The Oscar winner for Everything Everywhere and At Once, who plays a new character alongside Loki Mobius, can only fix the timeline and save the universe in new episodes of the Marvel and Disney+ comedy drama.
In Doctor Who, the phrase “wobbly wobbly things” and “Wymie” has become synonymous with both the nature of time itself (abbreviated version: time is a non-linear mess) and how woefully inadequate our profanity is when it comes to talking about time. .
Regardless of whether you understand the complexities of time and time travel in general, but cannot express them formally, or your head immediately starts exploding as soon as someone mentions the murder of Baby Hitler, it is easier to attribute temporary circumstances to shaky and shaky things than to pretend. You’re Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The usefulness of this phrase came to my mind more than once while watching the second season of Disney+ “Loki”, in which the creative team absolutely managed to use Marvel’s money to make an insanely expensive season of Doctor Who with Tom. Hiddleston as the Doctor. This is such a perfectly worthy goal (which was often hinted at in the first six-part season) that it’s almost rude to complain that after hundreds of issues, Doctor Who has mostly gotten rid of the need to gloat about this kind of continuous exposure that too often baffles people. Loki .
In the four new episodes presented to critics, there is only a small esoteric oddity that so often made the first season awesome. The plot is so complex that there is rarely a sense of fun, but thanks to a great cast and some of the best production projects on television, there is almost always something that attracts your attention, if not causes emotional changes.
When we leave things as they are, and it won’t make any sense if you haven’t watched the first season or if you’ve forgotten something other than Loki the Alligator, Sylvie, one of several varieties of Loki, has just killed Jonathan Majors.Which. The remains. Their choice was to believe in free will despite the risk of a multiverse war, rather than submit to the whims of the Temporal Dispersion Control (TVA). Sylvie sent Loki back through the portal to TVA headquarters, but this is another TVA, one in which the discredited statues of the Guardians of Time were replaced with images of the One Who Remains, and the other in which TVA analyst Mobius (Owen Wilson) and his colleague at TVA were sent to TVA headquarters. Hunter TWA Bi-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) has no idea who Loki is.
Continuing the premiere, written by Eric Martin and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, things are going badly at TVA because of Sylvie’s actions. Deadlines branch out in unpredictable ways that TVA technology is not ready to handle. Even worse, Loki fails in time, as Mobius says: It seems that you are either born or die, or both at the same time.
The premiere looks like it’s actively mocking any viewer trying to make sense of the shaky and shaky events of last season. The premiere is everything: Of course, you learned something from what we did last season, but did you take it into account… A Temporary Loom?!? For almost an hour, most of the characters sit and discuss whether the malfunction of Time Whoozywhat will affect Time Doohickey and end the universe, giving viewers no reason to support the universe other than the very beginning. Sometimes they have these conversations while eating mouth–watering slices of emerald–colored lime pie in an automatic ATV lined with sea-green tiles, and sometimes they allow the newly introduced Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) to either explain-or laugh at the explanation-technology.
Somewhat infuriating, there is no human side to any of this nonsense, but since Kuan, who is no stranger to explaining or existing in multiverse madness thanks to Everything Everywhere All at Once, instantly becomes such a pleasant figure, it is very easy to ignore that he is like that. interpreting the concept, not the character. He’s not the only one. The premiere introduces a new hunter who seems pleasantly nimble and sloppy because he is played by Rafael Casal, and not because of inconsistent writing. We meet the mighty Judge Gamble (Liz Carr) and General Dox (Kathy Dickey), who seem intriguingly strange because Carr and Dickey skillfully portray an intriguing oddity, not because neither character is largely scripted.
The appeal to the actors’ performances is also a lot of what happened in the first season. Almost all of the rustic and amiably baffling charm of Mobius comes from Wilson. Almost all of the strength and vulnerability of the B-15 comes from Mosaku. At the moment, Loki is completely unrecognizable from the MCU character and even from the first season, and the only remnants of his glorious goal can be found in the plot points of previous franchises that other people tell him. However, Hiddleston, like Wilson and Mosaku, anchors the character and enjoys the dialogues, in which there is no shortage of funny digressions.
It just hides the enticing details of the claustrophobic narrative and the machinations of TVA, a scenario that I described as epic claustrophobia in my review of the first season. Even more than in the first season, Kasra Farahani’s wonderful production design has become a real star of the series. Each new space in TVA adds a new melody of rounded surfaces, colors that Benjamin Moore has not preserved for 50 years, and dangerous clutter. It’s a terrific ensemble, and yet the show consistently benefits from escaping. The second episode, which tells about retro London, and the third episode -perhaps the most exciting adventure that Loki has ever tried – prove that, as much as I love TWA as a location, it holds Loki back.
The third episode, shot by the ubiquitous Farahani, returns the One who remains in the Majors in a new guise, which begins with interesting eccentricities, but quickly becomes repetitive. Majors whose off-screen drama will or will not be a distraction, at least in being able to make decisions. Lots of options. They also return in the third episode of the Gugu Mbatha-Ro series Ravonna Renslayer and the lively Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). If you had asked me which character after four episodes I was most interested in, I would probably have told you “Miss Minutes”, who was given a much more prominent arch than you would expect from a talking clock. Last season, Sylvie could have answered this question, but, apart from outraged statements about free will, Di Martino was deprived of the elements that instantly made Sylvie so bright.
Perhaps free will will find an emotional response in the season finale, and perhaps shaky and timely things will become something more than just circular chatter that Hiddleston makes sound Shakespearean, Wilson turns into domestic wisdom, and Kuan draws comedy. Or maybe Loki will remain seductively atmospheric, playfully kitschy and somewhat aimless. This is the lava lamp from the TV show, which in another timeline looks like it could be really instructive.