Loki season 2 is a quirky timeline cleanse before the next big Marvel event

Whether Loki could manage to pull both things off in its second season was an obvious question from the moment Marvel announced it would be returning to Disney Plus. And in the time since, the studio’s put out enough duds to make it seem like this new era might be in trouble. Watching Loki season 2 — so far, I’ve seen the first four episodes of the six-episode-long second season — you can tell that Marvel’s shuffled its priorities quite a bit in the years since the show’s titular prince of mischief found his purpose by pulling his selves (plural) together from all across the multiverse.

Despite all of the superstructural adjustments happening around it, though, Loki’s second season tells a tighter story than its predecessor and has a far more refined edge that almost makes it feel like Marvel’s found its footing again. It’s been two years and almost 20 Marvel-branded series and films since we last saw Asgard’s least-favorite prince. But even with all the time that’s passed and everything that’s happened, Loki’s new season picks right back up where it last left off: with Loki (Tom Hiddleston) trapped in the Time Variance Authority and surrounded by people who don’t know him or the fact that he tried to prevent all-out war from engulfing the newborn multiverse.

At first, everyone experiences curious amnesia about who Loki is. This, combined with the way he looks to a befuddled Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) for answers, makes it appear as if Loki means to use its season 2 premiere to rehash previous events. But just when it seems like Loki might merely be flipping Loki and Mobius’ season 1 power dynamic, the show pivots, and it becomes clear that what you’re really seeing is a small bit of how this season explores the many ways these characters have been unknowingly helping one another become their true selves.

All of existence being imperiled due to a mess of the enchanting Sylvie’s (Sophia Di Martino) making is yet another thing that makes Loki’s second season feel familiar, especially once it’s become clear that she’s on the run hiding again. But rather than unraveling into another reality-hopping game of cat and mouse, there’s less emphasis on outright mystery this time around and more on examining previously established things from fresher perspectives like those of TVA Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and receptionist Casey (Eugene Cordero).

After multiple movies and shows about people screwing around with the multiverse only for things to pretty much go back to normal, it’s a little hard to feel especially invested in this season’s core plotline about the now-malfunctioning TVA HQ being on the brink of a meltdown like a cosmic nuclear reactor. That said, the TVA being in imminent danger is what brings new characters like technician Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) and hunter X-5 (Rafael Casal) out of the organization’s chicly set designed woodwork and puts them into the spotlight as examples of people who’ve been robbed of their identities by their work.

More than in its first season, Loki’s second chapter feels like it’s truly being led by a full ensemble specifically because of the distinct journeys of self-actualization it puts everyone on as they set off to figure out how to keep the TVA running smoothly. And while it often still feels like the Loki and Mobius show when it’s focused on Wilson hamming it up opposite Hiddleston’s straight man, Mosaku owns every scene she appears in — particularly those spelling out the scale of violence the TVA has inflicted upon innocent people in the name of order over chaos.

The same goes for TVA’s cutthroat Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and its holographic artificial intelligence Miss Minutes (Tara Strong), who both return as even more conniving, dogged players of a game that could leave countless lives lost. But that is decidedly not the case with late-19th-century Kang variant Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), who finds himself suddenly thrust into the fight between those who want to prevent him from ever becoming a conqueror and those who can’t wait for his dynasty to begin.

Between Timely’s being a rather important piece of how the story unfolds but not showing up until halfway through this season, it’s difficult to tell whether the allegations of domestic violence looming over Majors ultimately impacted his screen time or the shape of his arc. What does jump out, though, especially if you’re coming fresh off Loki, is how energetically similar to He-Who-Remains Timely — a nervous Albert Einstein type more brilliant than his native era — he reads, and not in the sense that the two are really just slightly different manifestations of the same basic personality template.

Post-Quantumania, Timely comes across as a different kind of step back because we’ve already sort of seen a softer, misunderstood Kang turn to villainy, and there’s little about this variant that seems primed to make that eventual fall very interesting to watch.

Thankfully, Victor Timely isn’t the (only) baddie Loki wants you to keep an eye on. The show makes sure to establish that even once the whole Kang project is up and running, there will still be monsters for the TVA to contend with alone because it’s the only outfit capable of dealing with them. Loki’s the first of Marvel’s Disney Plus shows to make it to a second season, which feels like a major feat now that Marvel’s decided to ease up on the sheer volume of original programming it releases yearly. But watching Loki season 2, it’s hard not to get the sense that Marvel wants to keep this thing humming along for quite a while longer.

Loki also stars Kate Dickie, Liz Carr, and Neil Ellice. It starts streaming on Disney Plus on October 5th.