Loki is back as if he never left.
It’s been more than two years since the first season of Loki ended in the summer of 2021, but time passes differently in TVA. For Mobius (Owen Wilson), Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and the God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) himself, only a few minutes passed between the finale’s cliffhanger – in which Loki looks at a statue of “He Who Remains” Mobius and B-15 try to figure out who Loki is – and the opening scene of the second season premiere, where Loki is on the run.
After Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) kicks Loki through a time door and kills He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) in the season one finale, the TVA is left in ruins. The timelines are completely different from the course of the Sacred Timeline and have passed the point of no return. Meanwhile, members of the TVA, led by B-15, decided to stop pruning the branching timelines after it was revealed that the TVA was built on a foundation of lies, including the fact that everyone in the Cosmic Time Control Authority worked, built on a foundation of lies was always a variant. But Loki quickly realizes that he has ended up in a timeline where none of this has happened yet.
“Ouroboros” translates the chaotic momentum of the first season into a captivating opener that raises the series’ stakes even higher than they already were. The episode maintains a fast-paced pace as Loki is pulled through time, stopping against his will in the past, present and future versions of the TVA. For this new season, there were some significant changes in the series’ creative direction; Head writer Eric Martin has taken over from creator Michael Waldron, and filmmaking duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead – who made Ouroboros together – have stepped in for Kate Herron to lead a new directing team. And yet, the Season 2 premiere results in a seemingly largely seamless transition from one season to the next, with much of the Loki team remaining otherwise intact.
In “Ouroboros,” Loki’s involuntary travels through time – a process called “time shifting” – help expand our knowledge and understanding of the TVA by introducing new characters and showing sides of their world that we have never seen before haven’t seen yet. The time jumps also provide insight into some mysteries that will be explained in upcoming episodes. It’s rare for Loki to stay in one place for too long, but the Season 2 opener continues to focus on the TVA, restoring its volatile state of disarray, highlighting how B-15 attempts to end the organization’s repressive methods change, and to bring to light the raw emotions that Loki experiences immediately after his and Sylvie’s encounter with He Who Remains. (The poor guy hasn’t even had a chance to change his torn and bloody shirt.)
Many of the lingering questions from the first season remain unanswered after the second season premiere, but the episode gives audiences a chance to reacquaint themselves with this crumbling Time Lords bureaucracy and the wonderful buddy-cop dynamic between Loki and Mobius in its introduction into new allies and potential enemies of the God of Mischief in the coming weeks. Ouroboros serves as a reminder of why Loki worked so well the first time around, and why this character-driven adventure is the kind of series Marvel Studios should continue to strive for after often losing its way in the uneven multiverse saga.
Over the next five weeks, I’ll be recapping every episode of Loki. I begin each piece with an overview of the key events of each part, as well as my general thoughts on how it went, before diving deeper into the episode’s core conflicts, key characters, or most important scenes.
Time difference in TVA
Screenshot via Disney+
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 dismay of Casey (Eugene Cordero), Mobius, and anyone else unlucky enough to witness this disturbing phenomenon, Loki’s time jump repeats itself over and over again. When he finally finds present-day Mobius and manages to stick around long enough to string a few sentences together, he finally explains what happened to He Who Remains.
“We have found the man at the end of time,” says Loki. “And it made sense. We thought it was about freeing the timeline, but that just brings more malevolence, more violence, more war, more of him. They are coming; They’re all coming.”
Thanks to Loki’s arrival, Mobius and other high-ranking members of the TVA learn of the greatest threat the TVA currently faces. But since Loki can hardly stay in the same place for more than a few minutes in his current state, Mobius decides to take him to the Repairs and Advancement Department to solve this more pressing problem. There they meet the episode’s eponymous Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), or OB for short. OB, TVA’s technical expert, runs the entire department alone and even wrote the guide, which is something of a TVA Bible.
The introduction to OB is one of the biggest highlights of the episode, as Mobius and Loki simultaneously have separate conversations with OB over time after Loki returns to the past. Quan seamlessly blends into the strange world of Loki, bringing an instant burst of energy to the screen with his comedic timing and iconic voice as he takes on the role of this quirky genius who hasn’t spoken to another soul in 400 years . In a sort of correspondence between past and present, the two versions of OB are able to find a complicated solution to Loki’s time-consuming dilemma. Here Loki goes even deeper into science fiction territory.
In order to put an end to Loki’s time shift, OB creates a Temporal Aura Extractor, a machine that is supposed to extract Loki from the time stream using the so-called Temporal Loom. The latter temporal device is a technology crucial to the existence of the TVA and the multiverse as a whole, and OB speculates that it may be the cause of Loki’s problems. “The temporal loom is the heart of the TVA,” he explains. “This is where raw time is refined into a physical timeline. But it’s not designed to weave together so many new branches, so it’s overloaded.”
As an unintended consequence of the TVA’s magnanimous decision to spare the new branching timelines, the Temporal Loom becomes overloaded with too many timelines, causing power surges throughout the TVA. OB’s plan is to send Mobius into the Temporal Loom’s room wearing a comically bulky radiation suit so he can connect the Aura Extractor to the Loom. Loki, meanwhile, must be ready to circumcise himself – effectively freeing himself from time so that the aura extractor can pull him back to the present – once his synchronized timer indicates that Mobius is ready for him. If Loki fails to circumcise himself at the right moment, he will be lost forever. (No pressure.) As for Mobius, if he doesn’t get back through the Loom Room’s closing blast doors quickly enough, all of his skin will be forcibly stripped away due to the excessive temporal radiation.
(The science behind it all is deeply mysterious, right down to the advertised risk of “spaghetting” on warning signs before entering the control room. And yet it all somehow works with the humor that plays off its inherent absurdity.)
Of course, Loki jumps into the future at the worst possible moment and the plan almost goes awry. He desperately searches for a Time Stick to tailor himself to a version of the TVA that is in the middle of an emergency, and just as it is too late, Loki hears a telephone ringing in the distance, as if a call is coming to him pull back into the matrix. A stopped elevator next to the telephone is manually pried open from the inside and reveals a familiar face: Sylvie. She sees Loki and says, “There you are,” just before he is cut from behind by an invisible figure.
It’s not clear at the moment what this all means. But the sequence depicts a future in which Sylvie returns to the TVA and is relieved to see him, as well as the appearance of a mysterious guardian angel who happened to know that Loki needed to be circumcised at that very moment. “Ouroboros” raises many new questions, in addition to those from the climactic conclusion of the first season, to which Loki does not yet have the answer. But with a little help from the future, Loki and Mobius carry out OB’s plan at the last possible moment and appear to finally solve Loki’s annoying time problem. Still, the whole ordeal reveals an even greater threat to everyone at the TVA, as OB finds out that the Temporal Loom is under too much pressure due to all the branching timelines.
TVA’s existential crisis
Screenshot via Disney+
For eons, the TVA supposedly maintained peace and order in the multiverse, ensuring that “variants” that strayed from the path created by the Time Keepers were contained and that time was always reset to its predetermined course. According to the story, the Time Watchers founded the TVA and all of its associates to prevent another multiversal war between timelines and to protect this so-called Sacred Timeline. But as Sylvie and Loki help reveal in the first season, the Time-Keepers were merely animatronic figureheads, and every employee at the TVA was actually a variant whose memory of their previous life had been erased.
B-15 was one of the first TVA members. Sylvie helped recognize these truths and she is now leading the organization’s reform. In “Ouroboros”, Hunter B-15 argues that with what they now know about the Time-Keepers and the previously vilified variants, the TVA has committed atrocities by destroying timelines where innocent people lived. “I know how hard it is to turn your back on everything you believed in,” she says. “But the TVA needs to change, and it needs to change now. We can’t prune these branches anymore.”
B-15’s speech is so convincing that Judge Gamble (Liz Carr) orders that the TVA will no longer restrict branching schedules, but General Dox (Kate Dickie) remains unaffected. She contradicts almost everything B-15 says during the hearing, and she argues that this revelation that the Time Keepers were never real changes nothing. Dox’s unwavering position is similar to that of former judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Renslayer, still missing after escaping the TVA in Season 1 to search for Who Remains, believed that the Time-Keepers’ warnings of another multiversal war were as real as ever. Despite Gamble’s apparent superiority, Dox takes it upon herself to order another hunt for Sylvie, the version that got them all into this mess in the first place.
While this contentious meeting takes place in the present, the time-bending Loki enters the war room in another era. While waiting for his next time jump, he comes across a conversation recording with the voices of He Who Stays and Ravonna. “Ravonna Renslayer, you are a true miracle,” says He Who Remains. “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 dwell long on this moment after Loki arrives to interrupt the Judiciary Council meeting, but it’s the only direct update we get about He Who Remains or Ravonna. Given the series’ constant time jumps, it’s unclear exactly when this conversation takes place, but one way or another we now know that Ravonna managed to find “Who Remains” and helped him win the Multiversal War – whether It was now the famous war A battle on which the TVA built its lies, or a battle yet to come.
“Ouroboros” repositions the TVA as a house divided. B-15 – and now Judge Gamble – believes there must be a new way to police a multiverse of people who deserve to choose their own path. General Dox and her lackey to protect the Sacred Timeline for everyone involved. Dox and X-5 are not alone; The episode ends with Dox leading a small army of Minutemen through Time Doors armed with bags full of equipment. Even though B-15 witnesses them all leaving, she just stands by and wonders where they are going. “All this for Sylvie?” She asks.
Aside from the moral dilemma the TVA faces over these branching timelines now that its employees know about their organization’s fabricated origin story, there is still the greater danger of the tense Temporal Loom. (The fact that without OB no one would have diagnosed this whole Temporal Loom problem is a little mind-boggling in itself. How did the TVA last so long?) While He Who Remains may have been cruel in its methods, is the… The system he installed worked – it was a necessary evil, as he put it. Loki understood his reasoning, but Sylvie didn’t buy it, culminating in the very stalemate the TVA finds itself in now.
As the episode’s ambiguous title suggests, an endless cycle plays out between He Who Remains and the TVA that only Loki can see as he vacillates between past, present, and future. The destruction of a corrupt TVA may not mean its true end, as one of He Who Remains’ variants is intended to restore it as it was. The TVA may need to change, but with no other options available to handle the surplus of branching schedules, the group’s new leadership must find another way to quickly resolve this cosmic dilemma.
Post-credits scene: Sylvie arrives in Oklahoma
Screenshot via Disney+
It’s only the first episode of the season, but Loki has already given us our first stinger. As part of the TVA struggles to find the same variant they’ve been searching for throughout much of the first season in the final moments of the premiere, the post-credits scene shows Sylvie stepping through a time door to enter Broxton , Oklahoma, in 1982. Crucially, the on-screen graphic also clues us into another important detail about her whereabouts: This version of Broxton is on a “branching timeline.”
Sylvie’s first steps out of the Citadel at the End of Time – after she kills Who Remains and bestows the blessing (or perhaps curse) of free will on the multiverse – are in a reality that would have been according to the TVA’s old methods circumcised if they strayed too far from the path of the Sacred Timeline. But thanks to Sylvie, this branching timeline can forever run its own course, for better or worse.
After breathing in the fresh Oklahoma air, Sylvie enters a McDonald’s of all places, and with the blood still drying on her face, she goes to the counter to order. But as she tunes out the cashier as he describes all the menu options, she looks around and sees the customers laughing as they enjoy their meals and each other’s company. (It should be noted that Sylvie initially asks about “something that’s already dead” and “nothing with a face.” This woman has had a hard life.) It all feels like a pretty ridiculous piece of sponcon, the McDonald’s as a kind of “sponcon” represents an idyllic symbol of freedom. At the same time, there’s something tragic about how much this fast food joint (and the simple life its patrons seem to lead) represents what Sylvie couldn’t get after she was taken over by the TVA as a child.
Much to the McDonald’s employee’s surprise, Sylvie’s delayed response is, “I want to try everything.”
Aside from what this place symbolizes for Sylvie’s newfound freedom, Broxton also has significance in the context of Sylvie’s unusual comic book origins. The TV version of Sylvie is something of a fusion of Loki and another character from the comics: the Sorceress. The original sorceress is an Asgardian named Amora, but there is a second, Sylvie Lushton, who came much later and was born in Broxton.
In the comics, the destruction of Asgard during the events of Ragnarök 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 of Broxton, Oklahoma. Sylvie Lushton was just a normal person living in the city, but after the Asgardians arrived, the ever mischievous Loki decided it would be fun to make one of the locals think he was an Asgardian. Loki gave Sylvie her own magical powers and set her on the path to becoming the new sorceress.
In this way, Loki’s trip to Broxton serves as a nod to Sylvie’s comic roots while simultaneously reversing the nature of her origins. Di Martino’s Sylvie now arrives in Broxton to swap her life as the god of mischief for a simpler life as Sylvie of Broxton.
We know from previous trailers that Sylvie will eventually get a job at this very McDonald’s. (Either that, or she’s working off her debts after just ordering every dish on the menu.) But when General Dox leads a heavily armed hunt for her, Sylvie’s hopes of starting a new life in Broxton may not last long . So much for free will.