Welcome back to the blog readers. Loki absolutely killed it with the premiere of its second season, bringing us right back to the charm of the TVA in a brilliant way. Tom Hiddleston gave an Emmy-level performance selling the rest of us the threat of Kang the Conqueror, and Owen Wilson continues to kill it in this role. Ke Huy Quan came in and absolutely killed his role as Ouroboros, and there are way more mysteries to uncover. Would this second episode, titled "Breaking Brad," directed by longtime Marvel visual effects artist Dan DeLeeuw, and written by Eric Martin, be on the same level as the premiere? Stick around to find out.
NOTE: I will be using spoilers for my thoughts, so DO NOT read ahead if you have not seen the episode.
Right off the bat, I want to say that this episode was another brilliant one from Loki, and I am left with even more questions than I thought I would be left with. Rafael Casal really shined, and Tom Hiddleston gives another Emmy-level performance without saying much. We finally get some answers on what has happened to Sylvie after killing He Who Remains. Damn this was a good one.
First off, I need to talk about Rafael Casal's performance as Hunter X-5. Last week, his character felt there just to be there, but now there is a purpose to him. We actually get some meat for this guy. The entire episode revolves around him actually, a move that I thought was absolute genius. We start the episode in 1970s London as we later learn X-5 abandoned the mission to search for Sylvie to live out a life on the Sacred Timeline as film actor Brad Wolfe. Loki and Mobius apprehend him and bring him back to the TVA for questioning, and this is where we get the meaty content. Casal does such a magnificent job of portraying someone who is naturally a dick, and how he gets under the skin of Loki and Mobius is just insane. This could potentially be his Emmy campaign, as we are talking about it.
Speaking of Loki, Tom Hiddleston absolutely delivers another Emmy-level performance. During the interrogation of X-5, he absolutely goes in on Loki, going for the jugular basically. He basically degrades Loki, calling him a loser who is always destined to lose and even brings his mother into the conversation, saying how he makes things worse for everyone. Just the facial expressions that Hiddleston pulls off her make you feel a million different emotions just like Loki: guilt, anger, rage, regret, sadness, and whole lot more. This pisses off Loki, who goes into a killer monologue akin to Stellan Skarsgård in the Andor episode "One Way Out" (2022). In said monologue, he admits that he has done terrible things, but you cannot help but to feel some sympathy for this Loki. The TVA gave him a new purpose after losing the Battle of New York, and hearing these things from a fellow Hunter like B-15 infuriates him, prompting him to convince Mobius to torture X-5 to reveal Sylvie's location. This scene and the torture scene were incredible acting jobs from Hiddleston, and I would be shocked if his name is not in the running for Best Actor in a Drama Series next year.
In case you have not read my review of the first episode (which I would be utterly surprised if you have not), Ke Huy Quan delivers the performance of his life as Ouroboros (or OB) a year and a half after giving the performance of his life in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and seven months after winning Best Supporting Actor for his performance in said film. He was utterly hilarious in the role, and I hoped to see more of him in this episode. Although he took a small step back in this episode, I still love seeing OB doing his shit, and now I have a lot of questions about him and his past. We will get to those in a bit, but there is one character quality of OB that I immediately attached myself to. It is his damn humor. I do not remember howling every time a character spoke in the first season, because whenever OB shows up, I die of laughter. Now circling back to those questions, it appears that he knows a lot more than he is letting on. We learned last episode that he was instrumental in writing the TVA guidebook and creating all of the equipment in the TVA. He Who Remains for some reason never wiped OB's memory, as he clearly had for everyone in the TVA. I am interested to see if there maybe is more to him than meets the eye.
The mystery of Sylvie's whereabouts has some answers, but still a whole lot more questions. In the mid-credits scene of last week's premiere, we find her on a branched timeline where she shows up at a McDonald's in Oklahoma in 1982. Since that scene, we learn she took up a job there and wants nothing to do with the TVA or the multiverse. However, Loki, Mobius and a captive X-5 show up and rope her right back in. Loki tries to get an answer out of Sylvie on why he could have possibly seen her in the future when he was pulled there, but she rebuffs him. X-5 confesses the reason he abandoned Dox's plan to search for Sylvie was because she planned on bombing and erasing all of the branched timelines, which would kill trillions of people. Sylvie steps in to help Loki and Mobius stop the rogue TVA agents, and the crew returns to the TVA upset that most of the timelines were destroyed. Sylvie leaves to go back to her branched timeline and it is revealed she still has He Who Remains' TemPad, confirming she stole it when she killed him. I definitely believe there is more to her this season than we are being led on to believe.
One of the biggest mysteries that has presented itself so far this season is what happened to Miss Minutes and Ravonna Renslayer after the death of He Who Remains. They have been MIA since then and we only now have a trace on Renslayer. So there is a possibility that we will see her next episode. Gugu Mbatha-Raw was one of my favorite parts of the first season, and I hope we can get to see her soon. Miss Minutes, on the other hand, is one of the most interesting parts of the TVA, and we know less about this AI than we do Renslayer. People have theorized that maybe Miss Minutes is another variant of He Who Remains, others have cooked up some interesting stuff. But I cannot wait to get those answers because they will have been earned.
Speaking of Miss Minutes, OB's attempts to fix the Temporal Loom did not go according to plan because he finds out that he needs to have Miss Minutes or the aura of He Who Remains to even attempt to fix the Loom. Since He Who Remains is dead and Miss Minutes is missing, then there is no way to do that yet, so the multiverse will live on for now. It looks like finding Miss Minutes is going to be the ultimate mission for this season, and I cannot wait to see how this goes. Truthfully, I miss Tara Strong's southern drawl.
As you guys can tell, I am loving the second season of Loki right now, and I hope this strong momentum continues. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.
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