Loki’s first season was a tug-of-war between genuine artistry and mechanical shared-universe concerns; the latter eventually won out in a disconnected finale designed to tease half a decade of future films. With all that setup dispensed with, the show’s sophomore run has a corrective potential, even though the danger of being subsumed by the Marvel machine will likely loom large over all six episodes. However, its premiere is promising. The episode is a briskly paced, skillfully shot adventure that leans into (and often literally zooms into) the show’s kooky genre concepts and retro-futuristic designs. It’s entertaining, even if its ending is a bit sudden and jagged and aims to return things to a familiar status quo.
“Ouroboros” picks up right where season one left off, as Loki (Tom Hiddleston) sprints through the hallways of a new version of the TVA adorned with statues of Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors). Immediately, the show returns with a renewed momentum and texture: a sweeping, hand-held camera and a warm but low-lit and washed-out palette that, when applied to the TVA’s dark backdrops, allows its visual noise — the digital cousin to film grain — to create the sense of electric and chaotic unpredictability across the actors’ faces. Loki is on the run from familiar faces who, for some reason, don’t recognize him — Owen Wilson’s agent Mobius, Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15, and Eugene Cordaro’s custodian Casey — who only see him as just another multiversal “variant” to be hunted and destroyed. This leads to a brief chase of enormous action-comedy proportions, and one slyly reminiscent of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, in which Anakin Skywalker leaps from a window and plummets into crowded hover-car traffic.
However, the episode soon plays a mildly deflating hand: after Loki drops a giant monitor on a TVA logo on the floor, he “glitches” back into a more familiar version of the sprawling office where the supporting characters recognize him again, but he notices the crack on that very same spot on the ground and realizes that the place he’d just visited was the past. To have the story involve linear time travel hardly simplifies it — if anything, the reasons his comrades in the present don’t remember running into him is its own form of mystery — but it does end up being slightly irksome since season one’s finale was all about unleashing a multiverse into existence and creating alternate realities. This isn’t one of them.
Still, Loki’s predicament is a fun one, involving the mildest of body horror as he’s stretched between past and present, and makes discoveries about what elements of the TVA have been hidden and obscured over time (mostly, sculptures of Kang, which have been covered up by triptych murals of the godlike Time Keepers). Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and editor Calum Ross keep us grounded in the common spaces between the two timelines by using match cuts as Loki glitches between them, creating a sense of immediacy and continuity that ensures the story never slows down. In the absence of Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), Mobius, B-15 and Loki are brought before a panel of other judges and generals in the TVA’s “War Room” to try and make sense of the timeline mess that’s been unfolding ever since Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) killed a version of Kang, or “He Who Remains,” at the end of time, unleashing an entire multiverse into existence.
The severed head of a robotic Time Keeper lies on the judges’ table. Opinions are split on how to proceed, and whether to communicate this ruse to the TVA; after all, an entire community’s prophets have just been discovered to be false, a revelation that could shake them to their core. One administrator, Judge Gamble, having seen how the wool was pulled over her eyes, questions her very purpose for being, as Loki reveals that every agent at the TVA was a real person on Earth or elsewhere but had their memories wiped. However, Kate Dickie’s intimidating General Dox seems gung-ho about continuing the TVA’s mission regardless, and “pruning” or destroying divergent timelines to ensure a single “Sacred” continuity, setting up what is sure to be a major conflict in future episodes.
Most of “Ouroboros,” however, is concerned with Mobius figuring out how to get Loki to stop glitching back and forth in time, a process that looks at least mildly painful, leading Mobius and Loki to argue over just how bad it truly is. One advantage of the show immediately doubling back on Mobius not recognizing Loki is we get more of Wilson and Hiddleston’s affable banter, enhanced this time by the chasmic contrast between Mobius’ “gee, shucks” casual charm and Loki’s intensity and urgency as he tries to warn everyone about the danger posed by Kang. Benson and Moorhead replace Marvel’s otherwise polished and expensive look with their signature lo-fi aesthetic (of films like Something in the Dirt). Along with cinematographer Isaac Bauman, they create fluid, engaging, low-angle walk-and-talk scenes (bound, once again, by Natalie Holt’s magnetic, mischievous score) as Loki and Mobius argue and attempt to find a solution.
This solution likely lies in the forgotten basement of the TVA (detailed by production designer Kasra Farahani, like a magical workshop), the messy abode of the brand-new character Ouroboros or “O.B.” — a time technician played by Ke Huy Quan. The Oscar-winner brings an amusing frankness to his role in both the past and the present, as Loki glitches between conversations that not only play out simultaneously for the audience but result in new memories for O.B., speeding along the exposition in novel ways as the camera whip-pans between the two timelines. It’s here that the episode truly shines, leaning into its pulpy sci-fi influences by tossing out goofy, made-up technical terms at a mile-a-minute without slowing down to explain them. It’s nigh impossible for the audience to keep up with the plot at this point, but that’s hardly a criticism, since it places viewers in Loki and Mobius’ shoes.
In order to get back to normal, Loki needs to “prune” himself at a specific moment (when he’s told to by a handy clock) while Mobius must venture out in a rotund and puffy space suit towards a gigantic “Time Loom” that’s malfunctioning as a result of having to stitch together too many divergent timelines. With his space suit tethered to the TVA, Mobius must brave the temporal equivalent of solar winds and extract Loki from a physical representation of a winding time-stream at just the right moment before O.B. closes the blast doors for good. If you’ve ever wanted a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Doctor Who, there you have it.
After Loki glitches into the future (once things have seemingly gone even more awry at the TVA), the episode creates a sudden and convenient solution, albeit a mysterious one, as he finds Sylvie stuck in an elevator shaft, and some unseen character “prunes” him just in time, using one of the Hunters’ time sticks. Everything works out in the end, with Loki shooting out of the Loom in the present and landing romantically in Mobius’ arms (aww), but the threat of some other conflict also arises, albeit somewhat vaguely, as B-15 watches Dox send entire armies of Hunters through time doors, supposedly to capture the escaped Sylvie, though it seems like something more sinister is afoot.
And then … the episode just kind of ends, with something resembling the status quo of last season. Loki and Mobius are back together, and the TVA is hunting Sylvie through time, though the ending does at least promise a slowly unfolding mystery of why any of this is happening in the first place.
Low-Key Moments
• A nifty mid-credits scene sees Sylvie trying to settle down in Oklahoma in 1982, specifically at a McDonald’s. It’s a silly bit of product placement, but DiMartino sells the character’s “being tired of running” story point as an entire sensation, in just a handful of silent close-ups.
• In the past, Loki stumbles upon an old recording of Kang and Renslayer, hinting at a romantic dynamic between them similar to the comics.
• We get a fun look at some other Hunters, like D-90 (Neil Ellice), who apologizes to Mobius for pruning him last season (he was just doing his job!), and the ruthless X-5, played by Rafael Casal, who… seems to have a little something something with Kate Dickie’s General Dox?! Two very scary and very hot people, what’s not to love?
• It’s probably no accident that the door to the time bridge resembles Cerebro from the X-Men films. This doesn’t mean it’ll lead anywhere, but it’ll definitely get people talking.
