Loki is back like it never left.
It’s been more than two years since the first season of Loki concluded in the summer of 2021, but time passes differently in the TVA. For Mobius (Owen Wilson), Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), and the God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) himself, mere minutes have passed between the finale’s cliff-hanger—in which Loki gazes upon a statue of He Who Remains as Mobius and B-15 try to figure out who Loki is—and the opening scene of the Season 2 premiere, which finds Loki on the run.
After Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) kicked Loki through a Time Door and killed He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) in the first-season finale, the TVA is in shambles. Timelines are veering wildly off the course of the Sacred Timeline, past the point of no return. Meanwhile, members of the TVA, led by B-15, have decided to stop pruning the branching timelines following the revelation that the TVA was built on a foundation of lies, including the fact that everyone working at the cosmic time-keeping authority had been a variant all along. But Loki quickly realizes that he’s landed in a timeline where none of that has happened yet.
“Ouroboros” carries the chaotic momentum of the first season into a captivating opener that elevates the stakes of the series even higher than they already were. The episode maintains a frenetic pace as Loki is pulled through time, making stops at the past, present, and future versions of the TVA against his will. There have been some major changes to the series’ creative leadership for this new season; head writer Eric Martin has taken the reins from creator Michael Waldron, and filmmaking duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead—who together helmed “Ouroboros”—have stepped in for Kate Herron to lead a new team of directors. And yet the Season 2 premiere yields what appears to be a mostly seamless transition from one season to the next, and much of the Loki team otherwise remains intact.
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In “Ouroboros,” Loki’s involuntary trips through time—a process referred to as “time-slipping”—help to expand our knowledge and understanding of the TVA, introducing new characters and showing sides to its world we hadn’t previously seen. The time jumps also provide glimpses into a few mysteries to be explained in the episodes ahead. It’s rare for Loki to remain in one place for too long, but the Season 2 opener sustains its focus on the TVA to reestablish its volatile state of disorder, illuminate how B-15 is trying to change the organization’s repressive methods, and unpack the raw emotions that Loki is experiencing in the immediate aftermath of his and Sylvie’s encounter with He Who Remains. (The poor guy hasn’t even had the chance to change his ripped and bloodied shirt yet.)
Many of the lingering questions from the first season remain unanswered after the Season 2 premiere, but the episode gives the audience a chance to refamiliarize itself with this crumbling bureaucracy of time lords and the wonderful buddy-cop dynamic between Loki and Mobius, along with an introduction to new allies and potential enemies of the God of Mischief in the weeks ahead. “Ouroboros” serves as a reminder of what made Loki work so well the first time around and why this character-driven adventure is the type of series Marvel Studios should continue to aspire to after often losing its way in the uneven Multiverse Saga.
For the next five weeks, I’ll be recapping each episode of Loki. I’ll start every piece with a rundown of the main events of each installment, along with my general thoughts on how it went, before diving deeper into the episode’s core conflicts, key characters, or most important scenes.
Time-Slipping in the TVA
After having his heart broken by Sylvie’s betrayal at the end of the first-season finale, Loki begins the new season with his body being torn apart and put back together. Much to the horror of Casey (Eugene Cordero), Mobius, and whoever else has the misfortune of witnessing this disturbing phenomenon, Loki’s time-slipping repeats over and over again. Once he finally finds present-day Mobius and is able to stick around long enough to string together a few sentences, he finally explains what happened with He Who Remains.
“We got to the man at the end of time,” Loki says. “And he made sense. We thought it was about freeing the timeline, but that only brings more malevolence, more violence, more war, more of him. They’re coming; they’re all coming.”
Thanks to Loki’s arrival, Mobius and other higher-ranking members of the TVA learn about the biggest threat the TVA now faces. But given that Loki can hardly stay in the same place for more than a few minutes at a time in his current state, Mobius decides to bring him down to the repairs and advancement department to handle that more immediate issue. There, they meet the episode’s eponymous Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), or O.B. for short. O.B., the TVA’s tech expert, runs the entire department on his own and even wrote the guidebook that serves as something of a TVA bible.
The introduction to O.B. is one of the biggest highlights of the episode, as Mobius and Loki simultaneously hold separate conversations with O.B. across time after Loki slips back into the past. Quan is a seamless fit in the weird world of Loki, immediately bringing a burst of energy to the screen with his comedic timing and iconic voice as he steps into the role of this quirky genius who hasn’t spoken to another soul for 400 years. In something of a correspondence between the past and the present, the two versions of O.B. are able to devise a complicated solution to Loki’s time-slipping dilemma. Here is where Loki goes even deeper into sci-fi territory.
To put an end to Loki’s time-slipping, O.B. creates a Temporal Aura Extractor, a machine designed to extract Loki from the timestream with the help of the so-called Temporal Loom. The latter temporal device is a piece of technology that’s crucial to the existence of the TVA and the multiverse at large, and O.B. speculates that it could be the source of Loki’s problems. “The Temporal Loom is the heart of the TVA,” he explains. “It’s where raw time is refined into physical timeline. But it’s not constructed to weave together so many new branches, so it’s overloading.”
As an unintended consequence of the TVA’s magnanimous decision to spare the new branching timelines, the Temporal Loom is being overburdened with too many threads of time, resulting in power surges throughout the TVA. O.B.’s plan is to send Mobius into the Temporal Loom room, wearing a comically bulky radiation suit, to have him hook up the Aura Extractor to the Loom. Loki, meanwhile, has to be ready to prune himself—effectively releasing himself from time so that the Aura Extractor can pull him back into the present—once his synchronized timer indicates that Mobius is ready for him. Should Loki fail to prune himself at the right moment, he’ll be lost to time forever. (No pressure.) As for Mobius, if he doesn’t come back through the closing blast doors of the Loom room quickly enough … all of his skin will be violently peeled off due to the excessive temporal radiation.
(The science behind everything is deeply puzzling, down to the advertised risk of “spaghettification” on warning signs before entering the control room. And yet it somehow all works with the humor that plays off of its inherent absurdity.)
Of course, Loki time-slips to the future at the most inconvenient moment, and the plan nearly goes awry. He desperately searches for a Time Stick to prune himself at a version of the TVA that’s in the midst of an emergency, and just when it’s about to be too late, Loki hears a phone ringing in the distance, as if he’s getting a call that will pull him back into the Matrix. A stopped elevator next to the phone is manually pried open from the inside, revealing a familiar face: Sylvie. She sees Loki and says, “There you are,” just before he’s pruned by an unseen figure from behind.
It isn’t clear at the moment what any of this means. But the sequence shows a future where Sylvie returns to the TVA and is relieved to see him, as well as the emergence of some mysterious guardian angel who happened to know that Loki needed to be pruned exactly at that moment. “Ouroboros” raises a lot of new questions to add to the ones from the climactic conclusion of the first season that Loki has yet to answer. With a little help from the future, though, Loki and Mobius execute O.B.’s plan at the last possible moment, seemingly resolving Loki’s pesky time-slipping issue for good. Still, the whole ordeal reveals an even greater threat to everyone at the TVA via O.B.’s discovery that the Temporal Loom is under too much pressure due to all the branching timelines.
The TVA’s Existential Crisis
For eons, the TVA supposedly kept peace and order in the multiverse by ensuring that “variants” who veered off the path that the Time-Keepers created were detained and that time was always set back on its predetermined course. As the story goes, the Time-Keepers created the TVA and all of its workers to prevent another Multiversal War between timelines and protect this so-called Sacred Timeline. But as Sylvie and Loki helped expose in the first season, the Time-Keepers were merely animatronic figureheads, and every employee at the TVA was actually a variant who had their memory of their previous life wiped clean.
B-15 was one of the first TVA members Sylvie helped to see these truths, and she’s now leading the charge in reforming the organization. In “Ouroboros,” Hunter X-5 (Rafael Casal) summons B-15 and Mobius to stand before the judges’ council in the war room and explain why the TVA has stopped pruning timelines. B-15 makes the case that, with what they now know about the Time-Keepers and the previously vilified variants, the TVA has been committing atrocities by destroying timelines with innocent people living in them. “I know how hard it is to turn your back on everything you’ve believed in,” she says. “But the TVA has to change, and it has to start now. We can’t go back to pruning those branches.”
B-15’s speech is convincing enough for Judge Gamble (Liz Carr) to decree that the TVA will no longer prune branching timelines, but General Dox (Kate Dickie) remains unmoved. She stands in opposition to just about everything B-15 says throughout the hearing, and she argues that this revelation that the Time-Keepers were never real changes nothing. Dox’s immovable position is similar to that of the former judge, Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Renslayer, who’s still missing after fleeing the TVA to search for He Who Remains in Season 1, believed that the Time-Keepers’ warnings of another Multiversal War were as real as ever. Although Gamble apparently outranks her, Dox takes it upon herself to order another hunt for Sylvie, the variant who put them all in this mess in the first place.
As this contentious meeting occurs in the present, the time-slipping Loki enters the war room in another era. While he awaits his next time jump, he stumbles upon a recording of a conversation that features the voices of He Who Remains and Ravonna. “Ravonna Renslayer, you are quite a marvel,” He Who Remains says. “I will be proud to lead with you. You made a difference in this war. Thank you for being on my team.”
The premiere doesn’t linger on this moment for long after Loki arrives to interrupt the judges’ council session, but it’s the only direct update we receive about He Who Remains or Ravonna. In light of the series’ constant jumps across time, it’s unclear exactly when this conversation takes place, but one way or another, we now know that Ravonna succeeded in finding He Who Remains and helped him win the Multiversal War—whether it was the famed battle that the TVA built its lies on or one that has yet to come.
“Ouroboros” repositions the TVA as a house divided. B-15—and now Judge Gamble, too—believes that there needs to be a new way to oversee a multiverse of people who deserve to choose their own paths. General Dox and her lackey, X-5 (who have some sort of strange sexual tension that feels like a cosmic HR violation), believe that pruning branching timelines, as the TVA always has, is the only way to protect the lives of everyone on the Sacred Timeline. Dox and X-5 aren’t alone; the episode ends as Dox leads a small army of Minutemen through Time Doors armed with bags of equipment. Although B-15 witnesses them all leave, she simply stands by and wonders where they’re heading. “All of this for Sylvie?” she asks.
Beyond the moral dilemma that the TVA faces with these branching timelines now that its personnel know about their organization’s fabricated origin story, there’s still the greater danger of the strained Temporal Loom. (The fact that no one would have even diagnosed this whole Temporal Loom issue if not for O.B. is a little mind-blowing in itself. How has the TVA lasted this long?) Although He Who Remains may have been cruel in his methods, the system he installed worked—it was a necessary evil, as he framed it. Loki came to understand his reasoning, but Sylvie didn’t buy it, culminating in the very stalemate that the TVA now finds itself in.
As the episode’s double-entendre title suggests, there’s an endless cycle at play with He Who Remains and the TVA that only Loki can see as he slips between the past, present, and future. The destruction of one corrupt TVA may not spell its true end, as one of He Who Remains’s variants is destined to recreate it as it was. The TVA may need to change, but without any other options available to address the surplus of branching timelines, the group’s new leadership will need to figure out another way to solve this cosmic quandary quickly.
Post-Credits Scene: Sylvie Arrives in Oklahoma
It’s only the first episode of the season, but Loki has already given us our first stinger. As a portion of the TVA scrambles in the closing moments of the premiere to find the same variant they hunted throughout much of Season 1, the post-credits scene shows Sylvie as she steps through a Time Door to arrive in Broxton, Oklahoma, in 1982. Crucially, the on-screen graphic also clues us in to another key detail about her location: This version of Broxton is on a “branched timeline.”
Sylvie’s first steps out of the Citadel at the End of Time—after killing He Who Remains and providing the boon (or perhaps the curse) of free will to the multiverse—are into a reality that, per the old ways of the TVA, would have been pruned if it had deviated too far from the path of the Sacred Timeline. But thanks to Sylvie, this branched timeline can forever exist on its own course, for better or worse.
After taking in a breath of fresh Oklahoman air, Sylvie walks into a McDonald’s, of all places, and with dried blood still on her face, she steps up to the counter to order. But as she tunes out the cashier while he describes all the menu options, she looks around and sees customers laughing as they enjoy their meals and each other’s company. (It should be noted that Sylvie first asks for “something that’s already dead” and “nothing with a face.” This woman has had a rough life.) It all feels like a rather ridiculous bit of sponcon that paints McDonald’s as some sort of idyllic symbol of freedom. At the same time, there’s something tragic about how much this fast-food venue (and the simple lives its patrons seem to be leading) represents what Sylvie lost the chance to have after being taken by the TVA as a child.
Much to the McDonald’s employee’s surprise, Sylvie’s delayed response is, “I want to try everything.”
Beyond what this place symbolizes about Sylvie’s newfound freedom, Broxton also holds significance related to Sylvie’s unusual comic book origins. The TV variant of Sylvie is something of an amalgamation of Loki and another character in the comics: the Enchantress. The original Enchantress is an Asgardian named Amora, but there’s a second one, Sylvie Lushton, who came much later and was born in Broxton.
In the comics, the destruction of Asgard during the events of Ragnarok led Thor to search for a location for the new capital city of Asgard—and he happened to choose a piece of land just outside Broxton, Oklahoma. Sylvie Lushton was just a regular person living in the town, but after the arrival of the Asgardians, the ever-mischievous Loki decided it’d be fun to make one of the locals believe themselves to be an Asgardian. Loki gave Sylvie her own magical powers, putting her on the path to becoming the new Enchantress.
In this way, Loki’s trip to Broxton serves as a nod to Sylvie’s comic roots while also reversing the nature of her origins. Di Martino’s Sylvie now arrives in Broxton to trade in her life as a God of Mischief for a simpler one, as Sylvie from Broxton.
From previous trailers, we know that Sylvie will end up getting a job at this very McDonald’s. (Either that or she’s working off her debt after she just ordered every item on the menu.) However, as General Dox leads a heavily armed hunt for her, Sylvie’s hopes of starting a new life in Broxton may not last for long. So much for free will.
