The first season of Loki impressed me with its tight writing, excellent direction and cinematography, engaging ideas, and obvious passion from everyone involved. It was some of the better genre television to arrive in the last few years. 

Currently, the second season is progressing. You can check out our review, from Michaela El-Ters, of the first episode here.

Can Loki regain the momentum of the first season? How does it hold up? Let’s find out.

Be Warned: Spoilers lurk beyond this point – and if you indulge, even the TVA can’t protect you from getting ahead of your own timeline.

Synopsis

With last week’s plot resolved, Loki and the gang are engaged in another plot that will be wrapped up within the space of one episode: chasing down Hunter X-5 / Brad Wolfe (Rafael Casal), and foiling plans he might know about.

The episode opens with a fantastic reflection of Hiddleston’s original pitch for the series: a 70s-style mystery show that happens to star the God of Mischief. A delightful opening sequence see Loki and Mobius as buddy cops, interrogating and chasing a suspect while all of Loki’s powers are on full display. 

Their prisoner is interrogated. They hunt down Sylvie to her McDonald’s hideaway. They suddenly learn about the devious plans of General Dox, who is hard at work burning-out branches on the timeline. They stop her. Sylvie goes home to McDonald’s. 

In a subplot, OB and the rest of the cast are working on fixing the loom of fate but hit a roadblock. The software demands Kang to approve the final steps.

Breakdown

You might notice that the first two paragraphs of the synopsis are concise and build on each other, while the rest is a pile of stuff without context. Watching the episode is like that. What begins as a carefully constructed episode explodes into things that simply happen without build-up or context.

Everything feels disconnected, and everything feels like the characters are led from scene to scene instead of leading the plot. 

Discussing the episode with me, Michaela nailed the problem: the writers are running ahead of their narrative before they’ve fully paved the way. 

We are nearly two and a half hours into the conflict between Loki and Sylvie, and virtually nothing has been established. The debate about the TVA’s fate goes nowhere, as they talk past each other with snide remarks and vague statements of intent. Their positions are never defined, and what the characters mean in clear, real terms is never said. 

All I can think about is season one: the immediate episode after Sylvie is introduced, “Lamentis,” goes in-depth establishing their conflict, and what divides them. By the end of the episode we have a perfectly clear idea of their positions. 

General Dox’s plan is too little too late. It is introduced at the end of the episode, with a great deal of sound and fury. But the production does nothing to ground it, to give us context, or worst of all, humanize those who are lost. We hear about billions of deaths, but we never saw them live. All fiction is make believe, but we must be made to believe. 

Dox’s plan is unimaginable in scope, and they do nothing to help us imagine it.

Worse, we never feel any suspense about the fate of Sylvie’s new home. We don’t know anything about the people there, or even why she likes living there. We aren’t given any of the emotional investment that could have made foiling Dox matter. We don’t even find out that Sylvie’s co-worker is a nice kid who cares about his mom until after this plotline is resolved, so all we have in our mental shorthand about her home is, “Has a McDonald’s.” 

This is a problem with many modern Disney productions: the villain’s plan is introduced late, with no context, featuring a scope that goes beyond what can be imagined or feared. It only connects to the characters theoretically, or with a line of dialogue, but never in a meaningful way that received enough set-up for us to feel it too.

I felt like the first episode this season had a terrible habit of repeating almost every line of dialogue, and that the episode drowned in overly verbose back-and-forth that went nowhere. This episode mostly keeps that contained, with dialogue that harkens back to the first season.

The one major excellent thing that this episode offers is the extended opening sequence set in the 1970s, where we glimpse the original version of Loki. It is truly glorious. Tight, engaging, exciting. Loki breaking out all of his trickster powers to harry and capture a suspect is great fun, and used very well to illustrate his character. It always has a purpose.

Final Score

The cast is excellent. There are wonderful individual scenes and sequences, or moments that are simply alright. 

But it never comes together the way the first season did, and it feels like watching disconnected scenes culled from a greater whole or watching a show on fast forward. These are almost all things that could and should happen, but their connective tissue is lost. We’re adrift without context or narrative build-up. 

I hope Loki can pull itself out of these doldrums. There are still the bones of something better. We’ll see how the season progresses.

Stick with us for more of our Loki coverage every Saturday.  

Featured Image: IGN

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