Loki Is the MCU Show That Feels the Least Like Homework

When firing up the Loki Season 2 premiere episode, titled "Ouroboros," be sure not to skip past the pre-episode recap. It's likely you'll need it to remember everything that went down at the end of last season, with the sacred timeline, pruned variants, the Time-Keepers who turned out to be fake, and He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) giving Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) the choice to either take over the TVA and keep pruning the timeline as always or kill him and unleash a multiverse of free will yet terrifying chaos.

It's a lot, and you've probably forgotten at least some of it. Which makes it all the more impressive that the episode that follows it — in which Loki gets violently ripped throughout the timeline until he and Mobius (Owen Wilson) can figure out a way to get him stuck in a single time period —is a tightly focused, briskly entertaining 40-plus minutes of television. It's a quick reminder that more than any Disney+ Marvel show since the early episodes of WandaVision, Loki exists as its own distinct creation.

Like any 15-year-old, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going through its awkward phase: all gangly limbs, unsure of itself as it heads into an uncertain future. With very few exceptions, the films and TV series that have been produced in the last three years have experienced those growing pains. Disney+'s last MCU show, Secret Invasion, shined a glaring spotlight on a franchise that hasn't figured out its center in its post-Endgame existence. The show was often unwatchable as a result.

By all rights, Loki should be feeling the same strain. The one thing we do know about where the MCU is headed next is that it's got a lot to do with the multiverse and the villain Kang, who Majors played in the last Ant-Man movie (also unwatchable!). Both of those elements are now central to Loki: the multiverse has been unleashed and Kang is but one of the many variants of the same timeline-hopping conqueror. So why doesn't it feel like a slog to watch it?

For one thing, creator Michael Waldron put a lot of work into creating a world for the show that operates completely on its own axis. The TVA, though it pertains to everything via the timelines, is as much of a self-contained playing field as any of the Marvel shows have enjoyed. The rest of the MCU can't touch Loki here, and thus his story here plays out as essentially isolated. He's the Loki we've always known, with the same drives and flaws, and blessed with Tom Hiddleston's gleamingly mischievous grin. But in Season 1, he was able to spin off in his own direction, towards a cracked but genuine love story with Sylvie, a buddy-cop partnership with Mobius, and now, a big ol' task ahead of him as he takes on the Kang variants. It's hard to imagine this version of Loki re-entering the terrestrial MCU as we know it, and that's good. It means he hasn't just been running on a hamster wheel awaiting the next movie.

In "Ouroboros," everything that makes Loki such a satisfyingly independent show is on full display. Waldron has ceded head writing duties to Eric Martin, with whom he co-wrote the Season 1 finale, and Martin hits the ground running. Loki's temporal displacement gives the first half of the episode a frenzied energy, with the audience unsure of where we'll be operating from this season. Meanwhile, Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) are brought before some heretofore unseen authority figures, Judge Gamble (Liz Carr) and General Dox (Katie Dickie), the latter of whom is assisted by the attitude-heavy Hunter X-5 (Rafael Casal), who seems like he's gonna be a real problem for our heroes heading forward. The energy in this scene, which is halfway between a tribunal and a strategy session, is off-kilter. The command structure at the TVA has been rocked, and Mobius and B-15 have to operate within the uncertainty.

Once Loki manages to stay in one timeline long enough to update Mobius on what's happened with him, Sylvie, and He Who Remains, the episode shifts into the problem at hand: getting Loki to quit blipping around through time, looking like a piece of Silly Putty that's been stretched to its breaking point every time he does. Hiddleston and Wilson have retained their chemistry from Season 1, a banter which operates on a frequency so arch, only particularly dry-witted dogs can hear it. They set off to find O.B., or Ouroboros, the person who essentially operates the TVA's gadget repair shop. He's played by recent Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan, who plays the character like a slightly spacey Q from the James Bond movies. O.B.'s little gadget shop also highlights one of Loki’s best elements: its rigorously specific art direction, which combines mid-century American decor with unfathomable future tech. The scene where Loki (in the past) and Mobius (in the present) get O.B. to tell them how to fix Loki's temporal distress is a marvelously scripted, acted, designed, and directed piece of time-travel lunacy.

Loki might not stay this insulated from the MCU forever. For one thing, this show is currently the most tied to Jonathan Majors, whose arrest for assault and subsequent criminal charges all happened after this season was filmed. Marvel still hasn't decided what to do about Majors and the Kang character going forward, but considering Kang is central to the MCU's next big phase, a decision will have to be made one way or the other, and Loki will feel the effect of that decision in one way or another.

Still, with Season 2 starting off on a spry note, it's a relief that Loki is, for now, the rare MCU show that doesn't make you feel like you're doing homework by watching. It works on its own merits, in its own fussily-designed little universe, on its own comedic/sci-fi wavelength. For as long as that continues to be true, Loki will stand alone.

New episodes of Loki drop Thursdays at 9:00 PM ET on Disney+. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.