Loki S2 trailer finds the god of mischief battling for the “soul of the TVA”

[Karlston]

"There is nothing that stands between this world and utter destruction."

Tom Hiddleston is back as everyone's favorite Norse god of mischief in the second season of Loki.

Of all the various TV spinoffs of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Loki was perhaps the most popular, largely thanks to the winsome bantering chemistry between stars Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson. The much-anticipated second season is set to debut this fall, and we finally have an official trailer. Good news: S2 promises to be just as much fun as the first, if the trailer is any indication.

 

(Major spoilers for the first season below.)

 

It has been a couple of years, so let's briefly recap. As reported previously, the launching point for Loki S1 was that scene in Avengers: Endgame when a 2012 version of Loki snagged the tesseract containing the Space Stone and vanished through a portal. Our trickster soon encountered a team of armed guards who "arrested" him on behalf of an entity known as the Time Variance Authority (TVA), the "custodians of chronology" in the MCU, monitoring violations of the Sacred Timeline. Catch the TVA's attention by trying to change history, and you just might meet the wrong end of the Retroactive Cannon (Ret Con) and have your entire history deleted from the historical timeline.

 

By using the tesseract to escape his original timeline, this Time Variant Loki violated the established chronology and was brought before Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to answer for his "crime." But another TVA agent, Mobius M. Mobius (Wilson), intervened. He wanted Loki's help tracking down another "Time Variant" who had escaped and gone rogue, jumping around through time and disrupting everything by causing so-called "Nexus Events." And Loki reluctantly agreed to help, albeit with his own agenda. He had his suspicions about the TVA, for starters, and not just because he chafed at their authoritarian approach to maintaining the timeline.

 

The dangerous Loki Variant turned out to be a woman named Sylvie (Sophia di Martino) with powers of enchantment, and of course, the two Variants found each other fascinating. We also briefly met a bunch of other amusing Loki variants in the penultimate S1 episode: Classic Loki (Richard E. Grant), Kid Loki (Jack Veal), Boastful Loki (DeObia Oparei), President Loki (Hiddleston), Alligator Loki, and we even caught a glimpse of Thor as a captured frog, aka "Throg," whose croaks of rage were voiced by Chris Hemsworth.

 

Naturally, Loki's suspicions about the TVA proved well-founded. As I wrote in my review, the first season of Loki was "an excellent mix of action, surprising twists, canny exposition, and intimate character moments, all leading up to the final reveal: what is the TVA's true nature and purpose, and is there someone (or something) else behind the scenes pulling the strings of the sacred trio of Time Keepers?" The puppet master turned out to be none other than Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors, who reprised the role for this year's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania)—or rather, a Kang Variant known as He Who Remains.

 

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  Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius (Owen Wilson) seek information from TVA archives.

  YouTube/Marvel Studios

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  Ke Huy Quan ís a welcome addition to the cast as TVA archivist OB.

  YouTube/Marvel Studios

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  Loki and Mobius in the early 1900s.

  YouTube/Marvel Studios

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  Jonathan Majors plays Victor Timely (as well as He Who Remains).

  YouTube/Marvel Studios

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  Loki variant Sylvie (Sophia di Martino) warns about playing god.

  YouTube/Marvel Studios

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  Miss Minutes (voiced by Tara Strong) is about to lose her cool in the past.

  YouTube/Marvel Studios

In the S1 finale, He Who Remains informed Loki and Sylvie that he was tired of running the TVA, which he created after he ended a multiverse war among all his variants and set up one single timeline. He told the pair that they could either kill him—and thus risk another multiverse war—or take on oversight of the TVA in his place. Sylvie opted to kill He Who Remains against Loki's pleading, and a multitude of timelines were unleashed. When Loki returned to TVA headquarters, neither Mobius nor Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) recognized him, and the statue of the Time Keepers had been replaced by a statue of one of the Kang Variants.

 

Hiddleston, Wilson, Majors, di Martino, and Mosaku are all returning for S2, along with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as TVA judge Ravonna Renslayer; Eugene Cordero as TVA receptionist Casey, now Hunter K-5E in the new timeline; Neil Ellice as Hunter D-90; and Tara Strong as Miss Minutes, the TVA's anthropomorphic clock mascot. Majors will play two roles: He Who Remains and Victor Timely, a Variant in the early 1900s identifiable by his spectacles and snazzy three-piece suit. Ke Huy Quan joins the cast as a TVA archivist named OB (he snagged the role partly because of the smashing success of Everything Everywhere All at Once). Rafael Casal also joins the cast in what has been described as a "major role," along with Kate Dickie and Liz Carr in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

 

The trailer opens with Mobius and Loki striding into the archives, where OB greets them cheerfully. Loki has been having trouble with "time slipping," pulled through time between the past and the present—even though this should be impossible while within the TVA. "If what I saw is true, there is nothing that stands between this world and utter destruction," Loki says. "It's up to us to save this place." So he and Mobius undertake a bit of "good old-fashioned leg work," traveling to the early 1900s to enjoy the pie and, one assumes, take on Victor Timely. Sylvie cautions about playing god, but Loki reminds her, "We are gods." That doesn't make it any easier to choose who lives or who dies.

 

The second season of Loki premieres on Disney+ on October 6, 2023.

 

Marvel Studios

 

Listing image by YouTube/Marvel Studios

 

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