Loki Series Season 2 Review: Where were we? The first television season of Loki debuted on the Disney+ streaming platform in 2021 with great critical success and a particularly high appreciation score from the audience of Marvel fans, perhaps second only to the now iconic WandaVision. Between different timelines, battles, and clashes in the past, present, and future and the threat of a villain who wants to control time for eternity, the serial product created by Michael Waldron was the one that introduced Marvel fans to the very dangerous consequences of the Multiverse, even before the exploit (and stratospheric takings) of Spider-Man: No Way Home, of the same year.
In our review of Loki 2, we will talk to you about how the second television appointment with one of the flagship products of the latest Marvel Studios phase only keeps half of the promises it had in store for two years now: despite being a children's story always exciting and energetic and with a Tom Hiddleston in great shape, ends up incomprehensibly drowning in a needlessly complex and confusing narrative web.
Loki season 2 plot: the time leap dance
Season 2 of Loki picks up in the aftermath of the shocking season finale when Loki (Tom Hiddleston) finds himself in a battle for the soul of the Time Variance Authority. Along with Mobius (Owen Wilson), Hunter B-15 (Wunme Mosaku), and a team of characters old and new, Loki navigates an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous Multiverse in search of Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), Ravonna Renslayer ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes to understand what it means to have free will and glorious purpose. But the threat of the mysterious Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) endangers the fragile balance of the rapidly expanding Multiverse. Will they defeat him in the past, present, and future?
Loki 2 opens a few seconds from where we left our protagonist in the shocking finale of the first season, imprisoned without his knowledge in a TVA past in which Mobius does not recognize him and dominated by gargantuan statues of He Who Remains, the mysterious weaver of universe timelines killed in cold blood by the Sylvie variant in the previous episode. A lightning-fast incipit that perfectly frames the pace and tone of this second appointment with Thor's brother, perhaps a little too much at the mercy of ambitions and narrative purposes specific to the completion of Marvel's Phase Five.
The design of Loki 2 is the real star of the series
However, let's start first with the excellent assets of the Marvel series created and produced by Michael Waldron (who, however, this time does not write the six episodes, entrusting the burden to Eric Martin): the design and sets that give character and recognisability to the immense structure of the TVA are perhaps the true protagonists of Loki 2. Even more than in the first season, the past, present, and future threat of Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors, whose future in Marvel, however, seems increasingly fragile) invests the spaces in which our protagonists move, surrounded by narrow locations with very dark or aseptic color tones.
In some moments, and here the artistic design choice seems to aim precisely at that historical reference, it almost seems like we are witnessing exchanges of dialogue and more exciting situations that come out of an action drama set in the heart of the fascist period. Between sculptural blow-ups that reproduce the rough face and muscular features of the evil Kang and walls frescoed or chiseled with artistic depictions of very severe futuristic taste, the second season of Loki foretells the war of the Multiverse which will culminate with Avengers: Secret Wars and which brings down the show by Michael Waldron into a true rationalist nightmare.
Welcome back, Ke Huy Quan!
But not everything is so leaden and darkly foreboding in Loki season 2. There is also room for irony, lightness, and comedy, this time channeled into the introduction to one of the new characters of this season. We therefore welcome Ouroboros, aka O.B., played by the jovial freshness and charisma of the actor of Vietnamese origins Ke Huy Quan. The face of the cult cinema of the 80s thanks to The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Quan returned to the limelight last year after almost thirty years of semi-silence in front of the camera with the award-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once, for which he received an Oscar as a supporting performer.
In the second season of Loki, he plays the curious and irresistible role of O.B., head of the TVA Repairs and Modifications Department who seems to know everything, even the darkest secrets of the company that deals with the correct flow of time and the mowing of the variants that populate the infinite ramifications. A new entry that rightfully ranks among the most successful new Marvel characters of recent years, an unprecedented asset for the show created by Waldron that effectively balances expositions and explanations that unfortunately seem to abound too much in this second season.
There's still time?
Yes, because despite the good pace, the charismatic protagonists, and the narrative points of broad appeal, the second television appointment with Loki does not fully satisfy, the promises that he would have liked to keep and which had contributed so much to making the first season a success, this time are the proverbial double-edged sword that could have been avoided. What partly ruins the Loki 2 project is precisely a script that isn't up to par, a narrative web (as we anticipated in the introduction) that sacrifices the genuine attention of the casual spectator or the most die-hard fan in favor of frivolous complications between a timeline and the other, between the three narratological levels that mark the very flow of the Marvel series: past, present and future.
A great shame given the general success of the first television appointment which debuted on Disney+ in the summer of 2021, symptomatology of a phenomenon entirely signed by Marvel for which the management of the great narrative of the post-Avengers: Endgame Multiverse seems to show increasingly evident cracks to its foundations, also and above all in the sector dedicated to television production at Kevin Feige's studios. Is there still time to avoid the complete loss of love of a good portion of MCU aficionados?
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