka the source of power for the TVA, is breaking down as it cannot handle all of the new branches formed because of Sylvie killing He Who Remains and unleashing the full force of the multiverse.

Because of this, some rogue TVA hunters, including a high-ranking general, start bombing each new branch, which effectively kills billions of people who live in those universes.

It’s so horrifying to watch even though fans don’t get to see the carnage; just the diminishing universe branches are enough to make your heart hurt as you realize that so many lives were just lost.

To the TVA hunters and general, the ends justify the means because the branches exist outside of the Sacred Timeline, so they shouldn’t have existed at all. They don’t care that they erased billions of lives.

But, at the end of the day, those universes should have been allowed to thrive even if they weren’t expected and the callous nature of some TVA members makes it incredibly easy to sympathize with Sylvie and her cause.

Plus, as most Marvel fans will realize, this one episode now leads the charge for having the largest body count in any MCU movie or show, including Avengers: Infinity War.

Thanos may have snapped half of the universe out of existence, but everyone came back, even if it was five years later.

The bombing of the time branches holds more weight because those universes can never come back; those lives were lost forever and have created an unclear-able mark on the TVA for all time.

Loki Season 2 Episode 2 review score: 5/5

This may be the second episode of the season, but the stakes feel like they’ve been raised so much for the remaining episodes.

While it’s fantastic to see Loki and Sylvie back together, though one of them hates the reunion, only time will tell if they both can work through their betrayals and become one again.

As for the TVA’s branch issue, the good guys are obviously trying to fix the Time Loom, which is a noble cause, but now fans are aware that there are still some TVA members who still have no regard for the bigger picture.

While Loki has become a more empathetic character, it’ll interesting to see how he tries to get everyone on the same of saving the universe, especially when the team still has to deal with the upcoming Kang variant issue.

Loki Season 2 Episodes 1 and 2 are now streaming on Disney+. You can check out our other coverage below: