Disney+’s LOKI took a likeable but somewhat cartoonish villain from the MCU and made him highly sympathetic and three-dimensional in a show packed with odd turns and interesting ideas. The second season delivers on the ideas but the charm of the first season feels largely dissipated.

In Season 1, Loki is arrested by an organization called the Time Variance Authority, which is charged with maintaining a single timeline. People who do what they were not intended to do by the timekeepers end up creating new branches, resulting in their arrest and destruction along with the errant timeline. Mobius (Owen Wilson) recruits Loki to help him find a variant who is wreaking havoc and appears to have a grand plan, none other than another version of Loki.

It’s a lot of fun, not the least of which is Tom Hiddleston really gets to pull the leash off the character, the writing is solid, and there are plenty of interesting ideas and odd turns to keep me engaged. It was also fun to watch Loki go through some interesting self-discovery and find himself realizing that if he wants to rule the universe, he has to save it first. At the end of the first season, his counterpart Loki goes all the way, and the timeline breaks into a vast multiverse.

The second season picks up right where we left off, with similarly big stakes as the expanding multiverse threatens to destroy the TVA, and if the TVA is destroyed, then all the Kang the Conquerors out there will resume their multiversal war and possibly destroy everything. This requires plan after plan, with every solution having a problem, until Loki shows who he really is, getting what he’s always wanted but not in a way anyone expected.

Where things kind of fell flat for me, though, was in the characters. Loki is now, well, a good guy without any sneaky reservations, a god of mischief without the mischief. So much so he lost quite a bit of his charm, and when he makes his final choice, it doesn’t have nearly the same impact, there’s no tension to it. As for Sylvie, she’s barely present and doesn’t contribute much, and the villain in the story is the kind who’s annoyingly in the way more than a genuine threat. The terrific character arcs they had in season 1 are gone.

So overall I liked it well enough, but I appear to be one of the few who didn’t love it. It was a lot of fun and tied everything together in a nice redemption story, but overall it just didn’t engage me like the first season did.

Written and directed by Sarah Polley based on the book by Miriam Toews, WOMEN TALKING (2022) is a highly engaging if occasionally stilted encapsulation of violence against women. Consisting almost entirely of a debate in a barn, this microcosm nonetheless provides a roller skate ride through numerous issues and is probably the best explanation of how certain societal faults become institutionalized, making even the perpetrators victims of sorts. I didn’t love it, but I liked it quite a bit.

Miriam Toews’s novel is based on an incident at a Mennonite community in Bolivia, where women and girls aged 5 to 65 would wake up in the morning with blood on the sheets and missing their underwear. The elders got suspicious and caught several men in the act, reporting them to the authorities. The women testified against them in court, and eight men were sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Towes, who grew up in a Mennonite community in Canada, wrote her novel as events taking a different turn, which we see in the movie. The men have all left to post bail, and the women have been told that when they return the following day, the perpetrators must be forgiven. The women meet to discuss whether they will stay and accept things as they are, stay and fight, or leave. The novel and movie focuses almost entirely on their meeting in a barn. The stakes couldn’t be higher for them, as if they stay, they and their children may be subjected to further violence, but if they leave, they will face the unknown and possibly be excommunicated and be denied entry to Heaven.

The meeting covers a lot of issues and sees pretty much every type of response spanning the human spectrum of emotion, with the most notable being compassion. What’s particularly interesting is we see things like institutional problems, passed down generation to generation, described in a way that feels grounded and real by way of a stark example. Nor is the story a screed against men. Problems are outlined without generalized judgments, and there is an understanding that things could be better. While the women’s final decision carries a note of triumph, it’s also sad.

Otherwise, some of the interactions and proceedings came across as a little stilted, and the arguments are sometimes poetic if a bit too perfect. These are quibbles on my part, though. Overall, I quite liked it. The story makes you think, doesn’t pander or talk down to you, doesn’t provide pat answers, and invests you in the outcome.