Loki, on Disney+
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Caution: spoilers.

Season 1
This takes place after the events of "Avengers: Endgame", but while that movie was set in 2023, this show is set in 2012, after the events of "The Avengers". At the end of the first Avengers movie, Loki was captured and was taken back to Asgard, along with the Tesseract. However, in "Endgame", before he could be taken to Asgard, Loki came into possession of the Tesseract and used it to teleport himself away from his captors. Because this wasn't supposed to happen, it created an alternate timeline. So, Loki is almost immediately arrested by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), who call him a "variant", and put on trial by Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). A TVA analyst named Mobius (Owen Wilson) takes an interest in Loki, and wants to use him to help them capture a rogue variant who keeps killing their Hunters throughout time. Loki eventually meets the variant, a female variant of himself who calls herself Sylvie. They begin working together, though they can't completely trust each other, and they don't have the same goals. And I feel like that's all I can say without spoiling too much of the season, though I'll have to explain more about this season when the next one starts.

I liked the first season a lot (I rated it 3 and 3/4 smileys), but the way it ends left me unsure how much I'd end up liking the series as a whole. I suspected that after season two I might raise my rating of the series, and I was right.

Season 2
So... I don't want to reveal too much more of what happened in season 1, but it's important to know that Loki and Sylvie eventually made their way to the end of time, where they met He Who Remains, a variant of Kang the Conqueror, who created the TVA to maintain a single, "sacred" timeline. This is because if there was a multiverse, all the other Kang variants would eventually go to war with each other, wreaking untold havoc upon all of creation. However, Sylvie killed He Who Remains, and sent Loki back in time to the TVA, before anyone there had met him.

This season, Loki begins "time slipping", going back and forth throughout time. He eventually meets Ouroboros, or O.B. (Ke Huy Quan), a TVA technician, who helps put a stop to the time slipping. Now, because of Sylvie killing He Who Remains, many new branches begin breaking off from the sacred timeline, creating new universes. Some members of the TVA do their best to try to prune those branches, while others try to stop them. Those who want a multiverse include Loki, Mobius, O.B., and a couple of characters introduced in season 1 who I never mentioned, a Hunter called B-15, and a receptionist named Casey. Meanwhile, Renslayer escapes with Miss Minutes (Tara Strong), an animated anthropomorphic A.I. clock mascot of the TVA who was also introduced last season, but becomes more important this season. Renslayer tries to recruit a variant of He Who Remains named Victor Timely, an inventor from the 19th century. Loki and the others have to try to stop her plans, and get Timely to work with them instead. The TVA has something called the "Loom", which maintains the sacred timeline, and it's breaking down because of all the new timelines, so they need to fix it. Loki eventually begins time slipping again (it seems to be different this time, as his present consciousness takes over his own body at various points in time). He learns to control his time slipping, and uses it to try to save the Loom, but eventually realizes that's impossible.

I have left out a ton of plot details up to this point, and now I don't want to spoil how the story finally gets resolved. I'll just say, vaguely, that Loki saves the multiverse, and the TVA is repurposed to hunt down Kang variants before they can start a war. I haven't talked about how important Sylvie was this season, and there are plenty of other characters I haven't mentioned at all. I just don't know what to say about any of them without making this review a lot longer than I want it to be. I've tried to relay only the most salient plot points (though I've even left a few of those out). I do want to say that until the season finale, I wasn't sure I'd raise my rating at all, but after the finale, I had to. Because it really is an amazing ending, and I think it retroactively makes the rest of the season better than it originally seemed.