Plot: After stealing the Tesseract during the events of Avengers: Endgame, an alternate version of Loki is brought to the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA), a bureaucratic organization that exists outside of time and space and monitors the timeline. They give Loki a choice: face being erased from existence due to being a “time variant”, or help fix the timeline and stop a greater threat. Loki ends up trapped in his own crime thriller, traveling through time and altering human history.
Review: It feels a bit like deja vu, but I am going to say the same thing about Loki that I did about both WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Solider: this series is unlike anything Marvel Studios has done before. Where WandaVision was a genre-defying homage to classic sitcoms and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier was an epic in the vein of the big screen MCU offerings, Loki is a surreal and quirky science fiction mystery that feels like a blend of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy if it had been directed by Terry Gilliam. Loki is an intricately weird tangent for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and one that actually works to tie up plotholes leftover from Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.
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Loki is an interesting character. As the primary antagonist in The Avengers, Tom Hiddleston’s fan-favorite performance has transformed the God of Mischief from villain to anti-hero. While he met his demise at the hands of Thanos in Avengers; Infinity War, the time travel elements of Endgame brought him back, albeit as a variant of the character we know. Because Phase Four of the MCU deals with the concept of Marvel’s multiverse, Hiddleston gets the chance to reinvent his character through a different path than we saw in Thor: Ragnarok. The result is a series that plays in a much different space than any of the Marvel big-screen productions but one that is equally epic in scope. Written by Ricky and Morty‘s Michael Waldron (who also scripted the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) and helmed by Kate Herron (Netflix’s Sex Education), Loki is as funny as it is innovative.
Picking up directly from his escape in Avengers: Endgame, Loki, and audiences are plunged directly into the world of the Time Variance Authority which exists outside of the plane of existence. Not a planet or a traditional world, the rules of the TVA are completely different than what we have seen in the MCU thus far. Loki, already familiar with the distinct world of Asgard, is equally confused by the completely bizarre structure of the TVA. We learn, as he does, about how time travel and variances in the primary timeline impact the events of the universe. Partnering with Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) to track down a dangerous time-variant, Loki introduces us to some awesome characters and elements from the pages of Marvel Comics. Some of these fans have already guessed and others will come as a surprise.
Having seen the first two episodes of the six chapters that comprise Loki, this is the first Disney+ MCU series that feels like it is built to last longer than a single season. Without divulging any spoilers, I can say that Loki succeeds in tightening the time travel ramifications teased in Avengers: Endgame while laying the foundation for how all of the rumors tied to Spider-man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange could conceivably work. It also helps that the cast here is once again home runs for Kevin Feige and the team at Marvel Studios. While Hiddleston brings his signature smarminess to Loki, Owen Wilson shines in one of the best roles he has had in years. Hiddleston and Wilson have such chemistry that you will immediately be invested in their partnership. Equally good is Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ravonna Renslayer, a mysterious authority at the TVA whose friendship with Mobius is a key ingredient to the story. Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country), as Hunter B-15, is a nice foil for Loki and a character I am sure will quickly gain a fan base all her own. While I cannot speak to the characters played by Sophia Di Martino or Richard Grant without spoiling anything, I can say that Di Martino’s introduction is going to explode on the internet when fans see it.
Loki sets itself apart from the prior MCU efforts, like its Disney+ predecessors, by upending convention and delivering a series that creates its own rules while still following the MCU guidelines. With a baroque score from Natalie Holt, every bit of Loki feels designed to make us laugh and dissect what everything will mean for the rest of Marvel Studios’ films and series to come. There are many moments in these first two chapters of Loki’s story that are funny as well as touching and seeing the cast and crew connect everything back to Avengers: Endgame helps drive even more how brilliantly intertwined these tales are. But where the time travel served a purpose to drive the events of Endgame forward, they have much larger ramifications in Loki that you will just have to see to understand.
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Of the three Disney+ series that have premiered so far, Loki feels the least like anything else in the MCU. WandaVision‘s second half and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier felt like traditional Marvel Studios stories, but Loki never feels like anything else we have seen before. Much like how Guardians of the Galaxy took Marvel Studios into the realm of outer space, Doctor Strange into the metaphysical, and Ant-Man into the Quantum Realm, Loki fully invests itself into defining the rules of time and the multiverse and it does so in such a way that you will never look at the MCU the same way again. Loki works because the filmmakers and cast click perfectly and give us a series that tells a story we have never seen before.
Marvel Studios’ Loki premieres on June 9th on Disney+.