Time moved differently back in 2021, and it wasn’t just the lockdowns. When Loki first started messing with the sacred timeline on Disney+, Phase Four of the MCU hadn’t started and multiverses weren’t anywhere near the mainstream. Two years later, Everything Everywhere All At Once is the reigning Best Picture champion and Marvel is doubling down on theoretical cosmology – making wider, deeper, nerdier cuts into an overlapping story that you need a whiteboard to fully understand.
Into the madness returns Loki, a series that still feels like the best and worst of the MCU rolled into one. Showcasing an overabundance of big ideas and visual flair and bottomless budgets, Loki throws everything at the wall and watches it all sort of stick. Bigger, weirder, funnier, less emotional and more confusing than the first season, it’s a Disney Doctor Who stuck somewhere between a multiplex and a subreddit.
When we last left Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) they’d just killed the new big-bad “He Who Remains” (aka “Kang The Conqueror”, aka Jonathan Majors) in a castle at the end of time and caused a million rifts in the fabric of reality. Season two opens in complete chaos, and it only gets messier from there.
Moving at a clip, Loki reinvents itself every few minutes. It’s a time travel comedy and a cop thriller. A steam-punk sci-fi and a metaphysical action movie. A historical romcom and a workplace satire. Each would be fuel enough for an entire series but here they’re tonal pitstops for a show that never stops running. It’s untidy, but that’s kind of the point – embracing the weaker, geekier corners of the comic book world with a dry wit that the films too often don’t quite manage to nail.
Hiddleston charms his way through most of his scenes without looking like he’s even trying, and the rest of the cast still seem to be having just as much of a good time: Di Martino’s Sylvie now filled with rage, Owen Wilson’s slacker timecop now a bigger part of the main story, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw also getting more to play with. There’s also Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan in a character that feels like a less than subtle nod to Everything Everywhere All At Once, and an almost-new part for Majors that he chews through like his career depends on it (given recent headlines, it probably does).
Easily the best-looking thing Marvel’s done, Loki pins its visual tone (British sci-fi meets Terry Gilliam meets Star Wars) to a wonderful mix of smart art design choices and a whole lot of nicely un-polished set pieces. One chapter set during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (that briefly turns into a vintage monster movie) looks especially handsome – and especially different from the same big fireworks that Marvel often falls back on.
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With Tenet levels of timeline layering to try and unpick, and a story that wades deep in the weeds of the MCU even as it pokes fun at its own earnestness, Loki’s second season won’t win over any new fans. But then this isn’t for them. It proudly slips between the cracks left by the other titles – and feels less beholden to the franchise despite trying to tie everything together in one big temporal loom (don’t ask). It’s going to be a tough act to follow.
‘Loki’ season two streams on Disney+ from October 6