Loki and the TVA traverse the multiverse…

Loki season 2 arrived at an odd time for the MCU. The franchise is in a muddle, not helped by poor show running, an absolutely terrible sequence of films and shows leading to this moment and with no hope in sight that the narrative problems besetting the studio are being fixed.

I’ve been talking for a long time about the inherent rules which limit Marvel’s ability to write stories that are going to take its viewers along for the more complex rides – the most important of these is that when no one can die there are no stakes, and when there are no stakes it’s easy to not give a monkey about what happens.

Additionally, for me, the second biggest problem is Marvel’s inability to have stories that aren’t trying hard to link into everything else out there. Indeed, shows like Moon Knight and Ms Marvel effectively stood alone and benefitted immensely from such isolation.

Loki season 2 follows on from two films, one of which didn’t touch on the multi-verse at all and one which was entirely built on it. The former of these two (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) was the better. The latter, Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania being such a disaster that I honestly couldn’t imagine it was created by the same creative minds who delivered Avengers and Black Panther to us.

Loki had to build itself into the multiverse that has moved on without it since it arrived on our screens in 2021.

All our central characters return and the story essentially continues from the moment the first season finished. The convenience here being that within the TVA time doesn’t pass so the writers are free to just pick things up no matter what’s going on elsewhere in the MCU.

This is both a saving grace and a problem – we’ll come to the latter in a moment. Let’s start with the upside of this narrative contrivance. Loki, somehow now Lawful Good rather than Chaotic Evil, gets to save his friends, gets to save the universe and can do so with a bunch of time travelling and location changes without having to run into other superheroes or worrying about the plots going on elsewhere in the MCU. In many senses the events of Quantumania, Doctor Strange 2 and a host of other stories are entirely irrelevant. Which is, to my mind, a good thing.

We have one significant new character, Ouroboros, played by Ke Huy Quan in manically pleasing style who feels like they’re both more than they say but also, somehow just another member of the TVA.

The story is about aftermath and restoration, dealing with grief and loneliness and what it means to live with meaning. There’s a lot of meat here for Tom Hiddleston but there’s also a lot of exposition and technobabble. He’s most alive when he’s on screen with Sylvie, played by Sophia Di Martino who is the only character able to face him down.

Sylvie comes to this season incredibly bitter and suffering from her own aftermath. She’s not given quite enough time to explore these feelings but they’re best portrayed when she’s Loki’s foil because he sees the consequences of her actions as something to be fixed while she experiences these same consequences much more viscerally as a problem without a solution because, right in her heart, she’s the problem.

If Season 1 was a grand adventure to find the Wizard behind the curtain, then this is smaller, narrower and lacks the benefits of having a hundred different Lokis pitching up and arguing with one another.

It also lacks Loki’s mischievousness and that lack of anarchy sometimes leaves the show feeling too straight faced.

The writing is pretty tight however and the structure of the show makes sense in its own terms – this isn’t a repeat of the awful Secret Invasion where people made decisions and took actions that made no sense or, worse, were logistically impossible. Yet the pacing is uneven and it can veer from compelling tension to bone achingly dull talking heads talking about how the TVA works. Largely I’ve found it enjoyable and, certainly episodes 3 and 4 are excellent while 1 and 2 are good but not startling.

In fact the end of episode 4 was the type of cliffhanger you’d normally expect at the end of a season and for that reason alone has made watching the show worth my time.

Watching the season so far (with just the finale to go) I have sometimes felt bored but enough of the time I have felt interested in where the show was going. There have been a couple of times I’ve been surprised in a good way.

Yet the negatives of the TVA being outside of time is where this really hurts the show – because in episode 5 we see the same old reversion to no one dying, to no one being at risk. Worse than that, but the antagonists have literally disappeared leaving the show facing nothing more than resolving a technical problem.

A friend of mine pointed out just how meta the fifth episode is – and they’re right. You could imagine the collapsing of the multiverse as being the MCU’s central problem in the real world – viewers literally don’t care at all while a small band of writers and executives at Marvel and Disney run around trying to save the elaborate palace of plots they’ve built and their antagonists try to keep things just as they were. In this case I’m on the side of the bad guys – give us simpler story arcs less bound by stupid rules that don’t allow people to be at risk.

Loki season 2 is solid television. It’s largely fun and isn’t completely incoherent. However, Loki’s been neutered as a character and the show has struggled with the same old problems with which every Marvel show wrestles.

Verdict: With only one episode of this series left I don’t know where Marvel goes from here but, right now, it’s not looking great. I’m not writing the MCU off by any means and Loki has been entertaining enough to watch but it is not destination television anymore and I struggle to see how they find that essential viewing component again any time soon.

7 gratuitous product placements out of 10  

Stewart Hotston