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- There are spoilers. Read the reviews of the other episodes here.
While I really enjoyed the first season of Loki my reviews won’t let me lie the show never really appealed to me beyond “how cool, an alligator Loki” and things like that. Anyway, considering that what was originally sold as a miniseries was turned into a series and delivered a completely open ending that, dissatisfied, introduced a villain or variant of a villain at the last second gave us a lengthy and tedious monologue about the rules of the multiverse in one continuous act, I awaited the second season with a certain amount of trepidation.
And Ouroboros basically realizes my fear.
The New Year’s opening episode of Loki Laufenyson’s Misadventures through Time and Space is, in short, an endless, supposedly clever spiel that distills more rules, this time about how the AVT works and how to prevent the protagonist from “sliding” further “. through time” as we see it throughout the design. When Ke Huy Quan is introduced as Ouroboros or OB, essentially the same character he played in the acclaimed and Oscarwinning multiverse film in which he starred, he starts spouting lines of dialogue as if he’s trying to to imitate a horse race announcer. , my patience was exhausted. And it didn’t help at all that the great connection between Loki and Möbius became less important in the process, with a chaotic frenzy in a bad sense in which AVT was used as a backdrop that had no major meanings beyond the obvious screaming.
By that I don’t mean that Ke Huy Quan, Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson aren’t good in their respective roles, because they’re as good as the script requires them to be, and the script is exactly where the problem lies. Only very rarely do actors succeed in achieving miracles if the texts presented to them do not do justice to their talent and no miracles are achieved here. Yes, Quan is likable (how he won that Oscar is another topic…), Hiddleston has the same huge screen presence and appeal, and Wilson uses his “happy puppy style” to lure in the viewer, but everything is so rushed and so full of technological nonsense (the famous technobabble that has always been used in the audiovisual field, but of course there are uses and uses) thrown into the viewer’s lap at the rate of 10 words per second, that the drama empties itself and with it, the cast.
However, the direction of the inseparable duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead does what it can with Eric Martin’s crazy script and ends up delivering an audiovisual narrative that, while tiring, makes you want to take a break and recover (and no, I didn’t do that, I just felt like it!), it maintains good cohesion and a certain fluidity that helps make the word choice a little more palatable. The same goes for the art direction, which takes pains to create a variety of different environments in different temporal moments, preserving AVT’s identity, especially the sepia tone that the photography highlights.
Ultimately, Ouroboros is the television equivalent of an instruction manual. The rules are there and based on them, it is up to the production to develop the narrative according to a certain internal logic, even if the rules can be changed. Likewise, mysteries and parallel plots are used well to keep interest in the series, be it who exactly cut Loki or X5’s (Rafael Casal) relationship with General Dox (Kate Dickie), or of course, what exactly Sylvie is in this happened in 1982 at a McDonald’s in Broxton, Oklahoma. But of course we’ll find out all this and more in the first five minutes of the next episode if the deluge of expository dialogue continues at this pace…
PS: Do I care that the rules for time travel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been changed again, if at all? No, I don’t mind at all, but not one bit. And I don’t think it’s boring and don’t take it into account in my analyses.
Loki 2X01: Ouroboros (USA, October 5, 2023)
Creation and development: Michael Waldron
Direction: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
Road map: Eric Martin
Pour: Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Owen Wilson, Wunmi Mosaku, Eugene Cordero, Rafael Casal, Kate Dickie, Liz Carr, Neil Ellice, Ke Huy Quan
Duration: 47 mins