Loki wants you to care about the MCU at its lowest point
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is in trouble. This is the prevailing sentiment regarding the still-dominant studio’s output of late. Phases Four and Five, as they’re called, have underwhelmed critics, floundered at the box office, and generally struggled with a sense of directionlessness that contrasts with the methodical plotting of the MCU’s first decade. There’s a bit of irony to all this disarray, because the current MCU era is about the Marvel Cinematic Universe falling apart.
Loki sits at the nexus — or at least a nexus — of this disaster. The show traps its protagonist, the sort-of villain, sort-of helpful god of mischief (Tom Hiddleston) in the labyrinthine halls of the Time Variance Authority, a clandestine organization devoted to ensuring the MCU timeline doesn’t endlessly splinter into a kaleidoscopic hell of alternate realities and universes.
Previously, it was the Loki of one of those alternate universes — a femme variant of Loki named Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) — that threatened the integrity of what the TVA called The Sacred Timeline. Sylvie, with our Loki alternately trying to help or hinder her, connived (and knifed) her way to the end of time itself to find the person at the heart of it all, a mysterious madman known as He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). The pair of Lokis learn that this man is bad news, as he is just one of many variants of Kang the Conqueror (Majors again, but this version only appears in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), and they all have designs on ruling everything. Or something like that.
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Season 2 of Loki picks up in the immediate aftermath of this confrontation, with Loki sent through a time-travel portal to a TVA that’s under the control of He Who Remains, and Sylvie
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