The following contains spoilers for season 1 of Loki.
Loki—the third Disney+ Marvel series after the experimental meta TV entry WandaVision and the conventional ascendent journey-story of The Falcon and the Winter Solider—wrapped its first season, which was some mix between crime thriller and time travel epic, in Summer 2021. (When you’re a $200+ billion god, you can do whatever you damn well please with genre.)
But, as with WandaVision and Falcon, the question isn’t so much what is it? as how much of it can we inject into our veins? Now that it’s been more than two years since either of those shows aired and we’ve seen Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) story continue on the big screen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Sam Wilson’s (Anthony Mackie) will continue in Captain America: Brave New World, it’s safe to say those aren’t continuing in TV form any time soon.
Kamala Khan could get another season of Ms. Marvel, but the big-screen adventures of The Marvels will come first. Moon Knight? Who knows. Secret Invasion? Uh, probably not. We liked She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, but does Marvel feel like bringing back a show that, for whatever reason, comes with a built-in hater brigade? Maybe, maybe not. For now, Loki seems like Marvel’s only real chance at the general concept of “Season 2” (Outside of What If…?, which is a generally disconnected anthology kind of thing anyway.)
Now, we’re within striking distance of the God of Mischief’s second go-around on Disney+. Here’s what we know about the future of Loki.
Is Loki getting a Season 2?
It sure is! After the credits during Loki‘s Season 1 finale, we see a screen with a page of an apparent TVA document, naming our Loki variant. It’s then stamped with a message: “LOKI WILL RETURN IN SEASON 2.”
The development broke with Marvel’s previous trend of holding series in limbo. At Disney+’s Television Critics Association press tour earlier this year, the Marvel Studios’ President Kevin Feige answered a question about the future of WandaVision saying, “I’ve been at Marvel for too long to say a definite no or a definite yes to anything.” Feige then explained where that typical non-answer answer / development limbo comes from:
“We are developing all of these shows the way we’re developing our movies — in other words, when we start with a movie, we hope there’s a Part 2, we hope there’s a Part 3. But we aren’t factoring that into Part 1; we are trying to make something that will hook people enough and that people will enjoy enough that they will want to revisit and want to see the story continue. So that is the way we’re proceeding on television as well.”
In other words, the writers are hoping to craft entire stories contained within one season—if they decide to move forward with future seasons, great, if not, also great; the story has already been sufficiently told. Of course, that means we get often get seasons which don’t entirely commit to wrapping up character arcs or resolving character struggles. Wanda has kind of said goodbye to Vision, but not really. Sam is kind of Captain America, but not really. Bucky is kind of working through his past, but not really.
Loki becomes the first Marvel Disney+ property to officially return for a new season, giving Loki actor Tom Hiddleston possibly more screen time than the majority of the Avengers. We dig it.
When is Loki Season 2 coming out?
Loki Season 2 will begin streaming on Disney+ on October 6—which is a Friday. This marks a return to the way the first few MCU and Star Wars series (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the first two seasons of The Mandalorian)were released before switching over to Wednesdays.
Episodes will be released on a weekly basis (and not long after its done, Marvel will try a new experiment by releasing all episodes of Echo on November 29.)
Is there a Loki Season 2 trailer?
There is! You can either watch our embedded video above or below on YouTube.
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Who’s joining the cast of Loki Season 2?
In the new trailer for Loki Season 2, we see Mobius (Owen Wilson) bring Loki (Tom Hiddleston) for some help when he seems to be “time-slipping.” Surely we’ll get a more specific definition on what, exactly, “time-slipping” is when the show debuts, but for now we get to see who Mobius goes to for help: a TVA employee named OB.
This would otherwise mean absolutely nothing, but we see in the trailer that OB is played by Loki Season 2’s greatest cast addition: Ke Huy Quan, former star of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and current reigning winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Waymond Wong in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Quan’s comeback story is one of the best to come through the industry in the last few years, and it’s exciting to see him with a role in this story—hopefully he will figure significantly into Season 2’s story.
Rafael Casal (of Blindspotting fame) will also be joining the cast in an as-of-now unknown role.
What will happen in Loki Season 2?
The first season ends with both Loki and Sylvie confronting He Who Remains (who is a variant of Kang the Conqueror) and is the keeper of the sacred timeline. After Kang is killed, the timeline begins to branch—we assume, infinitely—and Loki is forcefully teleported into one of these timelines (which, we assume, is also a separate universe; we’re not really sure how that all works, but whatever).
To recap: We’ve got Sylvie sitting at the edge of time, Loki trapped in some newly branched timeline/universe, Mobius 1 watching Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) leave to find “free will,” and Mobius 2 confronting Loki in the library.
Season 2 was set to majorly figure into Marvel’s forthcoming “Multiverse Saga,” which began to take shape with the poorly-received Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and will ultimately culminate with Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars, whenever those ultimately end up happening (They are currently planned for 2026 and 2027).
Things have changed with regard to that titular villain however; actor Jonathan Majors has come into some major legal trouble and his future in the MCU (and in the industry broadly) looks murky to say the least. The Victor Timely version of Kang the Conqueror (teased in the credits scene of Quantumania) appears in the Loki Season 2 trailer regardless, and Kang’s menacing presence looms over the entire trailer, and, at this point we must assume, the whole season.
Marvel may still change their plans when it comes to that overarching villain, but for now its a little hard to undo what Loki and Sylvie saw at the end of Season 1 (and what Marvel already filmed before… other things… came to light).
Assistant Editor
Joshua St Clair is an Assistant Editor at Men’s Health Magazine.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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