‘Loki’ Head Writer Eric Martin on That Cliffhanger and His Secret Rule for Season 2

variety.com:

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: This story involves discussion of major plot developments in Season 2, Episode 4 of “Loki,” currently streaming on Disney+.

When Eric Martin started writing the Season 1 finale of “Loki” (along with then-head writer Michael Waldron), he already had a sense that the Marvel Studios show was going to continue for a second season. “There were definitely rumblings of that while we were still in the writers room of Season 1,” Martin says. “It didn’t become a sure thing until we were into COVID.” During the forced pandemic hiatus — Martin estimates that they’d filmed “about a third of Season 1” before the shutdown — Martin says that Marvel Studios executive Kevin Wright approached him about becoming the head writer for Season 2. “And we then started really getting down to business about where to take the next half of the story.” That effort reached a serious turning point in this week’s episode, “Heart of the TVA,” in which the titular temporal loom — the mechanism that harnesses the energy of time to power the TVA and thread the Sacred Timeline — explodes under the stress of the infinitely branching multiverse; the ensuing eruption appears to engulf Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and his compatriots before the episode cuts to black.

The cataclysm is the direct result of the decision Loki’s variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) makes in the Season 1 finale to kill the TVA’s creator, He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) — which precipitated the creation of the multiverse. “When dictators are toppled, when systems break down, chaos ensues,” Martin says. “Problems always come up in those situations that nobody could have predicted, because the system was taking care of them, silently.” It’s.