Season 2 of Loki has finally arrived, and, oddly enough, this series was not referenced in any of the nine movies or nine seasons of TV that have come out in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Season 1. Loki, at least for now, exists in its own bubble separate from everything else in the franchise–the Season 2 premiere does nothing to change that.
Nonetheless, the events of this series are very important and ostensibly provide the foundation for the Multiverse Saga. This premiere episode, though, pretty much stays in the Time Variance Authority’s bubble, because they’ve got some pretty catastrophic stuff to deal with in the immediate aftermath of He Who Remains’ death. Let’s talk about it.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of Loki.
Season 1 ended when Loki and Sylvie finally met He Who Remains, the secret boss of the TVA. He goaded Sylvie into killing him, but Loki tried to stop her–and so she kicked him through a time door back to the TVA, and then murdered the old man. Back at TVA, Loki found a big statue of Kang the Conquerer where the TimeKeepers used to be, and his pal Mobius didn’t recognize him.
In the Season 2 premiere, we learn that this wasn’t what we thought. Loki hadn’t arrived in a new, alternate version of the TVA that had come into existence because of what Sylvie did. Instead, he arrived at the same TVA, before he had originally shown up there at the start of the series. And then he disappears, and reappears back in the old TVA with the people who know him.
Before long, though, he disappears again, and pops up in another era of the TVA. This keeps happening–he goes back and forth between where he belongs and some other time period. Ouroboros, a new character who has apparently been keeping everything running for eons with no appreciation from his bosses or any of is co-workers, calls this phenomenon “time-slipping.” Ouroboros, or OB, says this shouldn’t be possible in the TVA, which exists outside of time and thus has no past or future. But it also is clearly happening, as OB acknowledges. What changed to make this possible? No explanation is given in this episode.
Fortunately, OB is a super-genius, and he knows how to fix Loki. They need to make use of the Temporal Loom, which is a gigantic physical device that controls the flow of time, to lock Loki into his present. But there’s a problem: the Loom is breaking down because of all the new timeline branches popping up, so they don’t have much time to pull this off.
But they do, right at the buzzer. Loki and the TVA live to fight another day, and we have a pile of Easter eggs and potential teases to mull over until we get another episode next week. Let’s dive in.
