Warning: this article contains full spoilers for Loki’s Season 2 premiere. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out IGN’s review of the first four episodes of Season 2.
At long last, Loki has returned for a second season on Disney+. Tom Hiddleston’s shifty trickster god is back for more time-related mischief, and there’s a whole lot of fallout from Season 1 to deal with. The MCU has a growing Kang problem, and it’s partly Loki’s fault.
The Season 2 premiere picks up right where Season 1 left off. In the process, it raises a lot of new questions about the future of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) and how Kang factors into the conflict. Let’s break down the biggest mysteries introduced in the premiere.
Why Was Loki Time-Slipping?
Loki Season 1 seemingly ended with the god of mischief finding himself in a new timeline branch created by the death of He Who Remains. In this timeline, the TVA is ruled not by a trip of robot Time Keeper decoys, but by a version of Kang himself. And in this reality, Owen Wilson’s Mobius doesn’t know who Loki is.
However, the Season 2 premiere reveals that things aren’t quite what they seemed at the end of Season 1. Loki hasn’t blundered his way into a new timeline, but is instead time-slipping between the past and present. In the old days, He Who Remains hadn’t yet hidden his existence from the rest of the TVA, hence why his statue is still visible when Loki is stuck in the past. That also explains why Mobius doesn’t recognize Loki. They hadn’t met yet.
This reveal is intriguing because this shouldn’t be possible. Time unfolds in a linear fashion inside the TVA. Mobius and his fellow agents can travel back and forth throughout the timestream, but back at home base, time only ever moves in one direction. So why is Loki able to visit the TVA’s past incarnation? And even though his time-slipping problems are solved by Ke Huy Quan’s OB, is it possible we’ll see Loki revisit the past once more?
That possibility is all the more interesting considering that it could open the door for Jonathan Majors to play He Who Remains again, despite the character’s death in Season 1. We know Majors is playing at least one Kang Variant this season in the form of Victor Timely, but somehow we doubt he’s the only Kang variant who will be showing up.
Where Are the Other Kangs Right Now?
Season 1 laid clear the stakes for the MCU now that He Who Remains is dead. The multiverse has returned, and with it comes countless variations of the most dangerous villain in history. The many versions of Kang are about to resume their multiversal war.
The obvious question now is what happens next? How soon do we see that war start to rage? When will reality start to quake because Kang is fighting Kang? The series doesn’t really address those questions in the first episode. It’s more preoccupied with the immediate problem of Loki’s time-slipping.
Thanks to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, we know the other Kangs are out there. We’ve seen them communing and plotting their collective next move after the death of the Conqueror. But at this point, we don’t know when or where these Kangs will appear next or what it means for the TVA. We have to imagine the Kangs aren’t going to react too kindly to the idea of a police organization whose entire mission was to prevent them from existing.
Again, there’s only one Kang variant confirmed to appear in Season 2. Majors is playing Victor Timely, who appears to be an old-fashioned inventor to whom Loki and Mobius pay a visit later in the season (Victor Timely is one of Kang’s many aliases in the comics). Where are the other Kangs, and how many will we meet this season? Only time will tell.
Loki: Season 2, Episodes 1-4 Review
“Now to Loki. He enters Season 2 with a new temporal malady that we can’t really get into but bears mentioning because it furthers his increasingly stale function as a plot device. (If nothing else, this new dilemma gives Hiddleston plenty of opportunities to flip his hair back, which seems to be his New Thing.) This Loki variant is a strange fit for Hiddleston, who has lost the villainous spring in his step that originally made the character so disarming. Season 2 makes an attempt to conjure a glint of malice in Loki’s eyes during one off-the-book moment of TVA space/time-cop procedure, but his redemption arc from last season has nerfed his animus; any forbidding tone he adopts can be clocked as a ruse from a mile away. That’s maybe the most disappointing aspect of Loki Season 2 so far: Nice Guy Loki is so frustratingly predictable.” –Jarrod Jones
Score: 5
Read the rest of our Loki: Season 2, Episodes 1-4 review.
What’s the Deal With Ravonna?
Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer is another character who’s pointedly absent in the Season 2 premiere. When last we saw Judge Renslayer in Season 1, she handily avoided being pruned by Mobius and cut ties with the TVA. She’s now loose in the timeline and on the hunt for “free will.” Free will, which she notes in the Season 1 finale, “only belongs to the person in charge.”
We don’t see Ravonna in the premiere, but we do hear a recorded message of a Kang variant speaking to her. Is this He Who Remains or another version of Kang? Why has this Kang suddenly taken such a deep interest in Judge Renslayer? Where are they now, and what exactly is Ravonna up to?
This Kang/Ravonna alliance is especially compelling because the two characters share such a close bond in the comics. There, Ravonna is depicted as a princess from the 40th Century who eventually falls in love with Kang. The two have a very convoluted romantic history (everything with Kang is convoluted), but the gist is that she’s the one person from across the vast timeline that Kang treasures most. The recorded message in the premiere seems to suggest that this relationship is beginning to form in the MCU.
That still leaves the questions of which Kang variant Ravonna was speaking with and what she’s up to currently. Are we about to see a timeless love story play out in the MCU, or is Ravonna pursuing her own agenda? There’s some evidence to believe that Ravonna is playing her own game here.
What’s the Significance of Broxton?
The Season 2 premiere ends with a post-credits scene teasing the fate of Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie. Following her execution of He Who Remains, Sylvie is ready to enjoy the freedom of living her own life far from the TVA and all its nonsense. And what better place to start a new life than 1980’s Oklahoma.
Not just any town in Oklahoma, though. Sylvie has set up shop in Broxton, a town with deep significance to the Thor franchise. In writer J. Michael Straczynski’s 2007 Thor series, Thor recreates the kingdom of Asgard in Midgard, transforming it into a floating castle above Broxton. The series explores the often comical clash of cultures that results, as the mighty gods of Asgard become neighbors to a group of farmers and simple country folk.
We have to wonder just how significant Broxton will end up becoming to the plot in Season 2. Is this just a fun nod to the Thor comics, or will the MCU Broxton also serve as a stepping stone to more stories about the intersection of gods and mortals? Let’s not forget that Asgard itself is in a fairly sorry state following its destruction in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. New Asgard may be raking in the tourist money, but could we see the original city recreated as a floating kingdom above Broxton?
This question is all the more pertinent because executive producer Kevin Wright has teased the prospect of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor actually appearing in an episode of Loki.
“I think the sun shining on Loki and Thor once again has always been the priority of the story we’re telling,” Wright told Variety. “But for that meeting to really be fulfilling, we have to get Loki to a certain place emotionally. I think that’s been the goal of these two seasons.”
As with so many comic book Easter Eggs in the MCU, there’s the question of whether Broxton’s appearance is a deep-cut reference or the harbinger of something bigger.
For more on the future of the MCU, brush up on Kang’s comic book history and see every Marvel movie and show in development.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
