Where did franchise television go (almost immediately) wrong? Marvel television was supposed to enrich character stopgaps between blockbuster movies—a place to spend more quality time with your favorite supporting character who doesn’t get enough airtime. Disney+’s MCU TV strategy was supposed to be the salve. And while “WandaVision” did captivate viewers once it found its footing, you only need to look at Rotten Tomatoes scores for Marvel films before and after the D+ shows began to see just how much the TV shows have dragged down the originally pristine RT average. Yes, it’s just RT, but the point stands: dissatisfaction, impatience, and frustration have grown among viewers, critics, and fans. This brings us to “Loki” season two, which won’t soothe one’s growing MCU discontent if it exists for you. In fact, “Loki” is more of the same, which is a lot of imaginative intention but not much else of substance, and it might strictly be for the die-hards at this point.
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While praised in its first season, the best “Loki” elements were its eerie outré score, esoteric, sci-fi vintage-y hybrid production design, colorful visuals, and VFX. In fact, all of these aesthetic components were so wonderfully unusual and creative that it’s a pity this inventiveness never applied to the rest of the show. Character and story became secondary to plot, even though the God of Mischief— a nature who’s evolved into someone intriguingly complex over time, loosening his grip on his bitterness in favor of a growing humanity and empathy—seemed like a character ripe for exploration. Following the events of “Avengers: Endgame,” where Loki died, the film also introduced a “variant” version of the character that escaped his fate in the timeline of the past.
This deviation and variant launched the “Loki” series and raised a profound existential question about Loki’s identity. Was he a man out of time who no longer actually existed? Loki learning about his true fate at the hands of Thanos and discovering he was a variant duplicate wasn’t very comforting to the God’s grand sense of ego and importance. And yet, while playing with these notions briefly, the series never really investigated those existential conundrums in any meaningful way.
In season two, the question of identity evolves but becomes simpler and goes back to his original roots: is Loki a villain? Is he a hero? Or is he something more complicated and unpredictable? And like season one, just as it feels like there is a gleaning moment when these identity questions will weave into the story evocatively, the plot gets in the way, and all we get is a brief tease.
“Loki” plotting was always abstruse to begin with. Season one introduced the concept of the TVA (Time Variance Authority), a group that policed variants and divergencies, and the Time Keepers—powerful beings of pure knowledge who become the guardians of all of time. But if you know the phrase “big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff” from the “Dr. Who” series, essentially a preposterous term to explain the nonsensical notions of time-travel, the multiverse, and multiple timelines, well, that does a good at explaining how confusing the show can be and or, how it can be so convoluted, it can alienate and distance you from what scarce character depth there is.
Explaining the intricate story and or plot of “Loki” season two feels like it needs charts and graphs to follow, but the shortest version is everyone in the TVA is facing a crisis in belief after it was revealed in season one that the Time Keepers weren’t real and that all of the TVA enforcers were actually variants of “real” people who once lived on one of the proper timelines (Get it?) So, the TVA is essentially in a panic and at war with itself, literally and figuratively, as emergency meetings mean some TVA adherents (new cast members Rafael Casal and Kate Dickie) go off to prune entire timelines (and thus millions of lives), and the core team of true believers Loki, TVA analyst Mobius (Owen Wilson) and TVA hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and newcomer Ouroboros or “OB” (Ke Huy Quan) and eventually Loki variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) try and take a stand from preventing the genocide of variant millions.
If the TVA faces a crisis of faith, Loki’s equivalent problem—and one not rooted in character, mind you—might be suffering from time-slipping—a phenomenon where he is being pulled apart between the past and the present and even sometimes in the future—a phenomenon that’s not supposed to happen in the “outside of time” realm of the TVA and this is where the amiable OB is initially recruited to help.
Sylvie is missing in season two at first, but like the mysteries in season one, she is eventually tracked down and reluctantly compelled to join the team and stop the rogue TVA members.
The existential anxiety of being lost to time—on top of having to reckon if you’re innately good or evil or something else— seems like rich fodder and one that an actor like Tom Hiddleston can do much with. But Marvel doesn’t seem as interested in the compelling question of identity that it’s constantly posing, seemingly caught up in plot-based narrative— this one being apparently just a pipeline story to tee up the He Who Remains/Kang The Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a figure whose visage we see all over the show and replaced all the previous statues and iconography of the Time Keepers. That story will play out in “Avengers: Kang Dynasty,” and worrisomely, this seems to be the case more and more with Marvel TV, each show just a plot baton toss to the next MCU chapter rather than something of real consequence and import.
With a pilot shot by sci-fi innovators Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (also executive producers on the series and direct a few more eps), “Loki” looks grand and ups the ambitious scale factor by a large degree. But as penned by head writer Eric Martin (who seems to have taken over for Michael Waldron, having graduated to writing ‘Avengers’ level events), the narrative leaves much to be desired. And at its worst, “Loki” resembles the aforementioned “Dr. Who,” a show that has become fringe it’s so geek-esoteric and SyFy Channel-ish in its silliness.
Marvel always builds teams around its main characters, and “Loki” is no different, but it’s a show that arguably fails its main character and underserves its own captivating questions about identity—something Loki himself is still grappling with. Loki once famously spelled that out in the early days when he wasn’t so conflicted, boasting about being “burdened with glorious purpose,” a God destined for more than just the boundaries of his own existence. And the catchphrase has such deliciously evolving meaning and further potential for the character. But again, right now, all Loki’s fate may lead to is provoking Marvel’s new big bad Kang The Conqueror, or you know, serving him up the next plot volley for ‘Kang Dynasty.’ But the human, soulful quality of that phrase—the higher calling, the affliction of grand destiny and what it could achieve—that always seems to go missing and get knotted up like so many messy timelines, gobbledygook timey wimey stuff lost like sand as it slips through the hands of unknowable time. [C+]