Not every attempt at comic book TV can be a home run hit out of the park... but I get that I'm going to look contrarian saying that Disney/Marvel's Loki has turned out to be the weak link of series programming by the company thus far.
From a geeky, comic book standpoint, the yea-sayers are probably right: Loki laid the groundwork for much of what's to come in the MCU, and those developments were compelling and intriguing to consider. But to those defenders I would confidently respond... "okay, then why was Loki mostly a long, talky dud?"
While previous series laid ever more tantalizing clues and foreshadowing as they went, week to week, Loki was a set up in search of a promising result. It may be interesting to imagine what the end of time looks like... Loki is the sad reminder that you may be really, really disappointed by what you find when you get there.
Over and over, the series set up promising pot machinations only to stall: when our wayward God of Mischief leapt through time and space to escape his captors... he wound up on a dying moon where the only outcome was certain death. When he cheated that ending (in a total Deus Ex Machina where he wasn't even the Deus), we were left floundering in yet more bureaucratic hell while...zzzz... Excuse me, where were we again? On the dead planet at the end of time? Does this set come only in grey?
Loki was exhausting. Based on the "now what" implications of Loki making off with the Tesseract (again) in the time traveling part of Avengers Endgame (also a bit of a dud), the series started promisingly enough with the introduction of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) policing the "variants" who do something or take things that impede the orderly flow of time itself. Loki - or many Lokis - do this a lot. That's interesting. So is the TVA itself - a homage to seventies era imagery of endless bureaucracy, wood paneled, brutalist architecture, endless files, life in constant triplicate (the show homages everything from A Clockwork Orange to Brazil to Hitchhiker's).
The trouble is... where to go? Loki quickly sets up the existence of an even more remote agent of chaos, a variant who is upsetting timelines in ways that cannot be easily mended. This turns out to be another, female, version of a Loki, chased by TVA authorities across multiple time and landscapes. Also promising. But once we meet this young woman... things gradually stall. What a first looked like thrills and chills and wild adventures become more and more talky set pieces musing on the nature of love and loss, free will vs. determinism and... well, lots of other stuff that I started to just tune out.
Which is unfortunate. I wanted to like Loki, and as with all the Marvel series, I do think it's smart and well executed, even as a talky often pointless existentialist rumination on the nature of free will. But that doesn't make it great, and we should hold Loki, as with all shows, to some standard set of expectations. And there, really, Loki just doesn't meet the imaginative brilliance of Wandavision or the deft weaving of contemporary politics, racial awareness and heroism at pay in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Loki has grander ambitions. And, grandly, it swings hard and misses. A for Effort. C for execution.
Filled with top flight performances - Tom HIddleston's Loki is brilliantly complex, ably abetted by Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wunmi Mosaku (the casting in the MCU is really off the charts, these days). Sophia Di Martino and several of the other Lokis are fun, but the effect of so many shades of one persona is... wearying. Jonathan Martin provides some zip towards the final proceedings... but getting there is still a bit of a slog.
Visually, too, Loki is a bit of a letdown. As those sets devolve into ever murkier browns and greys and blacks, the murk just takes hold and sludges up what had been fairly brisk pacing. And tonally, I think the show never quite found the - yes, hard to find - comic book sweet spot between seriousness and humorous hooey. Not Batman level drudge, but Loki spends considerable time being a bit of a downer. You can't just occasionally bring up jet skis to get around the fact that episode after episode of Loki boils down to 2-3 characters expositioning one another to near death. And that's just a preventable, unforced writing trap that no one, I think, was watching out for.
Tp their credit, Marvel and the Loki team are the first to get a Season 2 and I say... good. Take a minute, work out the kinks, and deliver on the promise that lurks, so sweetly, at the edges of this talky, murky letdown. Give us a Loki who jumps into action! A story that's compelling! Time travel that's interesting! I know you got this. But you don't get an A for snoozy. Not yet.
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