Marvel’s Loki doesn’t just enjoy its rampant comic bookness. It depends on it. Its second season, streaming weekly on Disney+, effortlessly clears the high bar set by Season 1 and offers a glimmer of hope for a sputtering, deteriorating MCU.
Loki Season 2 works because it continues to stress the narratively-connected-yet-tonally-distinct vibe that freed up the preceding season from feeling like another cog in the Marvel/MCU machine. Showrunner Michael Waldron reminds us of the stakes without skimping on the silliness that makes this particular MCU thread so much fun. This is a wild, weird corner of the multiverse, and Waldron absolutely treats it as such.
Unlike the first season, which front-loaded its 6-episode run with the juicy stuff before settling into a mid-season slump, Season 2 starts strong and doesn’t let up. Episode 3 is easily the best of the four episodes screened for critics, but everything we’ve seen so far has justified its existence.
Newcomer-wise, no one puts more verve, depth, and charisma into their parts than Rafael Casal and Ke Huy Quan do in their respective turns as rogue Hunter Brad Wolfe and the TVA’s tech repairs guy, ‘OB’. Both performers enjoy plenty of screen time, and what Disney has shown us so far positions them as some of the best new MCU characters yet.
Hiddleston and Wilson continue to be excellent together, but what’s most impressive about their dynamic is how welcoming and pliable it is. Their flexibility is never clearer than when the writers add Casal to the mix. The second episode spotlights a lengthy interrogation scene that finds Hiddleston and Wilson at their good cop/bad cop best, but Casal keeps pace, offering just enough resistance to set them all up for punchy character moments. He’s simultaneously a compliment and a foil, a necessary obstacle with desires and motivations of his own.
Loki‘s second season occasionally tangles itself in TVA-speak, but it never becomes completely inaccessible. Casual viewers almost certainly won’t get some of the obscure nods and references, and that’s okay. What matters is that Hiddleston, Wilson, and Quan keep things fun, funny, and relatively light.
Marvel really needed this win.
LOKI: SEASON 2 is streaming on Disney+ with new episodes every Thursday in the US / 2am Friday in the UK.
