Loki S2 premiere introduces a new scene-stealing character.
Sign me up for the Ouroboros fan club.
The Short Take:
An energizing return to a brilliantly distinct world, the Loki Season 2 premiere reminds me of all the elements I loved in Season 1 while introducing a new character who is likely to become a fan favorite.
[SPOILER ALERT: I’m not doing a spoiler-free section because I think if you were in on Loki Season 1, you’re in on Loki Season 2 because it’s as Loki-y if not Loki-er. So go watch the Season 2 premiere and come back to read this review. There’s a post-credits scene for this one, so make sure you’ve seen that too!]
Image Credit: Variety
The Long Take:
Do you have a moment to hear about Day of the Tentacle, an obscure point and click adventure game made by LucasArts in 1993? Mutant monsters — that look like a giant octopus lost a battle with a sushi chef — want to take over the world. And the only way to stop them is to time travel, via Chron-o-Johns. Yes, those are toilets.
I bring this game up not only because I have very fond memories playing it as a child, but because the fun, humor, and wacky adventure that I experienced watching the Season 2 premiere of Loki immediately reminded me of playing it. In the cartoonish game, there are three characters that you can toggle back and forth between most of the time, and each is in a radically different timeline: one in the 18th century, one in the present day, and one in the far flung future (in which mutants tentacles have taken over the world).
So the puzzles, which typically require a “combine object A with object B to interact with thing in the environment C” type solution, actually incorporate time travel logic. Sometimes you would have to travel to the past and move or change an object so that it would be in a specific spot for another character to use in one of the later timelines. There’s a whole storyline that involves sending an image of a tentacle back in time so that Betsy Ross will use it to design the American flag, thus making it a more useful object in a dystopian tentacle-dominated future.
This is the sense of play with which Loki Season 2 approaches its premiere. Yes, Kang is coming back and yes, the timeline is branching like an overactive Chia pet, and yes, that means all chaos is breaking loose. But, in the midst of all that catastrophe, we get many time travel/sci-fi jokes. Mobius, for example, might lose his skin in some harebrained scheme to help Loki. And not just because it’s a way to let Owen Wilson do his offbeat charm thing, but because Mobius writing “Skin?” in the dust on a teal computer monitor becomes a visual cue through which Loki can discern what timeline he finds himself in later in the episode. The same thing happens with a crack in the flooring that Loki, having time-slipped into the TVA’s past, clumsily creates when he crashes truck first into a window after being chased by a Mobius who does not yet know him. When we’re jumping back and forth between timelines so rapidly, and in the same location, these subtle signposts become crucial to avoiding narrative confusion.
The funniest and most Day of the Tentacle-esque scene of the episode is when Loki in the past and Mobius in the present have a conversation with the same character, Ouroboros, or “O.B.” for short. They’re all in the same place, the Repairs and Advancement Department, sequestered deep in the TVA’s basement. Hilarity ensues as the conversation in the past updates present day O.B.’s memory in real time. When Loki persuades him to build “one Temporal Aura Extractor” in the past, it’s miraculously sitting there, ready to go when he returns to the present. This kind of ever-so-slightly mind-melting but don’t think too hard about it time travel logic is like cat nip for me, and I was here for every second of it.
Between that and the eyebrow raising objects Loki finds along the way, like the bright orange guidebook, the tape recorder on the wall, and maybe even the severed robot Kang head, I feel like I am trying to point, click, and solve the puzzle along with Loki.
Image Credit: LA Times
Scenes like this work so well because the actors in them are so good at selling sci-fi nonsense. Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson are as good as they’ve ever been, each playing off the other’s own brand of charisma. Their conversations immediately evoke the bond they built in Season 1, and the novelty of all the bromantic hassling has not worn off a bit. They’re bickering about what would be worse, losing all of your skin or being ripped from the very fabric of time and being eternally lost in temporal oblivion. And I’m hanging on every word.
Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan, who plays the chipper, hardworking genius hermit, Ouroboros, arguably has the biggest mouthfuls of time paradox nonsense to spew out, and he sells them with interest. His comedic timing throughout the episode is immaculate.
and I were a little worried that he was being typecast for his award-winning role as Waymond Wang in last year’s Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All At Once, but it looks like he’s playing an entirely different character here. Waymond was in many ways the beating heart of Everything Everywhere, providing emotional intelligence, compassion, and humanity to the absurdist multiversal comedy. O.B., in contrast, is a genially distant fountain of knowledge, blunt and socially awkward after hundreds of years of being alone.It’s always impressive when I am endeared to a brand new character this quickly. O.B. seems incontrovertibly deserving of an episode title — he literally wrote the book on the TVA. Having just watched an ancient droid named Huyang serve a similar purpose on Ahsoka, I can confirm that it’s very valuable to have a character who is old and full of institutional knowledge, especially when none of the other characters have reason to remember or know the past. O.B.’s lines always reflect his age. He talks about all these terrible problems and consequences like they’re no big deal because he’s been around so long and seen so much.
O.B.‘s real name, of course, is a rather conspicuous mythological reference to a serpent eating its own tail. This signifies different meanings in different cultures, but generally we’re in the death, rebirth, renewal, eternity, or infinity zone. In Loki’s own Norse mythology, the ouroboros is known as Jörmungandr or the Midgard Serpent, wrapped around Earth. When this giant serpent releases the bite on its own tail, Ragnarok, a.k.a. the apocalypse, begins. So that’s not looking great. (And could Mobius’ skin jokes double as a reference to an infinite snake shedding its skin?)
A less panicky interpretation would be that O.B. is really good at fixing the TVA so that the whole multiverse doesn’t collapse. In the context of what we’ve seen of the TVA so far, Ouroboros may simply cast O.B. as being the one who is always there to reset the TVA every time the Kangs break through or something goes wrong with the sacred timeline. The consistent mentions of memory wipes implies that we’ve probably been through past cycles of warring Kangs, ending with one of them locking down the timeline until chaos breaks loose again. Still, I’m a little worried that O.B.’s willingness to close those blast doors means that at some point later on he may be at odds with Loki and Mobius, especially once Sylvie gets back in the mix.
Image Credit: IGN
For now, though, O.B. fits right into the TVA’s quirky, retro, “infinity stones are just paperweights here” vibe. In the two and a half years that have passed since Loki Season 1 ended, I had actually forgotten just how unique the world of Loki and the TVA is. The eerie score by Natalie Holt, the detail-oriented production design, and the austere yet bold costumes all work together to create this fully realized, alluring world, unlike anything else we see in the MCU. There’s some kind of alchemy in placing cosmic metaphysical concerns in what’s basically a 1970s IRS building crossed with a 1950s automat.
The contrast between that aesthetic and the faux grandeur veneer that Kang has constructed (the Time Keepers, the monuments, etc.) says so much about the type of story this is. We expect someone imposing and ceremonial to control time, but really it’s the unassuming engineer in a faded mechanic’s jumpsuit, apron, and glasses who actually holds all the knowledge and therefore power. This is not to say Kang isn’t powerful. But maybe O.B. evens the odds a bit?
The dissonance between expectations vs. reality, between serious and silly, is what makes the humor of the series — which is such a huge part of its success, especially in this episode — work so well. There’s a lighthearted zaniness in how O.B. describes the dangers of the TVA’s trade to Loki. When they discuss how he will have to prune himself to cure his time slipping, O.B. casually asks, “Have you heard about how if you fall into a black hole you turn into spaghetti?” When Loki says no, he replies with “Good. The less you know about that the better.” Later, when Mobius, Loki, and O.B. approach the Temporal Loom, there’s a notice painted on the ground: “Temporal radiation levels escalate exponentially beyond this point. Likelihood of spaghettification increases by 7000%, Proceed with caution.” I’m not even sure we got anything quite as out there as “spaghettification” in Season 1, but I’m lovin’ it. (Where is this McDonald’s product placement going, by the way?)
Image Credit: Men’s Health
The concepts in this episode are big, but the story remains small. Last season, we introduced so much and covered so much conceptual ground. We went to the end of time, for goodness sake! And yet, the story remained grounded in a simple narrative drive: solve the mystery of who is murdering all these TVA agents and why. Season 2, at least so far, seems to be structured as an even more traditional television series in this sense. We had one goal — fix Loki’s time slipping. Loki’s personal problem — he keeps painfully jumping from the past to the present and back again — then becomes linked with the more global problem with the TVA needing to be re-engineered to accommodate all of these new timelines sprouting. Centering the plot around Loki and a “problem of the week” premise grounds us amid all the gobbledygook exposition.
I’d gotten so accustomed to time jumps in between seasons of television. It was quite a shock to pick up moments after where we left Season 1. If anything, this episode feels incremental. And that felt good.
How did a return to Jonathan Majors feel, though? How did I feel about seeing him again? Pretty bummed out, to be honest. Even if he gets cleared of the domestic abuse charges against him and is technically safe to stay on as Kang, enough unofficial testimony about a pattern of abusive behavior has surfaced in the wake of the charges to cast a permanent shadow over his performance.
Image Credit: IGN
That shadow plus what critics who have seen the first four episodes are saying make me a little uneasy as I look ahead. But, for now, I choose to enjoy Ke Huy Quan as O.B., spaghettification, and the Whovian adventure Loki and Mobius find themselves on. If only to find out who pruned Loki at the end of this episode (it was probably another Loki), I have to keep watching. I have to keep pointing and clicking along.