Warning: Possible Spoilers for Loki Season 2 Episode 1 “Ouroboros” and Episode 2 “Breaking Bad”
Over two years after ending its first season Loki, one of Marvel’s better received streaming series, returns to Disney Plus for a much-anticipated season 2 which picks up pretty much exactly where the first season left off with Loki banished to a TVA where no one recognizes him after failing to stop his female variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) from killing the Kang variant He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors).
From there Loki discovers he is glitching in and out of time and the TVA he ended up in is simply the past version of the TVA and as he is ripped, literally, between the past and present he must team-up with Mobius(Owen Wilson) and newcomer Ouroboros aka OB( Ke Huy Quan) to stop himself from being ripped apart by time and fix the Time Loom which was damaged at the end of season 1 due to branching timelines caused by He Who Remains’ Death
It is good to see the main cast back together, especially Mobius and Loki who have always had a great rapport and OB, played by Ke Huy Quan, best known for his captivating role in the recent Everything Everywhere All at Once as well as his childhood roles of Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies makes for a great new addition as he tries to figure out how to help Loki and save the Sacred Timeline.
Three characters who are noticeably absent in the premiere, aside from an appearance in the end credits by Sylvie at a McDonald’s in 1982, are Sylvie, Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and He Who Remains, who was killed by Sylvie at the end of Season 1, but I have a feeling he may return in some capacity, maybe even a flashback and Jonathan Majors is playing a different Kang variant this season.
To make up for the absence of He Who Remains the premiere episode sets General Dox (Kate Dickie who is probably best known for playing Lysa Arryn in Game of Thrones) as the villain as she seeks to prune the branching timelines at the expense of billions of lives.
General Dox’s plan very quickly comes to fruition in the second episode of season 2 “Breaking Bad” which sees a no longer glitching Loki team up with Mobius to hunt down rogue Hunter X-5(Rafael Casal) who is masquerading as actor Brad Wolfe, star of the movie Zaniac, in the sacred timeline. They end up torturing Brad to find Sylvie’s location, but are surprised to find out General Dox is bombing all the splintering timelines.
Like OB in the premiere episode Brad appears to be a great addition for season 2, offering an entertaining foil for both Loki and Mobius., but Loki in particular. The scene in which Loki torture him is both tense and slightly entertaining and plays out how you would expect it to.
Loki and Mobius get the location of Sylvie from Hunter X-5 and Loki and Sylvie receive a very tense reunion. I for one would have liked to see the reunion drawn out a little more, maybe even for a least one more episode, but with only 6 episodes and what looks like a fair amount of ground to cover it is probably for the best Loki and Sylvie are back together so quickly and they can now figure out what is going on and prepare for the potential arrival of all the Kang Variants
Overall Season 2 of Loki appears to be off to a good start with some fun new additions to the cast and some high stakes with the potential collapse of the Sacred Timeline so I am interested to see where it goes from here.
