TV #57 of 2021:
Loki, season 1
This latest Marvel series has been a blast to watch and to speculate about, even if in my opinion the ultimate answers aren’t as clever or as daring as certain fan theories out there. (I wonder how it will be received differently for audiences who come at it later, able to binge the entire season at once.) We’ve already had time travel and alternate universes in the MCU, of course, but those elements feature pretty significantly here, lending a definite Doctor Who vibe to this story of what happens to the version of its title figure who escaped the Avengers during their movie Endgame, just after losing the Battle of New York. There’s a lot of goofy fun in the idea of the all-powerful bureaucracy with the inexplicable 70s aesthetic who scoops him up and makes him assist with keeping reality on track, and the episodic efforts to ‘prune’ troublesome branches like himself scaffold a nice larger mystery and character arc for the dubiously-reformed supervillain.
The whole run is an excellent showcase for actor Tom Hiddleston — although he doesn’t actually play as many of the variant Lokis as I would have expected — situating him in turn as a buddy-comedy partner to Owen Wilson and a legitimate romantic (anti)hero. The role is deeper than it’s been since the first Thor film, proving again how these Disney+ titles can rehabilitate aspects of the cinematic universe that perhaps haven’t reached their full potential on the big screen. The trickster god is even confirmed as queer via a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line of dialogue, and while it feels like so much more could have been done with the protagonist’s relation to gender given the original Norse myths that inspired him, this modicum of representation nevertheless constitutes real progress from the parent company.
Overall, I’d say that this storyline isn’t nearly as captivating or emotionally complex as WandaVision, but it’s a big step up from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and it seems likely that its multiverse concepts will inform some of the sequels that are on the horizon. At only six episodes the action and the plot never have room to falter, so I’d definitely check it out if you’re a fan of the broader franchise.
★★★★☆
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 
Leave a comment