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“Ouroboros” finds our protagonists blinking in and out of time while the TVA falls apart.

Loki Season 2 begins in a dicey place, immediately reminding us of He Who Remains–and thus the actor who portrayed him, alleged domestic assaulter Jonathan Majors–with a giant statue staring into the TVA. A fitting visual metaphor for the shadow Kang (and Majors) cast over the characters and the series, it remains just that, so far. Besides the statue and a hidden mural, the time-twisting villain (and his embattled actor) never appears in the flesh onscreen.

That dealt with, let’s run alongside Loki (Tom Hiddleston) as he flees from Mobius (Owen Wilson) and company.

As revealed in Season 1’s epilogue, Mobius has no memory of Loki, so the God of Mischief has no choice but to flee his friend/partner. That means slapstick playing off CGI backdrops. Hiddleston sells it amusingly enough, but if you have a strong radar for underwhelming CGI (I, admittedly, lack such a radar), you’ll likely bump a bit on the world outside the TVA’s window.

When Loki crashes back into the building, he finds more TVA workers, including Casey (Eugene Cordero), buzzing about diligently. Once again, our protagonist tries to get his co-worker/almost friend to recognize him. Once again, the effort fails. Just as Casy calls the 5-0, Loki shakes, stretches, and disappears.

He reappears shortly, but the room is now empty of everyone but Casey. However, the good news is this Casey recognizes him. We’re back in the right universe! Loki then notices the crack in the floor he made moments earlier. With that, the situation finally snaps into place. Odin’s stepson hasn’t been hopping between worlds in the universe. He’s been bouncing back and forth on one timeline. Mobius and Casey didn’t know who he was not because they were “different” versions of themselves but rather just themselves before Loki came to the TVA.

This realization in hand, Loki catches up current moment Mobius and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) on the situation. Before they can get too deep in discussing what they can or should do to help him, arrogant and swarmy Hunter X-5 (Rafael Casal) shows up. Apparently, the judges are holding a hearing to figure out how the TVA should proceed in the wake of He Who Remains’ death and the rapidly branching timelines. Loki can’t come along as he once again twists, stretches, and painfully disappears. By the time he flashes back, Mobius and B-15 have already left, so he must hustle to catch up.

While he does his best to get to the war room on time and at the right spot in time, Mobius and B-15 are doing their best to explain events they don’t understand and argue opinions they haven’t entirely worked out for themselves yet. The judges hitting the two with a recording of Loki explaining Sylvie’s (Sophia Di Martino) ability to reveal members of the TVA’s alternate possible lives only further pushes them onto their heels.

Quan plays it as being hit with a sudden memory but never swims in the ham river, a great acting choice.

Unfortunately, when Loki finally reaches the war room, he has been ripped to a different point once again. The room sits empty, but a reel-to-reel recording exposes a time when Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and He Who Remains were explicit allies. He promises the treacherous TVA agent that the two will rule together, a gift for her loyalty. It’s impossible to know when this happened or when Loki is hearing it, but given the specific version of Kang’s presence, it seems very likely it happened before Loki became entangled in the TVA.

Back in the present, B-15 has gotten her feet underneath her enough to argue against the old sacred timeline model. She passionately advocates that the lives lost in pruned timelines are real and viable, not meaningless shadows of their sacred timeline counterparts. General Dox (Kate Dickie) opposes this new way of doing things, but Judge Gamble (Liz Carr) ultimately sides with B-15. Loki then returns to the present to rant about Kangs and expose the hidden mural of several versions of the time despot.

Before Loki ruins B-15’s moment by throwing everyone into a panic, Mobius pulls him aside. As the God of Mischief increasingly blips in and out of time, he tries to articulate who Kang is and why everyone should be very concerned about what’s coming. Recognizing what state his partner is in, our favorite laid-back TVA agent drags Loki to Repairs and Advancement. There awaits time’s handyman, Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), whom Mobius nicknamed “OB” 400 years earlier, the first and only time the two ever met.

Seeing Loki’s state, OB quickly diagnoses him as “timeslipping,” which should be impossible. With Thor’s annoying baby bro blinking between the past and present, he’s able to coach OB into creating a device in the past to help and suddenly remember its existence in the present. Quan plays it as being hit with a sudden memory but never swims in the ham river, a great acting choice. It makes it fun without totally unmooring the tone of the scene.

Without getting too in the weeds here, the explanation is the Time Loom that manages timestreams has become overwhelmed by the ever-increasing new branches. Loki’s adventures at the end of time have somehow connected him with the chaos. So, to save Loki, they need him to prune himself from past and present moments on the sacred timeline. Meanwhile, Mobius has to don a special timesuit that will temporarily protect him from energy that rapidly ages everything it touches to fire a harpoon-like implement into the loom that Loki can snag and ride back from his pruning.

Hiddleston, Wilson, and Quan have their energies perfectly calibrated to each other to sell [their interactions].

On their way to pull off the mission, they encounter Doxx and her loyalists, including X-5, heading through the gold door. The assumption is they’re chasing after Sylvie, but B-15 points out that it is a lot of man and firepower for just one mission. Nonetheless, they hustle forward past Doxx’s team.

This is the first episode of the season, so despite it coming down to the wire, the God of Mischief, of course, gets back in time. Before he does so, however, he catches a glimpse of himself and Sylvie in an empty TVA in the future.

And, speaking of Sylvie, we see her arrive in the 80s Broxton in the post-credits scene. She wanders into a local McDonald’s (PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!!) and tells the cashier she wants to try everything. The blocking suggests she’s not talking Big Macs and Filet O’Fishes.

Moments From the Sacred Timeline

• Despite Loki’s claims to the contrary, that delivery woman definitely died, right?
• I loved the look of the timesuit. So huge and bulky, it suggests a small Michelin Man interpretation of the Hulkbuster armor. It also nicely illustrates how propped up on proverbial stilts the TVA is. They may have been doing their primary job well, but it is clear that all their backup plans were rotting and unraveling in the background. It’s like the TVA is a well-respected college that’s been neglecting its deferred maintenance for so long. One slip-up has exposed just how dire things have been for, likely, a long time.
• Loki creating low-key mischief by putting the screws to Mobius’s attempts to connect with OB are such fun. Hiddleston, Wilson, and Quan have their energies perfectly calibrated to each other to sell it.
• Evidently, OB never sleeps. This leads me to wonder, does anyone in TVA slumber?
• The dent in the floor and Mobius writing “Skin?” in the dust on the monitor are smart touches. It works as gags and subtle ways to reveal to the audience when we’ve gone forward or backward in time.
• The comic book nerd in me continues to appreciate how Loki has made Broxton, OK, such a central locale.

From the Lips of Gods

• “I’m fine, I’m fine. Morning. She’ll be fine.”
• “The funny thing about jet skis is everyone thinks it’s a personal watercraft, but it’s actually a brand.”
• “I’d ask who won, but—” 
  “It was a draw.”
  “You both kicked each other through time doors simultaneously?”
• “Live? What’s the quality of life with no skin?”