It’s about time! No, really, that’s what the show is about. The second season of Marvel’s Loki has finally arrived on Disney+ with the first episode premiering tonight. The premiere episode, titled “Ouroboros,” starts things off with a bang and wastes absolutely no time getting right into the time-travel craziness we know and love from this series.
The episode opens with a close up of a Kang statue standing in the middle of the TVA. Clearly, Marvel was not going to back away from featuring Jonathan Majors (or at least his likeness) in this new season and they let us know right off the bat. We then see Loki running from Mobius and a series of hunters before he is cornered. Mobius makes it clear he still does not know who Loki is as time has somehow been altered by Sylvie killing He Who Remains in the season one finale.
Loki escapes by diving out of the building and into the back of a passing truck. The distracted driver crashes the truck into the statue of Kang, causing her to crash back into the TVA building. The truck startles Casey and several other TVA agents before Loki stumbles out of the back and starts looking for answers. A monitor falls from the ceiling, cracking the floor where Loki expected to see a TVA logo but instead sees something new. Casey still does not know who Loki is though and identifies him as an intruder.
Loki seemingly glitches and disappears from the room, only to reappear in the same room, but in another time. He sees Casey, who now knows him. Loki thinks he is jumping through different timelines but he sees the the crack in the floor and realizes he is actually jumping through time on the same timeline. He asks to be brought to Mobius but glitches again and disappears.
After the title card, we join Mobius and B-15 as they watch the timeline continue to branch chaotically. Casey arrives to inform Mobius that Loki is looking for him but that he disappeared. They’re interrupted by another Hunter, X-5, who informs them that a new judges council has been formed in the absence of Ravonna Renslayer. New characters called General Dox and Judge Gamble are now the ones in charge and they are summoning Mobius and B-15. After they leave, Loki reappears and Casey tells him where to go.
Mobius and B-15 plan to “gently” let this now council know the truth about what’s going on, with the Timekeepers being fake and the TVA being a lie. Loki glitches again before heading into the War Room, where this new council is meeting, but he arrives to find the room empty with a big sculpt of Kang’s face on the wall.
The council plays audio records of Loki explaining the lies of the TVA as Mobius and B-15 arrive. They settle in to try and explain what’s going on but there is clearly tension in the group. Meanwhile (or… much later?), Loki listens to audio records of Kang telling someone they “made a difference in this war” and thanks them for “being on his team.” Loki rewinds the recording to learn that Kang, or He Who Remains as he knows him, is speaking to Ravonna. This plays off of the long comic history between these two characters in which they have gone from being allies to enemies countless times.
In present time, tensions rise as Mobius and B-15 try to explain what is happening and the council refuses to accept the truth. Judge Gamble eventually makes the call to continue not pruning the branch timelines. Loki arrives again and runs to Mobus to try to explain what happening. He steals X-5’s weapons and prunes the wall behind the council, revealing the sculpt of Kang’s face. Clearly having her own motives, General Dox seems to be putting her own plan into action and orders X-5 to find Sylvie.
Loki and Mobius go off on their own and Loki explains what happened in the season one finale, when Sylvie killed He Who Remains. After some playful banter, Loki explains the war that is coming before he glitches again and reappears a second later.
Mobius takes Loki to Repairs & Advancements where they meet Ouroboros, or O.B. as Mobius calls him. The eccentric new character played by Ke Huy Quan steals the show throughout this episode after he arrives to provide information about what’s happening to Loki and to the TVA as a whole. O.B. explains that Loki is time slipping. Loki time slips to meet O.B. in the past and explain what’s happening, instructing him to build exactly what they need to fix the situation in the future. Thanks to that, they conveniently have exactly what they need in the present.
It;s worth noting that this logic goes against everything that was explained in Avengers: Endgame in terms of time travel in the MCU. Of course, we know time works differently in the TVA and Loki isn’t simply traveling through time, but rather slipping around his current timeline.
After some protests from Loki and Mobius over the impossibly dangerous procedure they need to go through in order to stop his time slipping, O.B. notices the power surges that have been affecting the TVA. He leads them to the Temporal Loom, which he later refers to as the “heart of the TVA” and “where raw time is refined into physical timeline.” Because of the timeline splitting into so many new branches, the loom is overloading. It’s also worth mentioning that the “Temporal Loom” is an interesting name, given how similar it sounds to “Temple of Doom,” the title of the Indiana Jones film in which Quan starred as Short Round.
Given the new problem with the Loom, O.B. explains that he has to close the blast doors to protect the TVA while he works on a solution, putting Loki’s time slipping problem on even more of a clock. As they prepare to put their plan into action, a hunter arrives to let them know Dox is raiding the armory, which B-15 goes off to handle.
Loki slips again, this time to the future and he realizes needs to find a timestick so he can prune himself to properly execute the plan. Meanwhile, Mobius goes off to handle his part of the plan, which sees him head out into the raw time to put their device in place as O.B. watches on from a window, preparing to close the blast doors.
Loki scrambles to find a timestick but sees that the TVA is being evacuated as a monitor shows an apparent catastrophic series of branches being fed back into the loom with the message “LOOM CRITICAL.” Mobius gets the device into place and waits for Loki’s arrival while O.B.’s hand hovers over the button to close the blast doors.
Loki hears a phone ringing down a hallway and slowly approaches it. When he reaches it, he sees hands prying open an elevator door nearby. O.B. counts down to closing the blast doors and finally hits the button despite Mobius pleading for more time. Loki watches as Sylvie gets the elevator door open before he is pruned by someone behind him, whom we don’t get the chance to see. A good early guess would be Ravonna, but at this point there are just too many possibilities.
As it appears Mobius won’t make it back in time, Loki emerges from the chaotic raw time and flies into his friend, knocking them both through the door. Loki tells Mobius they need to find Sylvie before we cut away to see B-15 watching an army of hunters run through time doors. She and another hunter question if this is all for Sylvie as the episode comes to a close.
It’s not over just yeat though as we get a post-credits scene that sees Sylvie emerge from a time door in Broxton, Oklahoma in 1982 of a branched timeline. She heads into a McDonald’s and it quickly becomes evident she is perfectly content starting a new life here. However, Marvel Comics fans will recognize the city of Broxton as it serves as the location of New Asgard. This could be a sign of things to come as this version of New Asgard played host to the very popular “Siege” storyline, which sees Norman Osborn lead a team of villains posing as heroes to challenge the Asgardians and the real heroes.
This was an incredibly exciting first episode of Loki’s second season. It sets up a lot of very interesting building blocks, including Ravonna working with Kang and Broxton as a potential new New Asgard. If this episode is a sign of things to come, we are in for an incredibly entertaining new season and possibly a huge turning point in the MCU.
The second season premiere of Marvel’s Loki is now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes coming every Thursday night.