I recall really enjoying the first season of Loki. Fast on the heels of the mostly successful WandaVision, Loki starred Tom Hiddleston as the titular god of mischief on a timeline-tripping adventure involving a love interest who was also an alternate version of himself, an animated clock, secret jet ski aficionado Owen Wilson, and a killer ending that seemed to establish what the next wave of the MCU was going to be all about. Fast forward two years, and so much has changed.
Loki’s return, at least on paper, should have all the elements that would make for an amazing sophomore season: the main cast returning, Tom Hiddleston taking a more active role in the direction of the show, freshly-minted Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan as part of the cast, and the chance to follow up on the S1 cliffhanger that Loki’s variant Sylvie had killed He Who Remains, thereby sending Loki into an alternate timeline. A show with this much going for it should be something more than the sum of its parts. After four episodes, with only two remaining, Loki Season 2’s predilections toward macguffin-like gadgets, aimless searches, and the baggage surrounding its production have all led to a show that feels completely inert.
Too Many Gizmos
Ask any Star Trek fan what a phaser or a transporter does, and they’ll be able to clearly tell you their purpose. Sci-fi shows are chock full of gizmos and gadgets that help serve the story by providing portals between worlds, specialty weapons, and the like. Usually those gizmos are secondary to the adventure, they aren’t the adventure. And if they are going to be a major part of the story, the audience should at least know what they do.
I’m now going to list a few of the gizmos in Loki we’re being expected to keep track of: The Tempad, Timedoors, Pruning Batons, Timebranch tracker, The Temporal Loom, the Blast Shields to the Temporal Loom, the Computer that controls the Blast Shields to the Temporal Loom, the Temporal Aura Extractor, the Throughput Multiplier, the additional gadget that fits into the Throughput Multiplier, Oh – And a vacuum cleaner that crushes people to death inside Timedoor cubes – don’t forget the remote control!
If you’re looking at that list and can tell me exactly what each of those devices do, what they mean, what requires whose presence to work, etc. Bravo! Just to make that list I had to consult a wiki, and no, I can’t tell you exactly what every single thing does because the show has spent almost no time bothering to explain the importance of any of it beyond repeatedly telling us that if any one of these things doesn’t work, Everyone is Going to Die! Who is going to die? Is it the people on the branching timelines? The sacred timeline? The TVA? The MCU? Unclear!
But by focusing on all these mystery doohickeys, Loki diverts crucial time from any actual story about our protagonists’ motivations. Other shows have utilized mystery whatsits to great effect over the years, and sometimes explaining them reduces their power (Imagine my disappointment when I finally learned what LOST’s smoke monster really was). But LOKI is stacking them like a hoarder instead of dividing them into Keep, Maybe, and Trash piles.
What Are We Doing Again?
When the narrative isn’t revolving around gadgets, Loki spends most of its time on hide-and-seek games where one or two of our characters are running around looking for another character. Sometimes they decide mid-search to go find another character without any real rhyme or reason. Sometimes characters show up having played hide-and-seek and we’re not even sure why they went to all the trouble. In episode 2, Loki and Mobius go looking for Brad (AKA Hunter X-5), a new character this season who we’ve never met and with whom we have spent less than five minutes. Once they have Brad, it turns out they’re not really looking for Brad, they’re looking for General Dox, another new character this season with whom we’ve spent less than five minutes. And I guess they also have to go looking for Loki’s lost love/alternate self Sylvie, who is spending time shilling for an egregious McDonald’s ad campaign. She tells them to get lost, but eventually ends up tagging along on future hide and seek games because. . . she’s contractually obligated to?
The worst of these sequences is when Loki and Mobius head back to 1893 to find Ravonna Renslayer (or are they looking for Miss Minutes) in episode 3? It doesn’t matter because then they’re actually looking for Victor Timely, the Kang Variant from the post-credit sting in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantummania. The characters chase each other around for a very long time. They pause for exposition dumps and then chase each other more, sometimes with additional chasers added to the mix just for funsies. The motivation for these chases seems to arbitrarily change multiple times an episode, like a dog getting distracted by a squirrel.
Are our protagonists after Miss Minutes to unlock the blast shields? No, they’re after Timely to unlock the blast shields. Do they want to prune the timelines? No, they want to contain the timelines. Who wants to destroy the timelines? What’s the difference between pruning and containing? And, in what the show surely wants to be a Primer level mind-&*$%, who even created this place to begin with if Ourobouros and Timely both think the handbook was written by the other? GASP! It all lands with a resounding thud. Our protagonists have been sent on their wacky hijinks without being given an ounce of character development, so when they do return with the object in question it’s like a dog playing fetch and returning the ball you threw. It’s completely absent of meaning or purpose. It’s just something for them to do to kill time (pun intended).
What a Shame
The failure of this second season is all the more annoying because the sets, the props, the costumes, are all completely on point. The dressings of this production look fantastic instead of cheap, and often the direction by The Endless directors Benson and Moorhead is more than up for capturing this world. But perhaps blame has to fall with the making-it-up-as-we-go nature of MCU storytelling.
According to the newly released MCU:The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards, the idea to focus on Kang as a driving villain across the MCU on the level of Thanos was based entirely on “the positive buzz actor Jonathan Majors generated in the role” in the Loki S1 finale. Back in the real world, Majors has been charged with assault and harassment. If he’s convicted, he could spend as much as a year in jail. Now with Tatiana Siegel’s recent behind the scenes article for Variety revealing that the alleged assault happened on the set of Loki S2, it becomes impossible to watch Loki S2 without thinking about the implications of Majors’ alleged actions.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that writer Eric Martin is writing around Majors in the first two episodes, but then he dominates episode three only for the show to [SPOILER ALERT] immediately kill him off in episode four. Conspiracy-minded MCU heads have already come up with ways this moment could have actually created the multiversal Kangs who are supposed to represent The Avengers’ next existential threat. The aforementioned Variety article does suggest the final two episodes of Loki will set up Majors as the central villain of the next phase of MCU films, and that even if they wanted to write Majors out, the WGA strike made that impossible. Though none of this guarantees anything for the actor moving forward, a possible signal of moves to come may be Disney pulling Majors’ well reviewed performance in Magazine Dreams from the release calendar.
Loki S2 is also emblematic of ways the MCU system of fast and loose decision making is no longer working. Look no further than their scrapping of an entire season of Daredevil: Born Again and instituting standards like showrunners and writers rooms after the WGA strike in an effort to get a better handle on the creative process (and be in contractual compliance). The creative team behind Loki S2 had a fantastic opportunity to hit the reset button on the recent downturn in Marvel movie popularity with a stacked cast and a killer premise.
But like Victor Timely facing temporal radiation, they’ve ended up with spaghettified TV that doesn’t know what it’s doing or why. And unlike the show, there’s no magic gizmo to fix any of that. Or another gizmo that magically fits into the other gizmo either. It will be fascinating to see whether they can right the ship with two episodes to go, but I don’t have my hopes up.
Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom.
