Disney Plus
Note: Spoilers for the first episode of Loki and the movies The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. I think that covers all of the existing references.
It’s an interesting thing to parse these new Disney Plus Marvel shows, as they are inherently meant to drive conversations and intrigue with twists and turns. WandaVision was the most opaque as a ‘mystery box’, only really explaining anything four episodes in, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier saved most of its twists for its last episode.
For Loki, we thankfully are immediately given explanations and, just like Loki, we are thrown into a mysterious new world that must be explained to us. The show immediately picks up from the scene of Loki escaping in Endgame, except that we now see Loki using the Tesseract to end up in the Gobi Desert. We had previously heard from the Ancient One in Endgame that Infinity Stones can be used (intentionally or otherwise) to create new branches of time, other possibilities, so the Tesseract certainly falls into that category.
Of course, we can’t simply follow Loki as a hero post-Avengers because he was flat out a villain there — his later character development hasn’t happened yet. So first the show breaks Loki down and confuses and humiliates him, helping us to empathize with him more as an underdog. Typical sort of style but it works quite well here — the ‘TVA’ or ‘Time Variance Authority’ that captures this ‘variant’ of Loki is appropriately otherworldly and bureaucratic in ways that are familiar and foreign.
We also get a ‘worse’ person (Josh Fadem), yelling about his father who works at Goldman Sachs and refusing to comply so he simply gets ‘pruned’ from the timeline (meaning he is disintegrated before the horrified Loki’s eyes). Naturally we also get some great comedic moments, like Loki asking, ‘Do a lot of people not know if they’re robots?’, probably a reference to the Life Model Decoys in Marvel comics and in Agents of SHIELD.
We also see a classic cartoon starring an animated clock named ‘Miss Minutes’ (voice of legendary voice actor Tara Strong) which explains that this is all because of a great multiversal war, so three mysterious aliens called the ‘Time-Keepers’ merged it all into one perfect ‘Sacred Timeline’. There’s even a fun cultish phrase of ‘For all time. Always.’ that doubles in the meaning.
I’m sure that the Time-Keepers are a mix of well known and lesser known Marvel references, one of which is almost certainly Kang the Conqueror, since he’s known for time travel shenanigans. But the show also introduces a few characters — TVA ‘analyst’ agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson; a judge and arbiter whose name will be given in the second episode (Gugu Mbatha-Raw); and a field agent called Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku).
Disney Plus
The episode first takes away Loki’s magic to keep him humble, but the trickster still manages to get the run on a bunch of people until he runs into functionary Casey (Eugene Cordero), who hilariously has a drawer filled with Infinity Stones. Just to put it all in perspective. But the real depth here is when Loki sees both his complicated past (including a ridiculous one-off joke about being DB Cooper) and tragic future.
This is a dude who sees his mother die, then his father, then himself — all after hearing that his destiny is to be the one to help others be their best selves and wind up dead. It’s the sort of thing that lays Loki low, or at least as low as he allows himself to be, and he finally admits to Mobius that it’s all about a desperate play for control. But Loki always has other things in mind, even if he doesn’t want to admit some truths at all.
A benefit we have as viewers is that we’ve seen how Loki is capable of growth and sacrifice, so it’s not hard to get there again. He was already considered one of (if not the) best of the Marvel villains, and had legions of fans that already were into his problematic but charismatic nature. The ultimate twist of the episode is a good one — Agent Mobius wants Loki’s help because he’s hunting for a killer, another variant of Loki.
And who better to catch a god of mischief than another version of him? I admit I didn’t see it coming although I’m sure many people will claim they did and maybe some will be telling the truth.
The episode is immediately unafraid to be weird, but it also makes sure to explain things effectively and gives us Loki as our audience surrogate to ask the ‘really?’ questions. It’s a pretty great opening salvo for the series, perhaps not quite as out there as WandaVision but it’s a pretty killer blend of comedy and intrigue. It definitely is a standout so far.
New episodes of Loki premiere Wednesdays on Disney Plus.
Disney Plus
Share this post
