Warning! This article contains mild spoilers for Loki season 2 episode 1. If you've yet to watch the episode, turn back now.
Loki season 2 picks up right where its predecessor left off; with Sophia Di Martino's Sylvie killing He Who Remains and destroying the Sacred Timeline. As a result, the TVA's Temporal Loom – a device that refines raw time into a physical timeline, bear with us – starts malfunctioning, overwhelmed by the sudden surge of branches, which sets Loki and the gang on a mission to fix it before it breaks and well, wipes everything out of existence.
With that, there's not much... time, in its first few episodes anyway, to explore Loki and Sylvie's complicated relationship, which culminated in a fight and a kiss at the end of season 1. But that doesn't mean the team behind the Marvel show have forgotten about the God of Mischief's variant crush...
"I don't think it was a, 'Oh, we're moving away from the romance' decision, I think the stakes are just so high," executive producer Kevin Wright tells GamesRadar+. "There's so much drama happening that it always felt like convoluted to slow things down just for the romance, so we would try to find those moments where we could."
Aside from a brief re-introduction at the end of the episode, and a post-credits scene revealing where she's been based since that fateful day at the End of Time, Sylvie isn't in 'Ouroboros' all that much. Though she's mentioned a lot by Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who insists to Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) that they catch up to her before the Time Variance Authority does. (We already know from promotional material that the pair eventually reunite inside a McDonald's, as you do).
"Actors as amazing as Sophia and Tom can play it all without saying anything, you know?" episode 2 director Dan DeLeeuw adds. "Loki keeps saying, 'We need to find Sylvie, we need to find Sylvie. We need to find out what's going on'. What he's not saying is, 'I want to find Sylvie because I wanted to pursue what happened at the end of the last season,'" he laughs. "He's coming in ready to go.
"What muddies that, though, is that Sylvie has been [in 1982 Broxton, Oklahoma] for eight months to a year, right? For her, it's been a while but for Loki, it's been a couple of days. So she's had all this time to move on and be happy and he hasn't moved on at all. You can see in their faces; she's looking at this as an older relationship and he sees it as a younger relationship, and Sylvie's trying to like figure out how it's going to affect her life."
It's interesting that DeLeeuw alludes to the pair growing apart. Likening Loki and Sylvie – dubbed Sylki by fans – to "awkward teenagers", a phrase season 1 director Kate Herron often used to describe them apparently, Wright point outs that neither have experienced these type of feelings before, and so "don't know how to express or explore" it.
"You can feel Sylvie maybe feels a little bad for what she did, but she's never going to admit it," he notes. "And we just wanted to keep the dramatic tension of it, too, which is what is said at the end of season 1. 'You can't trust, I can't be trusted.' I think those are two big identity flaws that the two of them are still working through in season 2." Concerning matters of the heart, as the series continues, the Temporal Loom might not be the only thing at risk of breaking...
Loki season 2 episode 1 is streaming on Disney Plus now. Hear more of our interviews with Kevin Wright and Dan DeLeeuw on the latest episode of the Inside Total Film podcast. For more on the show, check out our spoilery deep-dives on:
- When does Loki season 2 take place on the Marvel timeline?
- Loki season 1 recap
- How to watch the Marvel movies in order
- Marvel phase 5
- Upcoming Marvel movies and shows
- Victor Timely comic book history explained
- Judge Renslayer comic book history explained
- What is Time-Slipping?
- All the differences between comic book Loki and show Loki
