Loki Season 2 Episode 1 review: A new team comes together as reality falls apart
Marvel/Disney+Along with the premiere of Loki Season 2, here’s a look into the good, the bad, and the time-traveling aspects of Episode 1.
Loki — the Disney+ spin-off that follows the MCU‘s favorite mischief god — is set to return the small screen with an explosive second season.
The first season, which debuted in 2021, followed Loki as he learned to become more empathetic while the fate of the multiverse hung in the balance.
And now Season 2 will have the God of Mischief and his crew try to piece together a fractured reality while dealing with violative personal relationships and an unstable, dangerous threat. Warning: spoilers for Loki Season 2, Episode 1 ahead!
Loki is slipping through time as his heart slips through his fingers
As the season begins, fans can see Loki being pulled through the past and present as a result of Sylvie, his female variant, pushing him through a time door at the end of Season 1.
When the pair were last seen in the season finale, Loki was trying to get Sylvie to not kill He Who Remains, a Kang variant who created the TVA (Time Variance Authority) and Sacred Timeline in an effort to stop a multiverisal war.
Despite his best efforts and their blossoming relationship, Sylvie ultimately decided to doom the multiverse for her revenge quest and betrayed Loki, sending him to a universe where his partner, Mobius, and the TVA hunters don’t know who he is.
Though Loki ends up finding his correct universe, the cure for his time slipping has him on the crossroads of pruning himself from time and space as a whole.
And, to top everything off, he still doesn’t know where Sylvie is or even if she survived after killing He Who Remains, which is incredibly complicated as he needs her to help save the TVA as a whole.
But, there’s no telling if she survived after killing He Who Remains or where she ended up. Plus, there’s the question of if Loki can even forgive her for betraying him when he was, for once, thinking of the greater good rather just himself.
Sylvie and Loki have always been an interesting pair as Sylvie is, technically, a version of Loki, though she does have her own mind. Only time will tell if Season 2 will have the two halves of the Norse god reunite for better or for worse.
New TVA members include a quirky inventor
Fans have already been introduced to the TVA hunters, including their leader B-15, who led the charge to arrest Loki in Season 1.
However, the first addition to the unique cast come in the form of Ke Huy Quan’s Ouroboros or OB, for short. OB works in the TVA’s repairs and advancement department and quickly establishes himself as the brain of the operation as with his brain and Loki being pulled into the past, the two come up with a solution to cure his time slipping.
Along with curing Loki, OB is the one who discovers the issue with the Time Loom, the source of the TVA’s power. While not much is known about it when the season begins, fans soon realize that it’s becoming corrupted as it can’t handle the branches forming on the Scared Timeline.
OB explains to Loki and Mobius that, if they can’t figure out how to keep the Time Loom from breaking away due to the force of the branches, the TVA will be destroyed and the multiverse will be thrown into chaos.
It seems like one of the biggest theme for Loki Season 2 will be time travel and the multiverse as a whole, which is what the recent Marvel Phases have been dealing with in certain projects like Doctor Strange 2 and Ms. Marvel.
As Kang the Conqueror is supposed to be the overarching villain for the upcoming Avenger films, it’s nice that Loki is getting back to the multiverse issue and how it will be a huge part of the upcoming war both in the show and in the MCU as a whole.
Loki Season 2 Episode 1 score: 4/5 stars
The first episode expertly sets up what the season will be dealing with: finding Sylvie, stopping whatever Kang variants that pop up, and fixing the Time Loom.
There’s still a ton of questions that need to be answered, especially when it comes to the multiverse to come but, in the meantime, it’s awesome to see the gang back together with some new and interesting faces sprinkled amongst them.
It’ll be interesting to see how the show handles its background issues of Mobius discovering who he is outside of the TVA and how known Thor villain Zaniac will fit into the rest of the cast.
However, the biggest draw for this season is the fact that Loki, the villain who took an innocent man’s eye straight out of his skull in The Avengers, is now the most level-headed person in the cast.
Loki’s arc from villain to anti-hero to hero has been a tumultuous one, but he’s the biggest example of how a character fans thought they knew can grow and change in the best ways. Hopefully the season will continue to explore his growth and cement him as a full-fledged hero.
Loki Season 2, Episode 1 is now streaming on Disney+. You can check out our other coverage below: