There’s plenty of reason to feel cynical about the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a monolithic pop-culture entity, and the way every installment in that universe can feel like little more than an extended trailer for the next part. If we’re going to enjoy the Disney+ Marvel series, Loki, it’s not going to be about whatever influences the show-runners are claiming to be honoring, or some radical genre shift. It’s going to be about the characters—specifically, about digging deeper into the characters who have previously occupied only fringe places in the blockbuster features.
Tom Hiddleston’s Loki was a natural candidate for such a treatment, given his scene-stealing presence in the Thor and Avengers films. The main question for a Loki series was whether it would allow Hiddleston the chance to bring that same chaotic energy and malevolent charm to the character, or whether they’d try to soften him and give us the kind of “but here’s why he does bad things” villain origin story that Disney has seemed addicted to in recent years.
The answer—at least so far as the first to available episodes of Loki can show us—is a little bit of both. The premise launches from Loki’s disappearance during the “time heist” in Avengers: Endgame, which lands him on the radar of a pan-dimensional organization called the Time Variance Authority that rules over blips and glitches in the timeline. Facing an unpleasant punishment for diverging from the main chronological stream, Loki agrees to assist a TVA agent named Mobius (Owen Wilson) in finding a sort of serial time-criminal that Mobius believes only Loki has the guile to track down.
What follows is a classic “mismatched buddy-cop comedy” set-up, with Wilson’s mellow presence serving as a perfect counterpart to the wheels you always see spinning behind Hiddleston’s eyes. Nearly all of the best material in the first two Loki installments revolves around their interactions and comedic chemistry, particularly because so much of the rest of the time has to be spent on the inevitable blah-blah-blah of explaining the mechanics of time travel and multiverses and potentially catastrophic consequences and so on and so forth. (Although, admittedly, you could do far worse with such material than the animated “Miss Minutes” cartoon that does a lot of Episode 1’s expository heavy lifting).
Of course, Hiddleston himself is the main attraction here, and showrunner/writer Michael Waldron understands enough to give him scenes where Loki’s monumental ego collides with some hitch in his plans—almost always the formula for great material like the legendary “Hulk smash” sequence in the original Avengers. There is also that urge to provide “wounded little boy” back-story, which definitely appeared previously and to a lesser extent in Loki’s complicated relationship with his Asgardian family history, but here becomes some too-literal text as Wilson’s Mobius basically tries to break Loki down with a therapy session. As well as Hiddleston plays some of the scenes with a little more emotion in them, like the discovery of tragic events that take place in the timeline we’re more familiar with, he’s much more satisfying as the rascal whose motivations are never entirely clear.
Episode 2 ends just as we’re discovering a little bit more about the series’ “big bad,” and some kind of grand plan involving, naturally, potentially catastrophic consequences. It’s going to be hard not to see it all as a set-up for MCU stuff down the road, particularly since Waldron is also the screenwriter for the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It will be worth the ride, however, if he can give us more of the Loki we’re really there to see: the villain with a little bit of hero in him, but not too much.
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Let’s Hear From You
Are you excited about Marvel’s newest series “Loki?” Will you be watching this new show which premieres June 9th on Disney+?