Loki Director Kasra Farahani Discusses Victor Timely & The Ever Expanding Timelines In Season 2

Loki season 2 picks up in the aftermath of Sylvie killing He Who Remains and pushing Loki through a time door into the past. As Loki grapples with He Who Remains’ warning about an impending multiversal war, he tries to help the people of the Time Variance Authority cope with the knowledge that everything they knew was a lie. At the same time, they must work together, along with new ally O.B., to track down Miss Minutes, Renslayer, and Sylvie, just as another variant of He Who Remains emerges.

Eric Martin is the head writer on Loki season 2, with indie duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead stepping in as the lead directors. Academy Award winner Ke Huy Quan joins the star-studded cast for the second season, while Loki’s returning cast includes Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di Martino, Jonathan Majors, Wunmi Mosaku, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tara Strong, and Eugene Cordero.

Screen Rant spoke with Kasra Farahani, the director of Loki season 2, episode 3, and production designer for the series. They explain why branches continued to grow from the Sacred Timeline after Dox’s bombing and Miss Minutes’ disturbing desires in the latest episode. Farahani also reveals a real-life inspiration for Victor Timely and why they included Balder the Brave at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Warning: SPOILERS lie ahead for Loki season 2, episode 3, “1893”!

Kasra Farahani On Loki Season 2

Screen Rant: Kasra, first of all, this show just keeps getting better and better. I love Loki season 2, and your work through both seasons as a production designer is top-notch. Now, Dox’s bombing didn’t work, the branches that were pruned are growing back, as O.B. explains, are these timelines resistant to Dox’s pruning, or are there other branches of equal numbers growing in their place?

Kasra Farahani: It’s the latter. It’s the latter. It’s that Dox did prune those timelines, end all those lives tragically, but the multiverse — or the timeline, rather — is fracturing at such a rate that they’re being replaced almost quicker than they were pruned in the first place. That’s the issue.

Now is the Sacred Timeline just another way of describing what’s left of the multiverse after the multiverse war?

Kasra Farahani: The terminology I’m not great at, so I don’t actually know the answer to that question. I don’t want to answer it wrong.

No, it can be tricky with these MCU projects, I’m sure. Now O.B. says they have to increase the diameter of the Loom’s intake enough to boost the throughput and clear that knot of unrefined time for the time streams to be knotted. What incursions are happening on the other side of the Loom?

Kasra Farahani: The way I would think about this is you think about it as a loom that’s weaving. Imagine a rope or a steel cable, and you’ve got the amount of hemp or something that’s going into the loom, and it’s weaving it into this thing. But all of a sudden the amount of hemp that’s coming in has exponentially increased, so at the rate that it can organize this time is inadequate for the amount of input basically. So they’re trying to find a way to increase that diameter so that they can refine more time quicker and clear it.

We get to see Chicago twice in this episode, in 1868 in the Sacred Timeline, which is before the Great Fire that destroyed the city, and then in 1893, which is a branched timeline of the Chicago World’s Fair. Can you discuss the challenges of bringing Chicago to life during both of those eras?

Kasra Farahani: Sure, absolutely. I mean, it was a challenge, but it was also a joy. It’s super fun. The big challenge obviously was a budgetary one, because when you’re building big sets, it really helps if they get a lot of screen time. So all the TVA stuff that we’re building, they’re playing in multiple episodes. The challenge with 203 is that we’re building Chicago, but only for one episode, so it’s tricky to build a set as large as the World’s Fair and do a responsible job of making the world feel beautiful and rich and layered, and yet be careful not to make more set than you actually need.

Now, where Victor Timely is kind of giving his presentation, that’s obviously one of the post-credit scenes we see in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. How closely did you work with that team for that post-credit scene? And does that post-credit scene lead directly into Loki season 2, or does that foreshadow something else that’s going to be coming in the MCU?

Kasra Farahani: Well, what I can tell you is that we shot this before there was any decision to use it as a post-credit scene. That decision came later.

Okay, gotcha. Now I’ve got to talk about Jonathan Majors, because his performance is brilliant as Victor Timely. Can you talk about some of the nuances he added to the character and working with Jonathan to create Victor Timely?

Kasra Farahani: Absolutely. There was a huge amount of invention and specificity that Jonathan brought to building out this role. The exact nature of his quirkiness, the embodiment of someone who is at once so brilliant that they’re operating seven levels above normal people, but then the awkwardness that comes as a result of that in terms of how they interact on a more basic level. And the combination of confidence in his brilliance and his technical knowledge, but sort of stammering and kind of shyness around Renslayer, because of the situation maybe he hasn’t found himself in recently.

And then also we wanted to acknowledge the fact that this is a Black man in the late 19th century in America who’s trying to be an inventor, who’s trying to be a business person, and that’s going to be a hostile environment. Just the very nature of the fact that he’s giving this presentation in the Hofbrau of the Midway instead of in the Machine Hall of the White City, which is next door, is probably due to that. They probably wouldn’t let him into that one.

And so I think some of his need to be quick on his feet and to be a conman comes from being a person surviving in a hostile environment. And on top of that, I think also the conman part of it is also informed of the fact that his ideas are so advanced that they exceed what’s capable with the materials and the technology he’s working with in the late 19th century. So he’s not conning anybody in that these ideas are all valid, but his ability to execute them is limited in the era.

The other thing that Jonathan and I talked about is this historical figure named Granville Woods, which is in some ways an uncanny mirror for Timely. He was a black inventor who lived basically the exact time Timely would’ve lived, who invented many things and was constantly having people trying to steal his patents, claim them, including Edison who tried to claim ownership of his patents twice and lost in court both times. So there was that. We wanted to get that element in there because if you have a figure like this in this moment in time in history, and he would be facing those challenges.

Absolutely. Now, switching gears for a second, much like Sylvie being Loki’s variant, many believe that Renslayer could be a variant of He Who Remains. What are your opinions on that theory?

Kasra Farahani: I don’t know. I don’t know about that. We’re going to have to wait and see on that.

So there’s a barricaded region of the Citadel. It was designed in the blueprints by you. What’s behind that part of the Citadel?

Kasra Farahani: Well, is it barricaded or is it collapsed?

It looks collapsed. Yes.

Kasra Farahani: It’s collapsed, right. So I think it’s collapsed, and as to what’s behind there, we’re going to have to see.

Have we seen your favorite variant of Kang yet in the MCU?

Kasra Farahani: Oh, I’m obviously biased, but my favorite I think is Victor Timely. I think he’s super charming, funny and an incredibly nuanced character.

I love Miss Minutes in this episode, she is quite terrifying. Miss Minutes tells Renslayer, “When he’s back where he belongs atop the TVA, you and I will be right by his side.” Is that a sincere promise from Miss Minutes to Renslayer?

Kasra Farahani: You’re going to have to watch. Keep on watching.

Well, let me ask you this. There’s a fun Easter egg with Balder the Brave in there, and we’ve seen concept art with Daniel Craig as Balder by Daryl Warner at Marvel. Was this a nod to that Balder the Brave that we never got to see in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness?

Kasra Farahani: No, it was not. What that is about this… First of all, it’s about the joke that you would expect that if you got Odin and Thor, that you would expect a third statue would be Loki, but it isn’t. But it’s also about using this as an opportunity to remind Loki and the audience that Loki’s not just somebody who works with the TVA, but that he’s a God. That he comes from that stock and that he has that power within him.

And then finally, also, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the midway of the Chicago Worlds Fair was basically they brought all these different cultures from around the world and they created pavilions for them. And the truth of the matter is they’re pretty reductive and downright racist at times. So I wanted to kind of acknowledge this notion that we have Loki say that, “You can’t distill an entire culture down to a diorama.” So I wanted to acknowledge that in there.

Now, Miss Minutes is a different representation of AI that we see in the MCU. We’ve had Jarvis and Ultron, but this is a more vindictive AI with Miss Minutes. What did you want to explore with the character this season? And can you talk about her connection to He Who Remains?

Kasra Farahani: Sure. I mean, what I can tell you is that, and this is just my opinion, that Miss Minutes is maybe more human in some ways than those AIs. And that’s what we’re seeing here, is that she has desires, she has very troublingly, awkwardly, uncomfortably human desires and that she’s frustrated that she feels like she’s been with He Who Remains since the start, and she’s starting to get pretty pissed off at how he’s never taken her seriously. And she’s, unfortunately for Victor Timely, taking it out on him who has no context about what the hell she’s talking about.

About Loki Season 2

Along with Mobius, Hunter B-15 and a team of new and returning characters, Loki navigates an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous multiverse in search of Sylvie, Judge Renslayer, Miss Minutes and the truth of what it means to possess free will and glorious purpose.

Check out our other Loki season 2 interviews:

• Kevin Wright
• Christine Wada
• Dan DeLeeuw

Loki season 2 debuts new episodes on Disney+ every Thursday.