‘Loki’ returns with uncontrollable powers

We’ve all done the time warp and explored the multiverse, but it’s high time to sort out the timeline. A brand-new season of “Loki” premieres Friday, Oct. 6, on Disney+. Tom Hiddleston (“The Essex Serpent”) returns as the God of Mischief, everyone’s favorite troublemaker, Loki, who has developed a mysterious problem this season.

Owen Wilson (“Haunted Mansion,” 2023) is back as Mobius M. Mobius, the Time Variance Authority agent tasked with helping Loki right his wrongs across the multiverse. The first season of “Loki” saw the Norse God meet his match in an alternate version of himself. Sophia Di Martino (“The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” 2021) is Sylvie, a variant of Loki who interrupts the Sacred Timeline. After coming together to set things right across space and time, Loki returned to what he thought would be the TVA headquarters he left before his mission, but something still wasn’t right.

In the official trailer for the upcoming season, Mobius brings Loki to a repair shop of sorts, manned by TVA repair guy OB, portrayed by Ke Huy Quan (“American Born Chinese”). Before the pair have time to explain what’s brought them there, Loki suddenly, uncontrollably disappears in a timeslip, leaving Mobius looking to OB for an answer. “It’s impossible to timeslip in the TVA,” is all he can say, though they just watched it happen.

“Loki” executive producer Kevin Wright told Entertainment Weekly in September that “[OB’s] job is basically every piece of tech, every computer, every thing that is running at the TVA . ... He either designed it or he fixes it and keeps it running.” Having recently picked up an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2022’s “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” Quan is well suited to help repair another multiverse.

While Quan’s character is the latest to join Loki’s crew as he chases chaos across the multiverse, several cast members return for the new season, including Gugu Mbatha-Raw (“Surface”) as Ravonna Renslayer, an ambitious judge in the TVA who oversees Loki’s case. Literally backing up Loki at one point in the season’s trailer alongside Mobius, Sylvie and OB is Wunmi Mosaku (“We Own This City”) as Hunter B-15. Eugene Cordero (“Star Trek: Lower Decks”) returns as Hunter K-5E, former TVA receptionist.

The upcoming seasons also star Neil Ellice (“Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn”) as Hunter D-90, Jonathan Majors (“Creed III,” 2023) as He Who Remains and Tara Strong (“Teen Titans Go!”) as the voice of Miss Minutes. Rafael Casal (“Blindspotting”), Kate Dickie (“Annika”) and Liz Carr (“Silent Witness”) all join the cast this season in asyet-unnamed roles.

Odd couple Mobius and Loki unsurprisingly have different approaches to their world-saving mission spanning space and time. While the former admits in the “Loki” teaser trailer that he prefers his “slow, deliberate, cerebral approach” honed by years in the bureaucracy of the TVA, while the Norse god is “a man of action, which is fine.” Unconvincing, given Loki is the source of the destruction that they are trying to stave off.

While Disney has remained characteristically tight-lipped about the new season of “Loki” ahead of its premiere, MbathaRaw promised in a December 2022 interview with Entertainment Tonight that fans “are gonna be in for a real treat because the show is bolder and more surreal.” She added that the upcoming season “goes to some bigger, bolder places than Season 1, which is really exciting.” Wright promised something similar in his September EW interview, saying, “We made a weird show [in Season 1], and people responded to how weird it was ... so, we wanted to push it further.”

Marvel introduced the multiverse in the 2016 movie “Doctor Strange,” and since its release,

it has opened up a far-reaching world of timelines and possibilities within the Marvel universe. The later so-called “phases” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe following the 2016 film utilize time travel to connect Marvel films and TV series.

Following the wildly successful first foray into a Marvel liveaction TV series with “WandaVision” in 2021, Disney and Marvel architects have been turning to the episodic format to expand on stories that simply can’t be done justice in the films. Wright told EW, “In our [Marvel] movies, sometimes you have to keep moving forward very rapidly to get to the next thing.”

Embracing the extra hours in a season of TV that you can’t fit into a theatrical release works for a complicated, expansive story like the one in “Loki,” Wright adds, “Here it’s like: ‘No, we can sit in these moments.’ And dramatically, that’s an exciting thing.”

Though Majors currently faces allegations of domestic violence, his character, Kang the Conqueror, is seen in the “Loki” trailer as variant Victor Timely, and Wright confirmed that he is “a big part of the show” in the upcoming season.

Plant yourself firmly onto the couch, try not to timeslip and tune in to the “Loki” Season 2 premiere when it drops on Disney+, Friday, Oct. 6.

Tom Hiddleston in “Loki”