The Marvel Cinematic Universe is back on the smaller screen to tell the larger story of how the Time Variance Authory operates outside of the Sacred Timeline in Loki season two.io9 caught up with Loki and Marvel Studios producer Kevin Wright to preview what lies ahead in the show. Last season left off on quite a shocking cliffhanger, with Loki (Tom Hiddleston) facing off with Sylvie (Sophia DiMartino) over the fate of the timelines with catastrophic results—something that season two picks up with immediately. There are new faces (including Ke Huy Quan as Ouroboros, the author of the TVA handbook) who are instrumental in understanding how to repair the expanding timelines endangering their universe, even if it means calling upon Kang variant Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) to step in and help. To see what’s in store, you’ll have to check out Loki when it drops on Disney+ tonight.Read ahead for a what Kevin Wright teased Loki season two is setting in motion.Sabina Graves, io9: We’re so excited to see Loki return. What excited you about continuing the narrative that’s set up in the finale of season one, and using that as a jumping-off point for what’s coming up next in the MCU?Kevin Wright: That’s a big question. There’s a lot I’m excited about—I’ll give you the short answer: I think the TVA in the world we established with these characters in season one is so exciting, and it felt like we just were starting to scratch the surface of this place and the high-stakes drama. Where we left Loki and Sylvie and all these people was so tantalizing to be able to come into season two and hit the ground running, and pick up all of those threads and push it further and dive deeper. As far as the bigger Marvel interconnectivity, everybody on the Loki team has always taken it like, we have our little corner of the sandbox and we’ve been very free to get to build whatever we want in it and we’re taking really big swings. By the end of this we’ll have told almost 12 hours of Loki and [the] Multiverse TVA story, so we really feel like we’ve been the authors of the tapestry that everybody else can tell their stories off of. io9: Season one showrunner Kate Herron imagined such a distinct world and mythology. In what ways does this season’s team take what was started from that era of the show into the world-building here?Wright: Kate came in and was great because it was like we all were aligned in what we wanted to make. Once we knew Kate was going to handing over the reins, it was like, “All right, well, we got what we need to keep together as much of this team as possible for the continuity of that storytelling, in this world-building.” We felt confident that it was so much of what you love about that world from season one. It came from kind of all these collaborators. These things are such a collaboration; [in] one of my favorite shows, Doctor Who, multiple people are always going to come in and take the franchise for a spin and tell their stories with it. It felt like that was something that we could continue to do here. Between Tom and myself, there was enough interconnectivity that whatever team we surround with it, we were confident we could recapture what people loved.io9: I love the new faces we’re seeing in the season, like Ke Huy Quan as Obie. Was that a role that you already had him in mind for because of Everything Everwhere All at Once?Wright: It was very lucky because Everything Everywhere All at Once was only at that time playing in L.A. and in New York. It had not gone nationwide and it hadn’t gone anywhere globally, yet—so it was a week away from him about being everywhere. At the behest of our casting director, Sarah Finn, she said, “I think you should cast Ke. I think he’s perfect for this. And if you don’t make an offer by Monday, you’re probably going to lose the chance, because I think he’s about to blow up in a very big way.” So we talked to him, we pitched him the show, we pitched him the character. We shared some of Eric Martin’s script pages, which was the big introduction to Obie. And then that Monday we called in the big guns and Kevin Feige gave him a call and said, “Ke, we really want you to do this. Will you join us in London and start making this?” Very quickly afterwards, he was on a plane to London to start building this. And then obviously we shot the whole thing. The buzz was picking up on Everything Everywhere All at Once—that was happening as we were shooting—and then when we were in post-production, he had won an Academy Award. The timing was crazy. io9: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it’s incredible. Definitely my favorite character this season. Wright:  I think he’s going to be a lot of people’s new favorite Marvel character. Yeah.io9: Taking it back to Loki and Sylvie—in the first season, we had Loki really facing all the different variants of himself and confronting his past as a villain, and dealing with this whole idea of loving himself in many ways. Here we have him kind of back at war with himself in a weird way. What can you share about how you wanted to have that play out with Loki and Sylvie’s relationship this season?Wright:  It’s certainly a continuation of those stories from season one, and it’s about identity and finding your place in the universe and what role you play in it. I think those things happen on a very surface-level way in season one, because you have to get these people to change so dramatically. You really need to hold that mirror up to Loki and Sylvie. The thing that we talked about with it still feels like, certainly, Loki has not reached his full potential in the MCU, but as a character, he uses magic throughout the MCU. But it’s always for trickery, it’s always for causing mischief, and it just feels like he’s destined for so much more and to be a bigger presence. And Sylvie is still in the early stages of this growth because she’s really never had free will. She goes through a time door, the TVA are going to be popping up unless she’s hiding out in an apocalypse. So this is her first chance at just trying to understand what it even means to live a life. So much of the story that we wanted to tell this season was “how can these characters become the best versions of themselves?” And that is a lot about embracing your past, the bad things you’ve done, the good things you’ve done, all of it. You can’t grow without fully embracing the yin and yang of yourself. It’s about the actions you make. I think for a lot of us, you can say you’re about this or you represent this, but it comes down to actually the choices that you make in life. We put Loki and Sylvie through a number of obstacles to really challenge their perceptions of themselves and what they will do.Loki season two starts streaming on Disney+ tonight. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.