Loki season two brought all sorts of new opportunities for production designer Karsa Farahani.
After receiving an Emmy nomination for his work on season one, Farahani returned for season two with the understanding that this new season would show us aspects of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) that we hadn’t seen before. Given the systemic issues within, the audience would be exposed to the underbelly and inner workings of the TVA, so the production design needed to reflect new locations within a familiar space.
“If you think of it as the foundation to a house or what we saw in season one, then season two shows us the foundation and systems upon which that front-facing part of the TVA is built. We needed to design spaces that were cruder, more industrial, and slightly more primitive,” Farahani explained. “For this reason, we thought it would be good to backdate it from the 1960s influence of the locations we saw on season one. The new sets — the RNA and the temporal core and the corridors that link them — are very much inspired by a Cold War-era bunker.”
Given that 1950s design, the color palettes for season two needed to be less whimsical and bright. They needed to reflect the cool, muted spectrum of the Cold War era. Nothing better describes that within season two than Ouroboros’s (Ke Huy Quan) workshop, a marvel (no pun intended) of period gadgetry that perfectly encapsulates the persona of Ouroboros or OB.
Farahani wanted to emphasize the sheer scale and complexity of that set to underscore OB’s importance to the TVA. In addition to the clutter surrounding the set, one of the most important architectural aspects of OB’s workshop were the giant pneumatic tubes above him that carried work orders, broken equipment, and so forth to OB. Visually, it underscores OB’s role at the center of the TVA and how all of that work falls to just a single person.
The design, in fact, was so specifically constructed because it needed to be replicated in another special manner.
“When we go into the fifth episode where we meet OB in his real life, we could reuse the same set, change the set but invert it. The idea is, hopefully, you get this sort of uncanny recognition when you first see that set in the fifth episode. We hope that audiences will feel that this is really familiar to the RNA, and yet it’s very different,” Farahani said. “The thinking behind that is, when OB came to the TVA even though his memory was wiped, his time spent in that real world lab was indelibly seared into his brain. So, when it came time to design his lab within the TVA, he couldn’t help but go back, subconsciously, to that original design from his real life.”
Aside from designing several fantastic new locations for season two, Farahani also directed a standout episode, “1893.” There, Farahani needed to recreate the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and guide the actors through the unique time travel adventure. He relished the opportunity to help expand the world of Loki beyond the TVA.
When designing the sets for the World’s Fair, Farahani and team decided to focus on its midways. Anyone familiar with the period (read Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City” if you’re not) knows that the 1893 World’s Fair was famous for its giant, blisteringly white structures. It simply wasn’t feasible to recreate all of that for the series. Plus, as the team needs to find Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) and his futuristic exhibition, there’s also the fact that a Black man would not have been allowed in the more famous, more prestigious buildings of the era, even in Chicago.
“[The midway] was the more working class part of the World’s Fair. It was the only part of the World’s Fair where you could buy alcohol. It’s where the Ferris wheel was. It was where people would really want to spend their time after seeing the exhibitions. The truth is that Midway was what made the World Fair ultimately profitable, specifically the Ferris wheel,” Farahani shared. “So that’s where we focused our efforts. We ended up building a sizable chunk of the midway — a several hundred feet long set by 100 feet wide.”
Farahani’s work on “1893” is so strong, in fact, that it makes me long for a limited series adaptation of Larson’s brilliant book.
Loki streams in its entirety on Disney+.
