The God of mischief finally gets to take the lead in the MCU. Whilst this may not be a movie lead by Loki, a whole event series to explore more of everyone’s favourite supervillain. This first episode was interesting, and not really like what I was expecting at all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I did struggle to get a feeling for what tone they were going for with the show.
The music of the show was certainly unique and had an otherworldly vibe to it, and my major feeling was that the tone of the whole show would have felt very different if it had something that felt more serious, or sinister. The vibe of the show felt at times borderline comical, and as there was a distinct lack of action or variety to the settings I did start to feel that parts of it dragged for me. This isn’t a major point for me, but I did feel with the whole arrest by these unknown people and interrogation like setting if the music and editing had felt more serious this could have been a very dramatic feeling show.
As we’ve previously seen with WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, these Disney Plus series allow the MCU more time to explore characters and take their time with playing out their stories. This show started with a recap from the Avengers End Game, with the scenes which themselves were expanded story elements from the first Avengers team up movie. This was a fair enough way to start things as obviously these scenes detailed how Loki would escape capture and be free, but instantly this told me that this is a show that a newbie couldn’t jump in on. Because if the opening scene is a scene where you need to understand the context of a film that was already jumping into the context of another film, and then later on after Loki is arrested they show visions of Thor Ragnarök to explain that Odin dies, and Thor the Dark World to show that Frigga dies and from Avengers Infinity War to show that Loki himself dies…this is one heck of an ask to a casual fan to fully know what is going on here.
But still, if you’re reading this review and break down I can probably assume that you’re invested enough in the MCU that you’ll have understood all of these things.
So Loki, who is played here by Tom Hiddleston in the same great form he always is carries the show well, and it’s important to understand that he is playing a version of Loki from just after the events of The Avengers, so he wouldn’t have all the character development from Thor 2 or 3 or Infinity War. I didn’t quite like the sense of silliness around the character where he was easily apprehended by the time cops and continually zapped by Owen Wilson in his dog collar time loop thing. Because remember, it had literally just taken all of the Avengers – Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Nick Fury, and Captain America to defeat and capture him. Now though on the same day he is being easily matched by comical time cops who don’t look in any way super or heroic.
But of course we are watching the show in the context of having seen Thor Ragnarök and of course the tone for Loki and Thor is now more comical and this continued that. Owen Wilson had the usual Owen Wilson charm, and not having seen him on screen for some time (at least in anything that I have seen) I did enjoy his work here. He was basically playing Owen Wilson and that is no bad thing.
Other than a couple of escape attempts by Loki, we didn’t really get any action, and the long set up to interview Loki and get his character to where they must need it to go did make this episode feel a bit like when you’d watch one of the clip shows of Friends where characters would just reminisce about the past to set up the next clip.
The time cops were an interesting idea as they work for what ever time keepers to keep things on track, but this played with the idea of fate and destiny and again you can start to think on Doctor Strange saying that he’d seen 14,000,000 versions of time and the Avengers could only win one against Thanos. Does this mean that all those time lines were wrong and if any other time line had played out the time cops would have arrived? The time cops set up the idea that there could be a multiverse of different dimensions, but if this were to happen it would be madness…so yes we now know the ending of the series as it’s already announced that the next Doctor Strange film is subtitled ‘The Multiverse of Madness’. This would also seem to indicate that since no time cops arrived that Evan Peters Quicksilver in WandaVision can’t have been from another dimension and was in fact Ralph Boner…
The big twist at the end was that the big bad that Owen Wilson is chasing is another version of Loki himself. This is interesting as the show spent the whole episode making Loki look a bit comical and weak, but then wants us to feel that another Loki is a big threat. If this is the case how come the “good” Loki was so not a threat?
These are questions that I’m sure will be answered in weeks to come, but if I have learned one thing from WandaVision and The Falcon an the Winter Soldier it is that with these MCU Disney Plus shows it’s better to wait and see how things play out to be able to fully appreciate how this chapter of the show truly stacks up. For now though I give this episode three stars. It was nicely watchable, but didn’t blow my mind. It later episodes adds hugs layers of context to this episode it could get a bump up in time, or if the set up fails to intrigue than this may feel increasingly skippable as time goes on.
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