Loki Season 1 tackled a vast corner of the MCU when the titular God of Mischief got himself arrested for stepping out of line – the main timeline, that is. The Tom Hiddleston-led Disney+ series is the first Marvel television project to be given a second season after Loki’s variant, Sylvie, played by Sophia Di Martino, puts an end to He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) and lets loose an infinite number of alternate timelines. With Season 2 upon us, executive producer Kevin Wright discusses where we pick up and why this season is about “closing that book.”

In the first season, we meet Loki’s variant as he succeeds in swiping the Tesseract after the Battle of New York. His victory is short-lived, however, when mysterious agents appear and arrest him, taking him back to the Time Variance Agency, where he discovers he’s a “variant” and that he’s now to be put on trial. Realizing he may be the only one who can help track down yet another Loki variant, Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) saves him from being pruned, and the two of them go on to discover Sylvie’s vengeful plan to take down He Who Remains. The series also features Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Judge Ravonna, Wunmi Mosaku as B-15, and Tara Strong as Miss Minutes.

While promoting the series’ return, Wright spoke with Collider’s Steve Weintraub about where Season 2 picks up and the deliberate choice not to time-jump ahead. In the aftermath of Sylvie’s decision, the two variants will have to face the consequences, along with the TVA, and Wright also reveals that though Season 2 may be the end of one book, “there are many other books on the shelf for this character and for this world.” As for those characters within this world, we don’t know much about Season 2’s trajectory, but we do know that Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan is joining the TVA team as Ouroboros, or O.B. for short, and Wright promises “he's quickly going to become a lot of people's favorite new Marvel character.” For all this and more, like why McDonald’s and how they nailed that ‘80s fast-food vibe, check out the interview above or the full transcript below.

COLLIDER: Season 2 starts right after Season 1 ends, and I'm curious, how much did you debate that and maybe jumping forward in time? As a fan, I was curious, where are they gonna go?

KEVIN WRIGHT: It wasn't too much of a debate, but in the writers' room all sorts of paths are discussed. We certainly walked down a few paths that didn't pick up right away, maybe jumped ahead, maybe weren't past TVA’s…You talk through all that very quickly, we’ve realized. Setting up this past thing did two things for us: it helped us kind of start the structure in place, the snake eating the tail structure that we wanted for a full season, but also it was where a lot of really rich character drama was going to happen picking up in the immediate moment, not just for Loki, but also for Sylvie and the TVA. We didn't want to fast-forward any of that drama of Mobius and B-15 want to stop pruning, but this is a vast organization, and clearly, different people are gonna have different perspectives on the future of this. So it just revealed itself fairly organically pretty quickly.

Season 1 was a huge success, Season 2 is so far fantastic. How much are you guys already thinking, or were you thinking in the writing of Season 2, “We might actually do a season 3, do we think about this and plant seeds?” Or is it sort of like, “We just got to do it one at a time?”

WRIGHT: It was similar to Season 1 in we wanted to tell this story and tell it well, but even in Season 1, we obviously were thinking about where we were going. I would say Season 1 and Season 2 were developed and created as, like, kind of two chapters of the same book. We felt pretty strongly, all of us involved, that Season 2 was about closing that book but that there are many other books on the shelf for this character and for this world. But this felt like it wanted to be the conclusion of these great things that we set up in Season 1. We don't want to constantly leave people with drastic cliffhangers for our finales.

When you were working on Season 2, how much did you have the creative freedom to do whatever you want, and how much was Kevin and people at Marvel saying, “You can do whatever you want, but you really have to include this?”

WRIGHT: That did not happen. The one headline we got from Kevin coming out of Season 1 was, “I love this world. I want to see more of it, and I want to meet more people there.” It felt like we were dealing with a smaller kind of corner of this organization. From there, it was basically a mandate to go further, push it further, lean more into the drama, lean more into the world, and just build. And frankly, Season 1 was that way, too. We've been given a lot of creative freedom, and all of the filmmakers who have come in and collaborated with us on the show have been given a lot of leeway to kind of put our mark on it. We've been telling, by the end of this, almost 12 hours of multiversal time-based storytelling. We've always seen it as we are laying the tracks for that, and where it goes and what other people want to do with it, great. But we've been given the freedom to tell our story in a cool way.

I think people are going to wonder, “Why is Loki time slipping at the beginning of the season?”

WRIGHT: All will be revealed. Keep watching. It's paid off. You'll learn. You will learn.

So there is a resolution coming? There's an answer?

WRIGHT: 100%.

McDonald's plays a role in the season in the first four episodes, and I'm curious, with something like that, is it product placement, or is it you guys saying, “Where could she work? Let's do McDonald's?”

WRIGHT: Look, it's product placement. It started with us, though. We asked McDonald’s if we could do it. So it happened in reverse. I think this maybe is out there, [but] I had a conversation with Sophia at the end of Season 1. We were sitting on the steps of the Citadel; it was like our last day of shooting; I was asking all the cast, as we were putting everything in a blender, thinking about a Season 2, “Where do you think Sylvie wants to go after this?” She jokingly kind of said, “I think she'd be hungry.” Months go by, we're in the writers' room, we're trying to figure out exactly where Sylvie is, and it was just sort of that seedling of an idea of, “Well, that's funny.” It would be funny that probably while hanging out at Roxxcart, she saw some McDonald's bags coming back from employees on their lunch breaks and went, “I want to go try that.”

But it sort of came about, truly, through trying to find a metaphor to tell the story of wanting a small, quiet life where she could explore free will and what that means. What does it mean to live a life? What does it mean to have friends? And I think through a nostalgic lens of McDonald's in the ‘80s, I think we're able to easily tell that story to our audience where they go, “Oh, I remember that. I remember going there for a party. I remember going and doing this. I know what it's like to grow up in a small town.” It just gave us a world to do that. The exciting thing was McDonald's was all in, and they realized we weren't trying to make fun of them. It was a real embrace of that kind of nostalgia.

So, did you get them to pay for that build?

WRIGHT: They helped. The bigger thing is they really helped us find…they're not like Marvel; they don't have a warehouse of props and old sets. Those pieces don't exist anymore. The creepy apple pie tree in the background and the Hamburglar statues – they have an archivist who helped us find all that stuff through auctions and just private people that own. It was a build on the outskirts of London. We took over an old Indian food restaurant and turned it into a 1980s McDonald's.

Loki and Sylvie, after Season 1, there was a lot of conversation about their characters. What can audiences expect from that dynamic in Season 2?

WRIGHT: Well, so much of Season 1 is about identity and finding yourself and finding your place in the universe. For both of them, and they are at different places on this trajectory, we're furthering that, and I think it's about becoming the best version of yourself, but that cannot happen until you have grappled with and accepted your past and who you are. You'll never become the best version of yourself without that, without that embrace of just all sides, all identities of yourself. And so, in one way, that was something that we just wanted to continue to push in this season, too. And for the two of them, it's like they had a real connection. I think they started that arc, and they started that push for each other by finding each other, by connecting, but I also think there is a continuing of that tension point of she can't trust, Loki can't be trusted. Season 2 is like the two of them having to work through that, which I think you see in that one scene in Episode 4 where they have that conversation about, “We are gods.” There's something to that, about Loki really embracing that, and there's something sad about the fact that Sylvie, in a way, needs to be reminded of that. It's a life she hasn't really gotten to live.

I'm out of time, but I was just gonna say that Ke as OB is gonna be a fan favorite. He's so good in the role.

WRIGHT: I've said it in every interview I've done, I think he's quickly going to become a lot of people's favorite new Marvel character.

Yeah, he's fantastic in the role. I love that it's not a gimme, like, “Let's just cast him for stunt.” He's really integral to the season, and he's fantastic.

WRIGHT: We already had a great ensemble, and he fit in perfectly as if he's been there since Season 1.

Loki Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+.