Yesterday, the midseason trailer for Loki season 2 dropped. Sadly, the trailer promises more of the same MacGuffin-led plot we’ve seen all season: it looks like Loki will gather up all his friends from their lives on the timeline while he’s trying to figure out how to fix the Temporal Loom. However, the trailer also hints at some more exciting directions the series could take.
Let’s wildly speculate!
Exciting: Mobius’ story might get heavy
The trailer contains some very interesting Mobius content. We see him in his previous life as a jet ski salesman, living in a suburban house. The most intriguing detail? There’s a kid’s bike in front of the house, and a rope ladder coming out of the window. Is Mobius a dad? Did he have a family before his Nexus event brought him to the Time Variance Authority?
There’s also a brief close up of Mobius’ face, possibly during the scene in which Loki finds himself back in his TVA prisoner’s uniform. In the shot, Mobius is tearing up. We all know Loki is a crier, but Mobius getting choked up breaks my damn heart. Could this shot be from a juicy, emotional heart to heart between Loki and Mobius?
Exciting: Loki could lean into his godhood
Although he now mostly acts and dresses like a normal dude, Loki keeps reminding the other characters—and the audience—that he’s a god. It’s not great writing, but the repetition does support some pretty cool theories about Loki finding out that he’s one of the original Time Keepers, or massively leveling up when he goes out on the Temporal Loom gangway without a radiation suit on (as we briefly see in several trailers). Loki could even take over stewardship of time itself as the MCU inches closer towards The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars. Could Loki finally become the God of Stories from the comics—or something even cooler?
One thing I’m reminding myself is that the trailer may only be showing footage from episode 5. I’m holding out hope that there’s something really amazing and unexpected in episode 6 that Marvel is hiding, like they hid He Who Remains in season 1.
Boring: the rest of the season might just be reassembling the team
It’s clear that after the TVA is destroyed in episode 4, Loki will go around finding TVA members in their respective timelines. Why? It’s not clear yet, but he could be recruiting them back into the TVA, so that he can start everything over from scratch in a giant time loop.
If that’s true, the recruiting part could be a plot beat that the show gets through fairly quickly. Or—and I’m kind of being masochistic here—it could take up the entire rest of the season. Considering the pace of the storytelling so far, along with its severely misplaced priorities, I could absolutely see episode 5 being swallowed up by Loki bringing everyone back to the TVA, and episode 6 being devoted to the gang trying to fix the loom over and over again. Which leads me to my worst fear…
Boring: Loki might hang up his horns and stay at the TVA forever
After all, the TVA is the real star of Loki, right? Loki isn’t about Loki anymore. It’s about the TVA.
It’s genuinely lovely that Loki has found a new family in Mobius, Sylvie, B-15, O.B., and Casey. I’m not snarking when I say that I think that’s a beautiful development for his character. But the series has shown that process in a way that’s completely stripped Loki of his personality, giving him bland soliloquies and parlor tricks instead of an actual arc.
While the trainwreck that was Secret Invasion was airing, I joked that if Loki season 2 ended with a letdown like Loki becoming a rank and file time cop for the rest of eternity, then I’d quietly dissolve into powder. It was a joke. I was joking. Now I fear it might actually happen.
Why? Because the series simply doesn’t seem to care about Loki as a character anymore. Forget glorious purpose—Loki’s only purpose, this season, is to keep the lights on at the TVA. With executive producer Kevin Wright on record saying there are “more stories to be told” at the TVA—like, say, in Deadpool 3—we know the organization is going to survive season 2.
If I wanted to come up with the absolute worst, most disappointing ending to Loki, here’s what I’d do. I’d have the cunning, charismatic God of Mischief decide that the TVA was his home now, his true calling was to be an analyst in a skinny tie, and he was content to spend eternity in a bureaucratic hellscape eating automat pie. (And hey, for good measure, I’d have his girlfriend work at McDonalds.) I could even make that dramatic suit-less gangway scene boring, if I decided that the secret to fixing the loom was that Loki could hoof it back inside more quickly without the suit on.
Could any of that actually happen? Look, I’m just venting some frustration here. The real problem is how badly season 2 has eroded viewers’ trust in the story. If the first two thirds of the season have been mostly dull and convoluted, why would the final act be any different?
Still, though, I’m holding out hope for something really good.
(featured image: Disney+)
Published: Oct 31, 2023 02:35 pm