When an entire season of television is just a rehash of a single episode of another franchise, that’s usually a bad sign. However Loki Season 2 narrowly avoids disaster due to the creative narrative.
The basis; this entire season is a creative re-hash of Time Squared from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2. Best described below:
Immediately following the events of Loki 1, the TVA begins breaking down without He Who Remains to control the timelines. With some more Doctor Who wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff, Loki starts timeslipping between branched timelines. Moving forward and backwards through time, creating paradoxes and ultimately having to find the man who built the TVA a Kang variant by the name of Victor Timely from 1800 era Chicago. That a Kang variant exists AT THAT TIME is never explained (headcanon is that a Kang sent him there to protect him from the multiverse war) but Marvel doesn’t want us to think about it.
Timely built the TVA and all of it’s technology. Explained by Mobius and Ouroboros (whose names are secondary references to what happens in the series), a temporal loom was previously working fine, but now has to be scaled up to account for new splits. Unfortunately, that’s not the fix. Time splits infinitely. At this point it gets confusing. MCU has layers upon layers of complexity. Dimensions within Universes, Quantum realms within Universes, Timelines within Universes, and Realities outside Universes (aka What If…).
The production of the season… cannot say enough how impressed I’ve been. Doctor Who on steroids. Much harder to see what scenes were filmed on soundstages compared to last season. Increased budget. Maintaining continuity between season 1 and season 2 while managing all the twists and turns seemed impossible but they did it! And then you have some of the most brutal death scenes filmed for an MCU project, scenes so brutal they happen off camera — but you know the method of death. Inspiring that they are branching toward R rather than PG.
However, in Marvel fashion, without spoiling too much: the good guys win to fight another day. The epilogue references that timeline 616 dealt with a Kang variant (see Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) hinting that perhaps Kang the Conqueror and He Who Remains are one in the same. I’m rooting for Johnathan Major’s innocence, because otherwise the MCU is going to implode without a Kang to put it all together.
All episodes screened day of release with special help between October 5 and November 9, 2023.
