Gareth Gatrell
“Hope is hard,” says Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief in the second season of Loki, and the struggle to stay optimistic extends to the Disney+ series itself. Despite a largely inventive first act, creator Michael Waldron and writer Eric Martin’s streaming affair remerges (October 5) during a rocky period for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is unraveling almost as quickly as the multiverse that Loki and his comrades are trying to mend. The show’s return engagement, unfortunately, doesn’t fix what’s broken and, in fact, contributes to the general sense that things are almost beyond repair. Its convolutions overwhelming its charming personalities and freewheeling spirit of paradox-laden adventure, it’s another indication that the once-mighty franchise has lost its direction.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead for Loki Season 2.)
Loki’s first go-round was an intricate saga concerning the Time Variance Authority (TVA), a retro-tech bureaucracy that governs every timeline across the multiverse. Those strands were all carefully arranged until the show’s season one finale, when everything was thrown into disarray by Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), a female Loki variant who murdered the man behind the TVA: He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), a version of Kang the Conqueror, the MCU’s new Big Bad. He Who Remains promised that his death would bring about a cataclysmic multiverse war instigated by his many doppelgangers. Initially, though, the result is a primary (i.e., Sacred) timeline splintering uncontrollably, thereby overloading the Time Loom—a monumental device that keeps these myriad threads in order—and threatening doom.