‘Loki:’ Head Writer, Executive Producer Eric Martin Puts Character First In Season 2’s Timeline-Bending Adventure

After co-writing the timeline-shattering Loki season one finale, Eric Martin assumed head writer duties for the critically acclaimed second season of the hugely popular Marvel adventure. Audiences may have been concerned about perspective or tonal shifts across the seasons. Yet, Martin felt extremely confident that he and his writing team would avoid any noticeable changes as he further expanded the Loki mythology introduced in its first season.

After working on season one, Martin and team felt they were on a continuation of the same journey. Given the twists and turns (to put it mildly) of season two, it helps to have that continuity from season to season. It’s how Martin and team ensure the audience continues to care so much about these long-beloved characters.

“Character and emotion are my bread and butter as a writer. That’s actually the easiest part for me. Everything that I do starts with character: who they are, who they think they are, and who they actually are. I’m just trying to dig as deep into them as I can before I ever start writing anything,” Martin explained. “That was the easiest part in what I wanted to do. I wanted to really make sure the emotion of it never got complicated, that we’re always tracking scene to scene where everyone is emotionally. We get crazy with our time travel, but we don’t get crazy with the emotion.”

Across its second season, Loki explores the ramifications of the massive timeline branching seen in season 2. As Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and friends try to bring the timelines back together, they travel across time to connect with Victor Timely, a variant of He Who Remains who was killed at the end of season one.

Keeping those interconnecting narratives in alignment across his writing team became less problematic that one would imagine.

“For me, as long as I can keep the whole story in my head, I knew it was simple enough. If I ever got confused, then I knew we needed to simplify things. In terms of keeping everybody together and understanding the big picture, it’s simply repetition and lots of conversations,” Martin laughed. “If you live in the TVA, then you’re just looking down on the screen and watching those dots moving around. I’m always looking at everything from that same eagle-eye view. So it didn’t really confuse me, but we definitely tested it on every collaborator throughout to see if people were lost at any point.”

Season two introduces a character that quickly became a fan favorite: Ouroboros or OB, played by Academy Award-winner Ke Huy Quan. OB serves as the chief architect of the TVA. He’s the one who builds all the fantastic devices and works in a research facility at the heart of the TVA. Quan’s natural talents as an actor blended perfectly with his incredible enthusiasm as a genuine and lovely human being.

As a viewer, you really couldn’t imagine anyone else explaining the eccentricities of time travel better than Quan. Martin and team knew the casting was perfect when they were able to tap into Quan’s sweet innocence for OB.

“He just brings so much heart to everything he does, and for all of OB’s wielding of science jargon, he just always felt like a sweetheart of a character. He’s somebody that just loves what he does and has affection for the people that come through because he’s just a sweet guy. [Quan] just inhabited that completely, so it felt like an easy call truly,” Martin said of Quan’s casting. “Innocence is a great way to look at him. He’s just in love with the science of it all, and it gets him so excited. There’s just a sweet innocence to that.”

Perhaps that sweet innocence and infectious joy rubs off on Hiddleston’s Loki across season two. Where the character was largely villainous in his early Marvel Cinematic Universe appearances, the Disney+ Loki series saw him mature and evolve in unexpected ways. By the end of the series, Loki hasn’t made the ultimate sacrifice, but he has chosen to give up the very friendships and human bonds that he so desperately sought across the second season.

Seeing Loki’s journey from villain to hero proved extremely rewarding for viewers, but Sylvie’s (Sophia Di Martino) journey has a few more bumps along the way. As a female Loki variant, Sylvie understands that the difficult choices, the unpopular tasks, are what it takes to win the day. That was certainly the case in the end of season one when she killed He Who Remains, setting off the events of season two.

But where does Sylvie fall within the spectrum of MCU villains and heroes? The answer is not easy to pinpoint.

“We always talk about them as heroes and villains, but when I interface with them, I’m just looking at them as complicated characters. They’re dealing with things as gods and people with these extreme abilities. So, that’s going to inevitably put them into ethically gray areas,” Martin posited. “The way I look at her is she’s somebody with a very black and white sense of morality. Inevitably, you put her into those situations where she has to make a choice, and things are going to be extreme either way. It’s almost like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, somebody with this dark gift. They’re definitely a force for good, but to do that, they’re going to have to wield a little bit of that dark gift.”

Loki streams in its entirety exclusively on Disney+.