Yahoo News ‘Loki’ Review: Season 2 Brings More Likable Pointlessness, Plus Ke Huy Quan
In Doctor Who, the phrase “wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff” has become synonymous with both the nature of time itself — short version: time is a nonlinear mess — and how woefully inadequate our layperson’s vocabulary is when it comes to blathering about time.
Whether you generally understand the intricacies of time and time travel but can’t formally express them, or your head immediately starts to explode the second somebody mentions killing Baby Hitler, it’s simpler to attribute temporal circumstances to “wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff” than pretend you’re Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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The handiness of the phrase came to mind more than a few times while I watched the second season of Disney+’s Loki, on which the creative team has absolutely succeeded in using Marvel’s money to make a wildly expensive season of Doctor Who featuring Tom Hiddleston as the Doctor. It’s such a perfectly worthy goal — one frequently hinted at in the six-episode first season — that it’s almost churlish to complain that, after however many hundred installments, Doctor Who has mostly dispensed with the need to wallow in the sort of nonstop exposition that too frequently bogs Loki down.
The four new episodes sent to critics have only a little of the esoteric oddness that so frequently made the first season a blast. The plot is so convoluted that the sense of fun rarely breaks through, but thanks to the sterling cast and some of the best production design on TV, there’s almost always something to hold your attention — if not to trigger any emotional investment.
When we left things — and this won’t make any sense if you didn’t watch the first season or if you’ve forgotten anything other than Alligator Loki — Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), one of several Loki variants, had just killed Jonathan Majors’ He Who Remains. Her choice was to put her faith in free will, despite the risk of a multiversal war, rather than submitting to the capricious whims of the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Sylvie had sent Loki back through a portal to the TVA headquarters, but it’s a different TVA, one in which the statues of the debunked Time-Keepers have been replaced by images of He Who Remains and one in which TVA analyst Mobius (Owen Wilson) and TVA hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) have no idea who Loki is.
Picking up in the premiere, written by Eric Martin and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, things are going wrong at the TVA due to Sylvie’s actions. The timelines are branching in unpredictable ways that the TVA’s technology is unprepared to handle. To make matters worse, Loki is glitching through time, about which Mobius says, “Looks like you’re being born or dying or both at the same time.”
The premiere feels like it’s actively mocking any viewers who tried to make sense of last season’s wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. The premiere is all, “Sure, you figured out some of what we were doing last season, but did you factor in … The Temporal Loom?!?” For nearly an hour, characters are mostly sitting around discussing whether the Time Whoozywhat malfunctioning will upend the Time Doohickey and end the universe without giving viewers any reason to root for the universe other than principle. Sometimes they have these conversations while eating lurid emerald pieces of key lime pie in the celadon-tiled TVA automat and sometimes they let the newly introduced Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) — or “OB” — explain, or make a mockery of explaining, the technology.
Somewhat infuriatingly, there’s no human side to any of the blather, but because Quan — no stranger to having to explain or exist within multiversal madness thanks to Everything Everywhere All at Once — is such an instantly likable figure, it’s a breeze to ignore that he’s playing a concept, not a character. He’s hardly the only one. The premiere introduces a new hunter, who comes across as likably slick and sleazy because he’s played by Rafael Casal, not because of the inconsistent writing. We meet the powerful Judge Gamble (Liz Carr) and General Dox (Katie Dickie), who come across as intriguingly odd because Carr and Dickie expertly project intriguing oddness, not because either character is written as much of anything.
Falling back on the performances from the cast is a lot of what took place in the first season as well. Almost all of Mobius’ folksy, amiably bemused charm comes from Wilson. Almost all of B-15’s strength and vulnerability come from Mosaku. Loki is, at this point, wholly unrecognizable from the character from the MCU and even from the first season, and the only remnants of his glorious purpose are in previous franchise plot points other people recite back to him. Yet Hiddleston, like Wilson and Mosaku, anchors the character and relishes the dialogue, which doesn’t lack for amusing digressions.
It just buries the appealing tidbits in a claustrophobic narrative and the machinations of the TVA, a setting I described as one of “epic claustrophobia” in my season one review. Even more than in the first season, Kasra Farahani’s remarkable production design has become the series’ true star. Each new space in the TVA adds a new melody of rounded surfaces, colors that Benjamin Moore hasn’t kept in stock for 50 years and precarious clutter. It’s an amazing set and yet one that the show constantly benefits from escaping. The second episode, with a detour into retro London, and the third episode, easily the most Whovian adventure Loki has ever attempted, prove that as much as I love the TVA as a location, it’s holding Loki back.
The third episode — directed by the ubiquitous Farahani — brings back Majors’ He Who Remains in a new guise, one that starts off full of interesting eccentricities only to become repetitive in a hurry. Majors, whose offscreen drama either will or won’t prove to be a point of distraction, is at least getting to make choices. Lots of choices. Also returning in the third episode are Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer and the animated Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). If you asked me which character is, after four episodes, the one I’m most invested in, I’d probably tell you Miss Minutes, who has been given a much more discernible arc than you’d expect from a talking clock. Last season I might have answered Sylvie to that question, but other than indignant declarations about free will, Di Martino has been stripped of the elements that made Sylvie so instantly vivid.
Maybe the free will stuff will find an emotional hook in the season’s home stretch, and maybe wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff will become more than just circular babble that Hiddleston makes sound Shakespearean, Wilson turns into homespun wisdom and Quan mines for comedy. Or maybe Loki will continue to just be tantalizingly atmospheric, playfully kitschy and somewhat purposeless. It’s a lava lamp of a TV show, one that in a different timeline feels like it could have been truly illuminating.
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