I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the second season of Loki nearly as much as I am. I feel like after coming out of the gate really strong with Wandavision, most of Marvel’s shows have been somewhere between decent and fine with perhaps their most consistent flaw being their tendency to get oddly muddled. Ms. Marvel was great when it leaned into its teen drama trappings, but that felt so oddly separate from her finding out about her heritage — which, while also good, felt like an entirely different chunk of the show.
Could the two threads have been woven together better? Oh, most certainly. The thing is, Ms. Marvel was a six-episode show which, lest we forget, is only a quarter of what used to be the standard television season. It’s not a lot of time by television standards and, in all honesty, one of my biggest wishes for Ms. Marvel was that the show had had more time to breathe. The teenager-finds-out-she-has-superpowers is a now-classic concept, and combining it with both a child-of-immigrants story and the fangirl angle offers a super rich vein of material to mine. But with six episodes, the show barely had time to dig into any of that. Instead, it had to keep its focus on the main plot and, in the process, left some things undeveloped and missed out on a lot of really fun potential.
Enter the second season of Loki. With a finished season in the rearview, the show uses that as a springboard and charge on ahead. And charge on it does. The season seems to recognize it’s a miniseries and chooses to hone in on two central questions, one character, one plot: What’s going on with Loki? and How do they fix the TVA? Every episode looks to answer these questions, building on top of them to create a propulsive plot that pushes the plot along and leaves me wanting more. It’s got its share of twists and turns that compound on each other and push it so that I’m looking forward to the next week not out of a dutiful “alright, let’s see what happens” but out of a genuine want to find out what happens next. I don’t feel like I’m waiting for the final episode to bring it all together, instead, I look forward to what wrinkles each episode brings in, even as it all builds towards something. Vitally, the second season of Loki doesn’t feel like a show that’s trying to set up the next big thing or a truncated season of television, it feels like an actual miniseries: six episodes exquisitely planned out with a purpose for its length.
Loki has a lot going for it. It’s gorgeously shot and Tom Hiddleston’s performance as Loki is full of fun physical touches that are such a joy to watch. It’s also a great piece of science fiction, feeling in some places cut from the same cloth as shows like Severance. It’s a fun time, and that it feels like a complete, intentional chunk of television is such a refreshing change.
Essays, Not Rants! 