Weekend Watch - Loki Season 2, Episodes 1 & 2
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating and review. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is the opening episodes of Loki season 2 from Disney+. This new season of the show (the first to get a second season from the MCU Disney+ shows) sees the return of Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Owen Wilson, Eugene Cordero, and Wunmi Mosaku in their respective roles from season 1, joined in this season by Ke Huy Quan, Kate Dickie, and Rafael Casal in the new roles of OB, General Dox, and Hunter X-5/Brad Wolfe, respectively. This season is releasing weekly on Thursday evenings on Disney+. Let’s get into it.
Rating: B+; it maintains the solid production design and frenetic pace of the first season well, and the performances have only improved, but a lack of direction has me hesitant to call this new season a full-on improvement from the first.
Review:
As far as season openers go, Loki season 2 has had two solid first episodes in terms of introducing its new characters and resolving most of the unresolved threads from season 1; however, it has so far done very little to bring in a compelling new conflict to fill the void now that Loki and Sylvie have convinced the TVA to accept branching timelines. (Also, this is not a show where you can jump in at the start of season 2 without having watched the first season and be fully in the know, so there’s that as well.) It feels like we’re moving toward either a showdown with Miss Minutes and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer or with some new version of Kang/He Who Remains, but all of those characters were notably absent from these first two episodes aside from a few statues of Kang (who seems to still be played by Jonathan Majors despite his arrest and accusations of abuse). On the positive side of things, the show continues to improve in its production design and casting/performances, giving audiences more of that dingy brown retro TVA vibe that they loved in the first season and more of Hiddleston playing the complex anti-hero that Loki has become.
With the story picking up basically immediately after the end of season 1, we are thrust very much back into the middle of things and are introduced to a new complication for Loki – he is experiencing time slippage while in the TVA, jumping back and forth between the past and present. This comprises the main conflict of the first episode, as Wilson’s Mobius and Mosaku’s Hunter B-15 are able fairly easily to convince most of the TVA leadership (aside from General Dox and her hunters) that branching timelines are acceptable. Their quest to anchor Loki in the present leads them to Ke Huy Quan’s OB (Ouroboros) who runs all the tech for the TVA and knows a lot about the flow of time. The resolution of that episode then leads into the second episode’s conflict, which is stopping Dox and her hunters from getting Sylvie and reverting the timelines back to a single timeline. This gets the band back together as Loki, Mobius, and Sylvie have to team up to stop this from happening, which ends up being fairly easy – much easier than any of the resolutions from the first season, and with such limited consequences as Sylvie leaving again, I’m hesitant to fully commit to the rest of the season.
What bolsters this season opener, though, are the performances from the characters – old and new. Wunmi Mosaku turns in another solid performance as Hunter B-15, this time on the side of Loki and Mobius, delivering her stoic but inspired lines with just the right amount of camp to match the show’s energy. Sophia Di Martino doesn’t have quite as much to do in these first two episodes as she did down the stretch in season 1, but her portrayal of Sylvie still holds up as the jaded, powerful, witty Loki variant that she is, and I’m glad she’s still in the show. Kate Dickie gets to do a lot with her limited screen time as the “villain” of the first two episodes, and it’s always frustratingly fun to see her get to lean into that loathsome side of herself (like in Game of Thrones and The Witch), which she does again here, giving the audience someone to root against in the early goings of this new season. Owen Wilson’s Mobius hasn’t gotten as much into the actor’s surprisingly complex bag this season as he did, especially toward the end, in last season, but his buddy cop repartee with Hiddleston’s Loki forms the backbone of the show, and it’s still just as good here. Ke Huy Quan joins the show in the role of OB, which feels like a character that’s always been there, showcasing how seamlessly the actor fits in with the energy and vibe of the rest of the cast and the show, bringing levity, lore, and some level of stakes to these first two episodes, and I look forward to seeing more of him as the season progresses. Hiddleston is in his bag here in these first two episodes, getting to be more villain and more hero than he was even in the show’s first season, really leaning into the anti-hero side of the character. In these first few episodes, he feels more established and in control than he’s ever felt as the MCU’s iteration of the Norse God of Mischief, and it anchors the whole show, offering (for me at least) the most compelling reason to see where the rest of this season goes.
As the show leans more heavily on its namesake, Loki season 2 has opened with a solid foundation of characters, performances, and production value that helps it overcome its somewhat lackluster stakes and conflicts through its first two episodes. I look forward to it hopefully amping up as we jump into the middle third of the season, and if the performances are any indication, I think we’ll continue to see why this show was the MCU’s first to get a second season. It will release weekly on Thursdays for the next four weeks, wrapping up on November 9th if you’d rather wait until it’s all out to binge it.
