Relatively hot on the heels of ‘Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, and ‘Wandavision’, comes Marvel’s latest TV spin-off from the MCU, Loki. With it also ostensibly taking place after the events of ‘Avengers: Endgame’, this is another building block in the next phase of the movies. *Warning! Spoilers Ahead!*
If you’ve seen Endgame, you will be aware that Loki (Tom Hiddleston) actually dies at the hands of Thanos (Josh Brolin), so we know going into this series that it can’t be the final version of the character as we know him in this instance. What we actually get is an earlier version, dating from the 2012 scenes in Stark Tower that appear in Endgame.
The central premise is that after the Avengers completely bungle getting the Space Stone, Loki manages to escape with it. What we know now is that he re-appears in the desert and is just getting his bearings when a mysterious new group appear, taking him into custody for violating the ‘Sacred Timeline’. The ‘Time Variance Authority’ it turns out are an organisation set up by 3 ‘Timekeepers’ to manage the Sacred Timeline, so that the various multiverses don’t end up battling and destroying everything.
Strangely, we have not come across this entity before, despite the significant amount of meddling that the Avengers have been up to. This is sort of waved away in a simple one-liner explaining that their actions were supposed to happen, whereas Loki’s were not. Therefore, he is labelled as a ‘variant’ and is destined to be erased from existence. Instead, what happens though is that Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) enlists him to help capture another variant, an alternate Loki.
This set up raises all sorts of questions about free will and possibly the futility of just about everything we know. Hopefully, they will address this in future episodes, as at the moment it appears to be painting itself into a bit of a philosophical corner. As far as we know, there are now 3 Loki’s: the one that dies in Endgame, the Loki that’s on the run, and the one seen here. Is the second variant a branch from this variant, or another branch off the original one? So far, we don’t know, but it will be interesting to see how they juggle the complexities this will no doubt bring.
As for the TVA itself, they seem to have gone down the well-trodden path of many tv shows and films before it. Like a character plucked from central casting, they have opted to portray the TVA as an office bureaucracy from the 1950s, which works, but isn’t the most original aesthetic choice. This always seems to be the ‘go to’ for any organisation outside of normal time, for many years, including ‘Good Vs Evil’, ‘The Middleman’, ‘Umbrella Academy’ and ‘Wandavision’, amongst others. By now this is a bit of tired cliché and although the original TVA appeared in Thor #1 (1986), it appears generally to be much more of the 50s aesthetic than originally seen. It could easily have been angled much more towards a futuristic look than it has, and an opportunity was missed.
Much more interesting is the direction they take with Loki, as within the TVA his powers are ineffective. This raises questions of who he is without that power, and whether he has a real presence, or strength of character. Coming up against Agent Mobius is also a nice match up, as Mobius really isn’t overawed by Loki at all and can even be downright dismissive at times. This means their dynamic will not be the usual one Loki is used to and we’ll see some intriguing sides to him.
So far, this opening episode has laid some decent groundwork for the series to launch from and there is some potential. Obviously, as it is early days, we still don’t know exactly where they will take this, or how Loki helping Mobius will work, but the chemistry between Wilson and Hiddleston seems to be sparking and looks set to carry this through. There are some reservations though, so we’ll need to see another episode to know for sure whether this will work in the longer term.
