'Loki' Hit With Departure News for Season 2 on Heels of Explosive Finale

Loki is the first Disney+ Marvel series to get a second season, but one key creative figure from the first season is not returning. Kate Herron, who directed all six Tom Hiddleston-starring episodes and served as an executive producer, said she will not be returning. The first season ended on Wednesday, with a surprising announcement at the end that there will be a second season. Both previous Marvel Disney+ shows, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, were limited series. Spoilers follow for Loki Episode 6.

"I'm not returning," Herron told Deadline Friday. "I always planned to be just on for this, and to be honest, Season 2 wasn't in the... that's something that just came out, and I'm so excited. I'm really happy to watch it as a fan next season, but I just think I'm proud of what we did here and I've given it my all. I'm working on some other stuff yet to be announced."

Herron was asked if she would ever return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. "No, I'm just focused on my own stuff at the moment," she said. "I love Marvel and I'd love to work with them again, but my outing with Loki is what I've done with them." Before working with Marvel, Herron directed several shower films and broke through by directing five episodes of Idris Elba's The Idris Takeover for BBC Three in 2017. She also directed four episodes of Netflix's Sex Education and an episode of Netflix's short-lived Daybreak.

The Loki season finale revealed the real villain behind the Time Variance Authority, He Who Remains, played by Jonathan Majors (Lovecraft Country). The character is an amalgamation of the same character from the comics, Immortus and Kang the Conquerer. Majors will play the more evil variant of Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which opens in February 2023. It is not known if Loki Season 2 will happen before Quantumania hits theaters.

Loki could also have ramifications on the other MCU Phase Four films, particularly Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which opens on March 25, 2022. The Doctor Strange sequel was co-written by Michael Waldron, who created the Loki series. Sam Raimi took over as director after Scott Derrickson left.

"We knew that we wanted this show to be huge, and we wanted it to really end with a bang and have a huge impact on the MCU moving forward," Waldron told Marvel.com on Wednesday. "Knowing that Kang was probably going to be the next big cross-movie villain, and because he is a time-traveling, multiversal adversary, it just always made so much sense. I came up with that big multiversal war mythology [in Episode 1] and pitched it out in the room one day to our producers. And they said, yeah, let's go for it. We knew we were going to end up meeting the man behind the curtain. And then it was just on us to make sure that that meeting really delivered."