Loki’s New Season Loses Sight of What Made the First One Great

Note: This review does not contain spoilers for season 2 but does reference the season 1 finale in general terms.

The first season of Loki was one of the most pleasant surprises of pandemic-era television. I tuned in for Owen Wilson—always—but was shocked to find a mustachioed Eli Cash was only one of many pleasures in a six-episode burst of pop perfection. (Or at least a five-episode burst of pop perfection that tapered off at the very end. They can’t all be Andor.) The show became my favorite thing the MCU has ever done.

So the second season, which premiered October 5, was obviously appointment viewing for me, and I tuned in to the first episode with my brother, who had watched and loved the first season as well. Instantly, it was clear to us that something was wrong. His comment near the end was “I guess there were some pacing issues in the first season, too.” The comment was correct in the sense that sometimes walls already have small cracks before someone drives a school bus through them.

Ke Huy Quan as OB, Wunmi Mosaku as Hunter B-15, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, and Owen Wilson as Mobius in season 2 of Loki. Photo by Gareth Gatrell/© 2023 Marvel

The second episode was when I knew something was wrong wrong. It was one of the most frustratingly structured, shot, paced, and edited chunks of visual drama I have watched all year. I had to go online and check on the behind-the-scenes talent because it seemed impossible that the same people who had created the first season were responsible for this.

Turns out they were not! I don’t know if there was drama involved, and the internet offers no decent gossip. But Kate Herron (Sex Education), who directed the whole first season, is not involved in season 2 at all. Series creator and season 1 head writer Michael Waldron (Rick and Morty) has been relegated to one of a sea of executive producer credits.

Where the first season was patient, charming, and cinematic, frequently upsetting the status quo and challenging audience expectations, the new episodes dynamite all that plot and work tirelessly to pull the characters back to a safe, predictable, and deeply uncinematic baseline. Where the first season explored character by repurposing classic film genres—dystopian comedies like Brazil, Fincherian detective stories, Hitchcockian train thrillers—the first two episodes of the second season do character by having two people sit down at a table and say their motivations out loud in the most stilted, bored way imaginable. The third episode (the latest release as of this writing) outlines the grander scope of the season, which at least gets things moving, but unfortunately it’s barely more compelling. Where the plots in the first season explored the nature of identity, morality, and individual responsibility, the new season wastes all its time having the characters stumble through one side quest after another, searching for a whatsit to build a whozat to find so-and-so, over and over, all headed nowhere, signifying nothing.

Character motivations over pie. Photo by Gareth Gatrell/© 2023 Marvel

It looks worse, too, by the way—some of the editing choices in episode 2 border on incomprehensible—but you can discard it entirely without ever moving beyond storytelling ethos. Its guiding principle seems to be “Keep something moving at all times. Doesn’t matter what.” You can practically hear the studio notes. Characters interrupt exposition scenes with jokes for seemingly no reason aside from the worry the audience might be getting bored. How will the viewer know the lines disappearing on a screen represent people dying? Don’t bother dramatizing it or representing those lives visually. Just have a character say, “All those lines represent people, dying.”

If it were another MCU show, I wouldn’t care. I would just stop watching, as I have with about two-thirds of the studio’s output. But the first season was targeted at viewers who still love comic-book storytelling: the mythology, the heightened emotions, the invitation to think about the big, maybe silly, maybe important questions. It got me to care. The Loki of season 1 was fresh off murdering thousands of people in the first Avengers, a pure egomaniac, all resentment and frustration. He gets dropped into the very kind of authoritarian dystopia he was working to create and discovers something about himself through his powerlessness. Every shot in season 1, episode 1, serves this story. The viewer can latch on by seeing themselves in it—and what’s more, we can explore some of the ideas of the MCU without a clear good or bad guy. Every moment Loki asserts his ego, he learns that strategy is not only immoral; it’s maladaptive. It will get him killed.

Sophia Di Martino as Sylvie. Photo by Gareth Gatrell/© 2023 Marvel

The second episode of season 1 immediately moved on to the next big question, covering more ground than the total of season 2 so far, as the audience was forced to question the purpose and culpability of everyone besides the title character. Sure, the show argued, Loki is a compromised and deeply flawed individual. But what about these characters whose whole identities are subsumed by their commitment to the Time Variance Authority, the militant entity revealed to control all of time in the Marvel universe? How complicit are characters like Mobius (Wilson), who seem humane but still largely accept and uphold the version of the world handed to them by their authoritarian regime? Which is worse: the crimes of the individual or the crimes of cogs in harmful systems? These are big questions, and the show rarely tried to answer them outright. Instead it put the characters in situations where those questions became relevant to the story’s big life-and-death, time-and-universe-spanning stakes. It was never quite groundbreaking, but it’s the kind of thing the best Hollywood thrillers have been doing for a century.

There’s a conversation in season 2 in which someone literally shouts at Loki, “You’re not a hero—you’re a villain!” multiple times. I suppose that’s another way to do it. Oh, and here’s a joke about jet skis.

So what went wrong? I doubt we’ll ever know for certain, but I have my suspicions. Kang the Conqueror, He Who Remains, a bafflingly still-employed Jonathan Majors, is the centerpiece of this season. The first shot is a closeup of his face. The third episode explores his backstory. The finale of Loki season 1, in its one true misstep, introduced Thanos 2.0 to the world. Now the series appears to be Marvel’s primary delivery service for hyping its next top heel. And that kind of arch foreshadowing is admittedly part of the comic-book form: Here’s the new bad guy! See just how bad! Maybe the baddest bad guy of them all! It’s part of the sales pitch. But it only really works if it’s in service of a story about human emotions, real people, the decisions we’ll make once the show is over that might seem boring but that this heightened reality has granted some additional meaning. The Sam Raimi Spider-Man films are the gold standard—the villains were always foils for Peter Parker, warning what would happen if he chose the wrong path.

Ouroboros (OB) is happy to help. Photo by Gareth Gatrell/© 2023 Marvel

Or it’s a way to convert your most successful show into a six-hour commercial for the Brand. Commercials don’t have rounded characters. There’s nothing for them to talk about when they’re not shilling the product. They might ramble on about jet skis or popcorn or pie, not in service of learning more about them (what would be the point?) but simply to kill time, to create the illusion of humanity, before moving on to the next stage of the sales pitch. You can disguise the characters not having any inner life by carrying them from one bit of forced drama to another, so they’re always responding, never internalizing. It’s the exact opposite of the season 1 ethos, and I can’t imagine that anyone capable of making Loki’s first season would be hyped about making such a product. I could also imagine Marvel would very much want to take its most popular show—popular, by the way, because it was clearly made by people who cared—and use it to promote the rest of its somewhat dwindling empire.

When I saw season 1, I thought maybe I wasn’t done with Marvel. Maybe the comic-book movie form I loved so much as a teenager still had a few tricks up its sleeve. Watching season 2, I remembered the problem is never the genre, the style, the methods of storytelling, or the age of the target audience. It’s all about how much the creatives respect the audience and the time we share together. If the first season of Loki proved that great, surprising stories can exist anywhere, season 2 proves an undeniable caveat: quality survives better in some environments than others.