One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about “Loki” is how it’s telling its own story, but have you considered bringing more of the MCU into it?

We want everybody to be in the gray area — they’re neither good nor bad. They might make bad choices or heroic choices, but they are trying to figure out who they are. The TVA felt like the place where we could maximize that storytelling and learn more about those characters through that. But also stay tuned, because we are going to more places [in Episodes 5 and 6].

Oculus Gostore

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Because that felt like where so much of our core character conflict was going to come from. There was so much intersectionality of our characters and what they think of the TVA. Sylvie wants to burn it down because the apple is rotten, as she says. Loki sees it as potentially the only form of defense against whatever else is coming in a war with Kang. Mobius and B-15, they’ve dedicated their whole life to it. They’re not quite ready to give it up. Renslayer feels like she’s been keeping it together, and you get a real understanding of why she thinks she should be the one to get this thing back on track.

No. This is maybe — not maybe — this is the first Marvel series to never have any additional photography. The story that is on screen is the story we set out to make. We went out there with a very specific idea of what we wanted this to be, and we found a way to tell it in that production period. It’s very much what’s on screen on Disney+.

At just over a pound—my kitchen scale clocked it at 16.7 ounces—the Go is lighter than a phone-laden Gear VR, and far more comfortable: its “facial interface” liner is cushier, and its top strap keeps it so stably on your head that I was able to loosen the side straps enough to avoid the telltale raccoon marks around my eyes and cheeks. An included extra spacer can be placed between the facial liner and the headset to create room for eyeglasses, something I appreciated early mornings and late nights, before I'd put my contacts in. There's one significant design demerit, though: The top strap anchors to rest of the strap only by a smallish bit of velcro, which has an annoying habit of pulling away when I put the headset on.

Behind the scenes, there have been some changes from Season 1. The series’ original director Kate Herron and head writer Michael Waldron both stepped back to focus on other projects. In their places, “Moon Knight’s” Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have stepped in as lead directors, and Season 1 writer Eric Martin stepped up as head writer for Season 2.

While there’s a headphone jack near the micro-USB charging port on the headset’s left side, speakers embedded in the headset direct sound toward your ear. It's audible, if not clearly so, to people nearby, and it’s not as immersive as the Rift’s fold-down headphones, but it works better than you’d think—and certainly removes one of the most annoying parts about taking off a headset for someone else to try. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever gone full Tommy-Davidson-in-Booty-Call with a headphone cable while in VR.)

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That’s the hope. I don’t want to — yeah. I think the the sun shining on Loki and Thor once again has always been the priority of the story we’re telling. But for that meeting to really be fulfilling, we have to get Loki to a certain place emotionally. I think that’s been the goal of these two seasons.

What's the first truly mainstream virtual-reality device? Is it the first one that millions of people can get for free or close to it, like the Google Cardboard? Is it the one with the first glimmer of name recognition, like the Oculus Rift? Is it the one that can run off a smartphone people already have, like the Daydream View (Google Pixel) or the Samsung Gear VR (Samsung Note)? Is it the one that gives the brawniest in-home experience at the brawniest price point, like the HTC Vive Pro?

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It’s clear that Majors plays an integral role this season, and you just alluded that Marvel usually does additional photography on all its titles. So was there any discussion about making changes to the show, given the uncertainty about what was happening with Majors?

What those games and apps encompass is further proof of the Go's particular mission. When Oculus first unveiled the device last year, its "welcome, casual users!" messaging was already in place in an introductory blog post: "It’s awesome for watching movies or concerts, playing games, or just hanging out with your friends in VR." Each of those is represented in a different part of the headset's launch-window rollout. Oculus TV lets users bring their streaming apps into VR and watch them together; Netflix and Hulu already made popular apps for the company, but they'll be joined by Showtime and others, with ESPN+ coming to the platform later this year. Oculus Venues does the same for comedy shows, sporting events, concerts, and other live spectacles.

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No, because we tried to bring back as much crew as we could from Season 1. It was largely the same team. Obviously, we went from Atlanta to London [for production], but a lot of our department heads carried over, so there was an institutional knowledge that was built in. And Tom is my producing partner in a true sense. Before we had any writers or directors, it was Tom and I for months building this story out. We had a 30-page document that was like, This is what the show is: TVA, He Who Remains — even Victor Timely was in that first document years ago. And it’s just carried through.

But while you'll find lots to do and see, the Go offers precious little of the deep social experiences have captivated PC VR users. The Go's best new games, like Anshar Online and tabletop title Catan VR, offer networked play, but its dedicated social offerings are limited to relatively lightweight apps like vTime and Altspace. "Hanging out with your friends" seems to refer only to Oculus TV and the company's Rooms app, which lets you share a space with your existing FWH (friends with headsets). With the Go, sharing is meant for people outside the headset. You can take photos and record videos from inside the headset, even livestream your VR, and you can post all of it—you'd just better want it on Facebook, because as of now that's the only place you can post it.

After a quick tutorial on how to use the single bundled hand controller, the Go sets you free to explore and install any apps or games that catch your eye. All Gear VR titles are compatible with the Go; that means more than 1,000 are available in the Oculus Store on day one, with more than 100 that are either brand new or, in Oculus' words, "substantially improved." How many you can fit into the 32GB version of the Go remains to be seen—titles range from less than 100MB up to more than a gig, but there's no way to check your storage at a glance. According to an Oculus spokesperson, users will get a notification in the headset when their free space dips below 2GB, and then again at 500MB. (Don't worry; I have 27 things installed at the moment, and I'm still notification-free. If you can't live without downloading multiple movies, though, your fileage may vary.)

Loki wants the first option; Sylvie wants the second. She wins, kills He Who Remains, and boots Loki back to an alternate version of the TVA, where previous compatriots Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) don’t remember ever meeting him.

That’s the thinking behind so-called “standalone” headsets, which ditch cables and satellite devices in favor of ease of use. The Oculus Go, which goes on sale today starting at $199, is the first of its category, though not the last. Lenovo’s Mirage Solo, which works on Google’s Daydream virtual reality platform, is available on Friday starting at $399, with other standalones following later this year.

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Variety has screened the first four (of six) episodes of “Loki,” and without spoiling anything, Season 2 picks up pretty much exactly where the first season left off — before then charting its own storytelling path. The full cast has returned, including Gugu Mbatha-Raw as former TVA judge Ravonna Renslayer and Eugene Cordero as TVA functionary Casey. And Majors returns as well as He Who Remains, in addition to another Kang variant, a 19th century inventor named Victor Timely. They’re joined by new actors including Kate Dickie (“Game of Thrones”), Rafael Casal (“Blindspotting”) and recent Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan as TVA technician Ouroboros, aka “OB.”

Of the eight live-action TV shows that Marvel Studios has produced for Disney+ to date, only one has concluded with the explicit promise of a second season: That would be “Loki,” the outrageously entertaining series about Tom Hiddleston’s god of mischief and his metaphysical exploits in the Time Variance Authority.

So even as Kate Herron kind of handed the reins over at the end of Season 1, there is an institutional knowledge that comes with us being the glue between the seasons.

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“As we were shooting the ‘Lamentis’ episode, Tom and I started having lots of conversations about how this world could build out, how we dive deeper into it,” he says. “A large part of what we wanted to do was not trying to repeat ourselves, and not try to play the hits.” At the same time, he adds, they also wanted to make sure didn’t start Season 2 by “fast-forwarding through the drama” of the Season 1 finale.  Related Stories VIP+ How Kai Cenat Alerted Hollywood to ‘Subathon’ Power 'Batman Unburied: Fallen City,' Starring Colman Domingo as the Dark Knight, Sets Premiere Date on Spotify

The Go continues that tradition. It’s not quite as friendly looking as the Rift—its featureless gray plastic feels like Kafka Moderne, which the iridescent gray faceplate and gray fabric strap do little to dispel—but finds its way onto your face quickly, thanks to a quick and flawless setup process. (While the Rift’s setup process was clear enough, most users by now are familiar with the woes of an ill-timed GPU update or a seemingly random USB port failure.) Its initial power-up also broaches not-quite-standalone territory; you’ll need Oculus’ smartphone app to set up the headset, as well as to connect the Go to any wireless network for the first time.

Also, there were certain things in Season 1 that felt like they were maybe a risk, and we didn’t know how the audience would respond. Once we realized that they embraced it, it felt like a lot of freedom to go further.

However when compared to these other devices, Oculus and Facebook’s gamble becomes clear: this isn’t a full-court press, it’s an undercut. With a cost (and capability) markedly less than its competitors’, the Oculus Go isn’t trying to blow anyone out of the water—it’s trying to cajole you into seeing VR as easy, affordable, magical entertainment.

Oculus Go2

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Yet, it's all in perfect keeping with the device's strategy. The Go is meant to be simple, and it's meant to be inexpensive. But most importantly, it's meant to be immersive while still being easy. Easy equals fun, which equals customers, which equals the continued growth of VR—an important consideration for the company that's arguably sunken more money into the technology than any other.

That Facebook-centrism, while understandable given Oculus' parent company, still remains one of the Go's two glaring issues. The other is that like the Gear VR, it only tracks your rotations, not your motion in three-dimensional space. You can spin and nod and tilt to your heart's content, but being confined to so-called "three degrees of freedom" means that you can't lean over to inspect something more closely, or duck out of the way of an incoming virtual object. And since the same goes for its single controller, it also means that you can't bring your hands into VR for natural gestural controls. Instead, the controller functions like a glorified laser pointer—good for at what it does, just not transformative. (I'll pause here to give lobbyists from Big Laser Pointer a chance to flood my mentions.)

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I think we had to just keep reminding ourselves that the TVA is a great world, let’s live in the drama of what we’re creating there. Which means not fast-forwarding through the drama that they just decided to stop pruning timelines, but also staying in the emotional turmoil that Loki and Sylvie are coming into this season with.

No. And that mainly came from — I know as much as you do at the moment. It felt hasty to do anything without knowing how all of this plays out.

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Or is it none of those? What if what VR needs to finally vault out of the realm of the curio and into wide usage isn’t lightness or power, but convenience? Something self-contained, with all the necessary processing and sensors and display components built in so you don't need to slap your phone into it or connect it to a PC or game console—but also wireless, so you can throw it in your bag and use it anywhere? Something with an on/off switch that just powers up and works? Something that you can easily remove and hand to a friend?

And so much happened in that finale. To recap: Loki and his variant-turned-potential-soulmate Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) arrive at the end of time, where they meet the creator of the TVA, He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) — the variant of the supervillain Kang who won a massive multiversal war. To prevent future Kangs from emerging, He Who Remains has used the TVA to maintain a single, sacred timeline — pruning away trillions of potential lives in the process. He gives Sylvie and Loki an impossible choice: Replace him as the head of the TVA, or kill him and bring forth an infinite number of Kangs. Popular on Variety

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Now, Season 1 and 2 were always built to be two chapters of the same book. The hope would be going forward, there are more books that we can tell these stories with. I certainly think that we could start doing that.

We were in London, so I had at least some version of our scripts. The way the process works, they’re always being rewritten, but OB was in there, and his introduction scene was almost exactly as originally written. I would like to say it was in early spring, which was maybe just two months before we started shooting. We were casting, and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was playing in L.A. and in New York, but it hadn’t gone nationwide yet. I think it was going the very next week. We had gotten a call from our casting director who said, “Hey, I’m about to put together a list for OB — just initial thoughts. But before I do that, I really think you guys should meet Ke, and I think it should be Ke. I think you guys should meet with him quick, because probably by Monday, he’s going to have a lot of offers for different things.”

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Yes, in both seasons of writers’ rooms. It always felt wrong to go too far outside of the box of things that would directly contribute to Loki’s character arc in these two seasons. So that’s why we get [Jaimie Alexander as] Sif in there [in Season 1], we play with the variants in the void and various levels of Asgard-specific storytelling. But while we’ve had nearly 12 hours of storytelling, it never feels like we have enough time. Eventually, just handling the stories of our ensemble and not shortchanging them has always been priority number one.

You mentioned He Who Remains and Victor Timely. You finished shooting Season 2 in 2022, but did Jonathan Majors’ arrest for assault in March result in any changes to the show?

Of the major VR manufacturers, Oculus more than any understands the power of retail design. Unboxing the Rift felt like opening an Apple device—solid material, inventive closures, any cables and adapters nestled smartly and surreptitiously in their surroundings. The headset itself was designed with intuitive comfort in mind, as were its controllers. This was a product that not only looked good, it felt good.

Whether the Go is the device that's finally going to rocket VR out of early-adopter orbit and make it a mass technology remains to be seen. Oculus has a more ambitious, fully-tracked standalone device in the works; "Santa Cruz," as the prototype is known, gets much closer to the performance of a first-generation PC-connected VR headset like the Rift, including full positional tracking. But Santa Cruz has no date, and the Go is here now. It's comfortable, it boasts a huge software library, and it comes from a company that has polished its user experience to a fine sheen. And at a shade less than $200, it's as damn fine a stopgap as you can imagine.

Oculus Go64GB

To delve into the second season of “Loki,” Wright talked with Variety about casting Quan just before his performance in the multiverse spectacular “Everything Everywhere All at Once” changed the actor’s life forever; what the future of “Loki” the show and Loki the character might be following Season 2; and how Majors’ arrest in March for assault did (or did not) affect their plans for Season 2.

In Season 1, the show explored several time periods and locations outside the TVA, but in the first four episodes of this season, you stick to just 1880s Chicago, 1970s London and 1980s in the Midwest. How did you come to that decision to focus more on the TVA and building out its history?

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The first thing you notice when you turn on the Go and select a home environment—a 360-degree photo that serves as backdrop for the rest of the user menus—is "wow that display looks good." It's not just better than a Samsung phone looks in a Gear VR; it's better than the Rift's display as well. Part of that is the display itself: Rather than utilize the same OLED screens as the Rift, the Go employs a fast-switch LCD, which helps fill in the spaces between the pixels a bit and mitigates the famed/dreaded "screen door effect." There's also a new generation of the Fresnel lenses that the Rift used, with Oculus claiming that the new lenses reduce "god rays," the light dispersion effect that can occur in high-contrast scenes. And in my week of testing, I wasn't bothered by either phenomenon—though using the Go with my back to a window on a bright day did allow light to leak in. So ... don't do that.

It turns out, those plans were already in the works before a second of “Loki” had ever streamed. As executive producer Kevin Wright explains to Variety, he and Hiddleston began talking about Season 2 of the show while in production on the third episode of Season 1.

So that that Friday, myself, Justin and Aaron, two of our directors, had gotten on a Zoom with Ke. We pitched him the show and this character. We shared that introduction scene with him and maybe the full script. And then we called in the big guns that Monday; Kevin Feige got on the phone with him and said, “Ke, I know you read the script. I know you talked to the guys. We really think you should do this. I really want you to join the Marvel family.” And he had already made up his mind over the weekend. It was like, “I’m there. I’ve been a huge fan of this for a long time.”

I think it’s open-ended. We certainly did not develop this season going, “We have to tee up Season 3” — in the way that we did with Season 1, where there was a very specific, “Hey, we’re coming back.” But I also think that where this show goes, there certainly can be many, many, many more stories told with Loki in the “Loki” world, and in other worlds connected to Loki, the character.

In a very early draft of the script that Michael Waldron had written, that first Time Theater conversation between Mobius and Loki was maybe a couple of pages. And then a lot of other big Marvel-y action things happened afterwards, and we all went, “That’s not the interesting stuff. This Time Theater conversation is interesting. That’s what the show could be.” If we are really diving into the character-driven philosophy and introspection of self, that’s quite different than the last 10 years of Marvel movies. Would the audience follow us along on that?

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I would love that. Look, I’ve been siloed in on “Loki” for almost five years now, by the time this show finishes, and with every filmmaker who has put their hands on the show, we’ve all had the same conversations: It feels like the TVA could really be this exciting connective tool for all of this storytelling. And we’ve only seen a fraction of it. We’re dealing very specifically with this one smaller department with Mobius and B-15 and Renslayer, but you look out at those vistas — this place is infinite. The exciting thing to us is there certainly are more stories to be told there. We’ve carved out our own little corner of the sandbox and built something cool. We’re hoping that other people want to come and play with it.