SPOILER ALERT: Be aware this review contains spoilers from Loki Season 1. It is, however, spoiler-free regarding Season 2.

6/12 ForReel Score | 2.5 Stars

Loki, a Disney+ Marvel series or a 12-part movie, depending on perspective, presents viewers with many paradoxes and, even in its second season, continues to be one itself. Much like Star Wars’s recent spin-off series, Ashoka, Loki’s title is somewhat misleading; the series should instead be called Tales Of The TVA (Featuring Loki).

Amidst all the fake science and time mumbo-jumbo, it’s hard to remember that Loki was once the villainous Norse God who challenged The Avengers for Earth in 2012. It’s especially worse since this version of Loki came directly from that time. Still, Loki’s second season is miles better than most of Marvel’s Phase 5, but take that with a grain of salt since Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantuamania and Secret Invasion set the bar quite low.

Any Marvel fan interested in Loki’s sophomore outing is surely familiar with what’s happened on the show, but just in case, the series follows a version of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) right after he lost the infamous Battle Of New York to The Avengers. This Loki escaped capture using the Tesseract after The Avengers time-travel back to 2012 to gather the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. After his unplanned escape, Loki is apprehended by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), an authority responsible for protecting the Sacred Timeline, where he’s recruited to help Mobius (Owen Wilson) search for the mysterious person killing their agents.

Upon discovering that the killer is a female variant of himself named Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who was taken by the TVA from her universe as a child after triggering a Nexus Event - an event not supposed to occur on the Sacred Timeline - Loki and Sylvie team up to destroy the TVA. Last season ended with the two Lokis finding He Who Remains, the creator of the TVA (Jonathan Majors, Magazine Dreams), at the end of time. With Sylvie’s machete to his neck, He Who Remains tells them that millions of his more terrifying variants, like Kang the Conqueror, will be released and destroy everything if he dies. Ignoring his warnings, Sylvie kills He Who Remains, creating endless branches in time and interesting stakes for the MCU.

This season picks up right where the show left off with a premiere that feels far more exciting than anything in last season’s exposition-filled finale. Loki quickly learns he’s experiencing ‘time slipping’ and has been pulled to the past, not to an alternate universe or timeline as many thought was the case. Season 1 focused primarily on finding Slyvie and taking down the TVA. This season is also about finding Sylvie, who settles down in a 1980s McDonald’s after killing He Who Remains. Instead of “burning the TVA to the ground,” Loki now needs her help to save it.

Even as a passionate Marvel fan, reviewing a show that is so far removed from anything remotely real is hard. Comic book entertainment always has its fair share of nonsense, but Loki takes it to a new level. As a result, your enjoyment will depend on your threshold for said nonsense. If the recap of Season 1 wasn’t overwhelming enough, Season 2 throws a lot more fictional terminology at the viewer to the point where it’s easy to tune out the dialogue. Luckily, Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once) provides most of the exposition. He is delightful as OB, the tech genius behind the TVA’s technology, and he’s thankfully in almost every episode.

Loki also seemingly forgets what it promised would happen once He Who Remains dies, because instead of more terrifying versions of Kang coming for Loki, the TVA’s main concern is their Time Loom- a space station-like structure outside the TVA, which branches of time are overloading now that He Who Remains is dead. It’s not that this is uninteresting - Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson’s effortless banter never gets old - but, at times, it feels like the show is repeating story beats to avoid committing to the consequences promised.

One thing that remains confusing in the MCU, particularly with Loki, is the difference between timelines and multiverses. As explained in the first season, the entire point of the TVA is to protect the Sacred Timeline, but what exactly is the Sacred Timeline? If it’s the timeline of the MCU, then does every multiverse have its own Sacred Timeline? How can that be when there is only one TVA? If killing He Who Remains released other multiverses, how did variants of Loki, like Sylvie, exist in the first place? There are so many questions the show still doesn’t bother to clarify, making it difficult to invest oneself in the plot.

The season’s highlight is anything with Miss Minutes, He Who Remains’s sentient A.I assistant, voiced by the legendary Tara Strong. After the death of her boss, Miss Minutes teams up with Ravona Reynslayer (Gugu Mbtha-Raw) to set Victor Timely, another Kang variant, on a certain path. This storyline is where the show shines because it’s when it keeps its promise to the audience, instead focusing on contrivances to draw out the series.

Loki continues to be the most technically well-crafted and creative Marvel Disney+ project since Wandavision, which is a feat in and of itself, given it has an almost entirely new creative team behind this season. However, Loki feels so disconnected from the rest of the MCU that it’s difficult to see how it will impact projects going forward. When you compare Loki, which literally operates outside of time and space, to other Marvel shows like Hawkeye or Secret Invasion, it’s sadly apparent Marvel has lost its interconnectedness. It’s unfortunate, given it was the one thing that set them apart in the first place.

Episodic Review: 'Loki' S2 Is Entertaining, But Stuck In A Narrative Time Loop