Marvel's Loki Season 2: Mischief Managed

In Loki Season 2, The 'God Of Mischief' Continues To Disrupt The Superhero Genre

Loki’s retro-futuristic design, time-space hopping shenanigans and near censure of superhero grandeur continue to be its strengths. Manik Sharma reviews.

“IF you’ll never look, you’ll never know,” Loki tells Mobius, in a scene from the second season of Marvel’s Loki (Disney+Hotstar). In this sequence, the two discuss if Mobius ever wishes to visit the timeline from which he has been kidnapped to work for the TVA (Time Variance Authority). It’s an argument that encapsulates the contrasting energies that have become the highlight of a show that has more in common with goofy, pop-coloured sci-fi sitcoms than superhero spectacles. Loki’s retro-futuristic design, time-space hopping shenanigans and near censure of superhero grandeur continue to be its strengths. In its second season, though the show loses some of its strained emotionality by way of a more adventurous narrative and syntax, it remains Marvel’s most enjoyably lean and wacky streaming series.

Marvel hasn’t had a good spell of late with its streaming offerings. None of its novel creations, including the promising WandaVision, made it past the singular mini-series event. Most recently, Secret Invasion offered certifiably dull evidence of the waning powers of a hit-spinning studio. But Loki — played by the impossibly charming Tom Hiddleston — returns to save both Marvel’s enviably deep pockets and the world’s many time-space conundrums.

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NOTHING LOW-KEY ABOUT IT

Loki Remains Marvel’s Most Enjoyably Lean & Wacky Streaming Series

By Manik Sharma

We begin this second season right after the events of the first. Loki is back at the TVA in a timeline where he and Mobius, played by the bewitching Owen Wilson, are strangers to each other. Loki believes it is imperative to stop the infinite branching of timelines and the key to doing that would be Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), lost in one of the hazy branched timelines that have emerged since she killed ‘the one who remains’ at the end of the first season.

In this second season, Loki is also afflicted by something called ‘time slipping’, symptomised by him being ripped across time and space, in shapeless, liquid form. To solve this ailment, he and Morbius visit Ouroborus (OB), played by Oscar-winner Ke Huay Quan, the faceless plumbing operation of the TVA. Quan is perfectly cast as the zoned-out, soft-spoken nerd who instantly quashes the severity of everything transpiring around him. It’s a charm offensive on multiple fronts and probably what retains the show’s appeal despite the unconvincing switch in focus.

The somewhat prickly but affable romance between Loki and Sylvie (basically a version of himself) made for a fascinating pop-culture dissection of narcissism but in this second season the show switches to a caper format, urging every participant to team up, in one way or the other. Things move swiftly, with swatches of technological buzzwords, ear-splitting pop physics doled out with the nervous energy of interns who have just botched the most important experiment in history. It’s churlish but also infectious. The cataclysms stack up as the guard — old and new — split up to complete different missions.

What made Loki’s first season so watchable was its wacky syntax, the thrill of switching between imaginative timelines (at one point Loki visited Pompei moments before it was destroyed) and the camaraderie between Morbius’ workmanlike good-cop routine and Loki’s dormant villainy. “You’re better at playing the villain,” a character he is interrogating chides Loki in this second season. The ‘God of Mischief’ has been transformed into an avenger of sorts, but his provincial identity remains that of unreliability. This intimate struggle between the past and the present, often underlines the humour and humanity of a show that uses jolly Back-To-The-Futuresque stumbles as opposed to self-serious roadblocks to heighten its plot. It’s precisely what makes the duo of Morbius and Loki eminently watchable, as a pair with contrasting styles and attitudes towards the mysteries of the universe. While one wants to merely survive it, the other wants to unwrap it for what it might reveal. Of course, the latter operates with that heroic energy but without the elegant, softening presence of the other it might have felt like any other superhero story.

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The second season has overcomplicated subplots, a nerdy outline of time and space problems that require practical solutions, a visual language that merges nostalgia and pulpy futurism and characters who, except for a handful of moments, aren’t dressed to take themselves too seriously. At times the screwball nature of the missions — Mobius literally skywalks with a giant tube plastered to his backside in one sequence — evades concern or empathy, but Loki knows how to rein itself in when the story demands it. It’s not perfect, or sufficiently broody but it is breezy, especially by the low standards of everything Marvel has produced of late.

Loki’s continued stability as Marvel’s only successful franchise on streaming proves that the superhero syntax might require a long-form update. In Loki, there are twists, unanticipated provocations and scenery-spilling visuals but none of the grandstanding, the laser-tag battles that are the grammar of superhero cinema. Instead, Loki feels more like an economically hamstrung project, a stifled sitcom that has landed on a persevering format by way of circumstance. The resultant infirmity has made the show conform with the geometry of retro cable television, without any of the glib, modernising tropes of superhero vastness. It has evidently liberated a show from testosterone and the tiresome hero-vs-villain format to instead unwrap unspecific time-space mysteries with the glee of a college kid who has just received his driving licence.

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