Ravonna Renslayer Is the Best Part of Loki Season 2
Renslayer's storyline has been a surprising — and compelling — bright spot.
We're nearing the final stretch of Loki Season 2, a Disney+ series that is promising to change the status quo of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in some major ways. Across the four episodes we've seen thus far, that has definitely been the case, with some surprising personal stakes for Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and those in his orbit. But amid the Temporal Loom and the Victor Timely of it all and the looming threat of Secret Wars, one element of Loki Season 2 has stood out — the journey that Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has gone on.
From the second she was confirmed to be in Loki's ensemble cast, it was clear that Ravonna was headed on a unique journey. In the comics, the character has evolved from the space princess of a far-future colony, to a paramour of Kang the Conqueror, to a full-fledged assassin donning the name Terminatrix. She has been reborn, rebooted, and cloned against her will — but she has still sporadically found ways to matter in the grand tapestry of Marvel Comics, decades after her initial debut. With Mbatha-Raw's Ravonna initially being introduced as a leader at the Time Variance Authority (and the track record of comic accuracy across the MCU itself) it was safe to assume that we probably wouldn't get an exact adaptation of her comic status quo. And to an extent, we didn't — once the members of the TVA began to wake up from their brainwashing in the later parts of Season 1, we learned that Ravonna is not a space princess at all, but a Variant of Rebecca Tourminet, an ordinary Vice Principal at an Ohio high school.
But if Loki has proven anything, it's that a person can be so much more than their pre-ordained destiny — and Ravonna has begun to illustrate that as well. Across the later episodes of Season 1, Ravonna began to reckon with the machinations of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) creating the TVA, and set out on a mission to find him and get answers. Season 2 has explored that quest for answers, and so much more — in Episode 3 alone, Ravonna helped create, developed a kinship for, and was betrayed by Victor Timely. This ordeal, and the way the characters around her dealt with Timely, proceeded to help her realize all of the ways she has been betrayed — both by He Who Remains, and by the rest of the TVA, who have gone rogue in her brief absence. As we got into Episode 4 and Ravonna discovered the past partnership she had with He Who Remains, she got pushed even further, crushing many of the TVA agents to death in an impossibly-shrinking cube.
Yeah, you can't necessarily endorse every action Ravonna has taken in Loki Season 2 thus far — but it's hard to deny that it's fun rooting for her. In a roundabout way, this journey of Ravonna "breaking bad" feels like a send-up to her comic counterpart, to the point where it wouldn't be too jarring to have her suddenly don her Terminatrix costume onscreen. Not only is she joining a still-small group of female MCU villains, but the kind of antagonist she is representing is still fascinating. At her core, Ravonna is a woman who has grown sick of being mistreated and disregarded by the world around her, and is finally deciding to take action. (Ravonna getting this development does help Marvel Studios if they decide to pivot away from Kang as their next franchise big bad, but that's a whole separate conversation.)
Ravonna's arc is also compelling to watch because, by and large, Loki Season 2 has not made space for significant growth among its other characters. Any other beats have been somewhat fleeting, like Sylvie (Sophia di Martino) developing more of a kinship to humanity after working at a 1980s McDonalds, Hunter X-5 / Brad Wolfe (Rafael Casal) balancing his allegiances with his love for acting, or Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) admitting that he doesn't want to know his real non-TVA identity. A lot of Loki's tension has been plot-driven, instead of character-driven — even Loki himself has remained largely static and reactionary, outside of some glimpses of his former villainy and him using magic slightly more often. Maybe the next two episodes, which have already been teased in a spoiler-filled trailer, will change that, and deliver a magnum opus of character development. But even if it doesn't, at least we have Ravonna's weird and violent personal journey.
If you haven't signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.
Note: If you purchase one of the awesome, independently chosen products featured here, we may earn a small commission from the retailer. Thank you for your support.
