Loki Episode 3

Ha ha, it’s Loki 2077.

(Loki proceeds to fuck everything up)

Yep. Definitely Loki 2077.

That’s a nerd joke for you. The rest of you just skip to the next paragraph.

There’s a sequence in this week’s episode that perfectly captures this series’ sense of plot progression:

l  Boy Loki and Girl Loki have snuck aboard a train heading to Location A

l  B & G Loki are discovered

l  There is a Fight

l  B & G are thrown from the train

l  During the scuffle a device is broken which means the Lokis’ plan is in SHAMBLES and they are DOOMED

l  After a brief discussion they decide ... to walk to Location A

So everything that happened was kind of pointless. They didn’t need to sneak onto the train at all, they could have walked. The consequence of the device being broken was that they decided to do the thing they had already decided to do.

All we get out of the entire sequence is a bit of banter between Tom Hiddleston (Loki One) and Sophia Di Martino (Loki Two) and her Mancunian accent. Tom gets to rehash his character backstory about being quite close to his adopted mother while Sophia gets to drop vague hints and tell us precisely nothing. This is also in line with the show’s penchant for repeating plot points we’ve already been over.

Fans will squeal about the character development but no it bloody well isn’t don’t be so daft, it’s a reiteration of things we already knew about Our Loki (mama’s boy) and deliberate obfuscation about Other Loki. Oh, and iTs CaNoN tHaT tHeYrE bIsExUaL jesus this era is going to look pathetically fixated on people’s sexual orientations in 10 years’ time isn’t it.

(I wonder if Sophia’s offhand remark she has a post-apocalyptic relationship with a postman is a reference to the Kevin Costner movie/David Brin novel of the same name? IT’S CANON SHE’S FUCKING KEVIN COSTNER doesn’t get you Twitter retweets though so probably not.)

Otherwise, it’s Tom reenacting his relationship with Owen Wilson, only now it’s with Sophia. Have Tom bicker with someone he’s supposed to be working with, how very original. To be sure there’s sparks there, a bit of fireworks even, and Tom can play charming yet vulnerable like nobody’s business so the interplay is fun to watch, but I can’t help the nagging feeling it’s not actually in the service of anything related to the story. 

And why does Sylvie, who is supposed to know all about the planet in question blowing up, not know where the Ark is? Whatever.

We still don’t know quite what Sylvie/Sophia is aiming to do or why—I THINK that as an unwitting “Variant” much like Tom she has been hunted by the TVA and has decided to strike back and destroy her pursuers rather than quietly submit to erasure, but that’s kind of conjecture on my part. As I keep saying, some clarity with regards to your antagonist (or perhaps deuteragonist at this point in the plot) would really help grease these narrative gears.

The only progression or new information that we get is that the TVA is also staffed by Variants, meaning they’re all kind of witless dupes too, including Owen/Mobius. So the TVA is pretty well solidified as the “real” bad guys of the show and a jet ski future for Mobius is looking more and more likely. Though it does make Sylvie/Sophia murdering all those other TVA guys kind of gross—look, the baddies can either be “mooks” that are just obstacles your hero can vanquish without worrying about morality, OR they can be real, live humans with their own hopes and dreams, but suddenly switching from one to the other is going to make half your story feel very, very odd.

See also: Stormtroopers are just brainwashed kids, now let’s go murder-fuck a couple thousand of them.

At least we got to see where the entire special effects budget went: on a kind of grey-purple planet that could be Vormir but isn’t, with an astonishingly fake-looking planet in the sky, plus a kind of “Snowpiercer” train that also steals the save-the-rich premise from the same movie, and a single cut action sequence lifted from “1917” only the people are patently just running around in a circle while the camera spins on a tripod.

It all ends in a kind of cliffhanger which gives Tom yet another chance to strike almost exactly the same pose he held at the end of episode two.

I think I joked about this time-travel show ending up being kind of a time loop like Tenet or something, but this repetition and recycling of scenes and conversations ain’t funny.

Loki Episode 2

Well, we had some highs and lows this week.

The highs, or singular high really: The relationship between the two leads. Part father versus son, part by-the-book veteran versus young maverick, part crook working with the cops, it’s comfortingly familiar but that’s exactly what gives the actors room to play. Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki have one or two nice moments, one in particular that is revealing of Mobius’ character in a clear yet unvoiced, understated way:

See, company man for life Wilson keeps a Jet Ski magazine on his desk. He’s never ridden one, being a lifer, living to work rather than working to live. Loki presses him on it. Why jet skis? Well, they look great. The conversation then elides into the nature of Wilson’s job, and more to the point, what happens if he is successful: Order. Eternal, predictable order. Wilson really captures the air of a man repeating the company line with his best smile while simultaneously showing us how it’s crushing his soul.

Great scene, loved it, nice character-building work there. Hope it pays off at the end and Mobius gets the freedom he secretly craves.

The rest of it I’m less enthused about it, precisely because it lacks the clarity of the character byplay.

We’re two episodes in to this six-episode series, a third of the way through, and here is the sum total of what we know about our antagonist:

It’s a chick.

Motivations? A little fuzzy. Methods? Ya got me there. Goals? Search me, pal.

All we got is the surprise twist reveal that it’s a woman, which might have been more surprising or impactful if people related to the show had babbled a little less about Loki being genderfluid and thus given the game away to such an extent that even I was able to predict the twist.

What does Bad Loki do? Attacks a bunch of Minutemen, which incidentally is exactly what she did at the end of episode 1 so a bit of repetition there, huh show. Not really advancing the plot ya know. Anyway, she steals a time charge thing that erases stuff in a radius around it and kidnaps one of the time cops. She had also left a stick of “Kablooie” gum with a kid in medieval France in Ep 1, which now turns out to be part of a plan to lure the time cops to find her in 2050 Atlanta.

Wilson, Hiddleston and one of three women of color cast in secondary roles to make up for having two white men in the lead show up. Naughty Loki beats up Nice Loki. Then sends the time charge thingies to various points in history, which apparently screws up the timeline for some reason. Then she escapes.

Why does she need to lure the team to her hideout? Why do the time charges screw up history? Why does she even want to screw up the timeline in the first place.

Dunno.

Compare this to, say, InfinityWar: Boom, scene one, here’s the bad guy, here’s what he wants to do, here’s how he’s going to do it, let’s rock. Clear stakes, you know what the good guys need to do, I can now focus on the scenes before me rather than wasting time trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Good Loki is also a bit confusing. He gives every indication of thinking he can take over the TVA from the inside, in which case what is with the scenes of him moping over his dead mom, friendship with his brother or destruction of his homeland (another bit that is kind of a retread of character development from ep 1)? One more thing I’m hoping will have a payoff somewhere along the way, because as of now he goes from sobbing over the death of his people to putting salt on a salad in five seconds of show time.

So, for the second episode in a row, I mainly feel that the story is spinning its wheels, playing for time just as Loki does, trying to delay for as long as possible telling me what is actually going on. Repeating beats we already had in episode 1. There are a number of scenes were you just have to wonder what the point of it was—like Evil Loki beating up Good Loki, nothing is achieved other than wasting two minutes of show time and letting Tom Hiddleston pose dramatically under Red Alert lighting. Doesn’t move the plot forward or reveal new information. Just there to provide a bit of action since, as I mentioned last week, the writers feel the need to have a guy walk in with a gun every once in a while just to keep things moving along.

Another culprit is the character of Judge Renslayer, whose role in the series so far has been to pad out the timing and give Wilson somebody to react to for five minutes each week.

As a result, I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be looking forward to next week. Girl Loki seems to have already executed her plan. Boy Loki has escaped the TVA but I’ve no idea what he means to do with his newfound freedom. Don’t know about you guys but a third of the way through a story I’m not sure I should be drawing a blank as to what happens next.

As for the rest. Well, the less said about the terrible, tiny, tiny set for “Pompeii” the better. Green screen work on par with the opening shot of the “Gobi Desert” and that’s not a compliment. Loki and Mobius figuring out Other Loki is in Atlanta makes zero fuggen sense. Kidnapped space Nazi going “It’s real, it’s real,” just more mystery boxing of the plot. Stop it, just stop it.

Loki Episode 1

Well, it’s a setup episode, like they used to do at the beginning of each season of “Game of Thrones”, and spends the bulk of its time reminding you who people are and what they are trying to do. I can foresee we might reach some kind of terminal endpoint with this, where each Marvel movie or show has to devote increasingly long stretches of time to the backstory before it can move forward. A bit like that subplot from “Hyperion” with the girl living her life backwards and her family makes longer and longer videos to explain what’s happening to her until she loses it and screams at them to stop.

Marvel, I beg of you: Stop.

So. Yes. We’re re-introduced to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in all his brittle egotistical glory, a pre-End Game Loki who skipped over the last five or so Marvel movies and landed right in the middle of the Gobi Desert only it’s quite clearly a green screen and hats off to people working under pressure during a pandemic but really, the light doesn’t match at all and it was quite jarring, sorry.

NuLoki is promptly arrested by jackbooted quasi-Nazi time cops emerging out of Quantum Leap doorways (er, Minutemen from the Time Variance Authority, sorry this is a crowded genre and the tropes are everywhere) so we can have both Loki’s life story and The Premise explained to us.

To whit: There is only one timeline, and a bunch of time cops arrest and execute anyone who tries to change things or create alternative timelines. Though some time travel is apparently allowed. But deviating from your “path” is not. I don’t think it’s supposed to make sense—the arbitrariness of the TVA is probably the point. Anyway, somebody with a grudge against the time cops is going around killing them.

NotLoki is frog-marched off to his Kafkaesque trial in a sort of 70s style version of the dystopian bureaucracy from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, replete with black jokes about the absurdity, inefficiency and unfairness of it all, before Wowen Wilson’s Agent Mobius saves him from imminent erasure.

There follows the narratively demanded refusal of the call to adventure that literature professors have insisted every protagonist must go through. Mobius wants !Loki’s help, but he’s not having any of it. To convince him, Mobius shows a highlight reel of past Marvel movies, plus a rather long anecdote where it is revealed Loki was mysterious hijacker “D.B. Cooper” back in 1971 which is a real thing that happened. TIL. (I hope this becomes relevant again—Loki does tell the stewardess he’ll see her again which is foreshadowing 101—otherwise that was a hell of a waste of time).

This gets to the one part I thought was poorly written in an otherwise slick script, where the writers couldn’t seem to settle on a motivation for Loki2’s turn and gave him ALL the motivations: He got his own mom killed and regrets it; He realizes how pathetic his ambitions were next to the power of the TVA; He sees the future in which he reconciles with his brother, and how it leads to his own death.

They also threw in a rather pointless chase sequence, written presumably out of the instinctive realization the episode was 90% exposition and they needed some action to keep people’s eyes open. So Loki escapes, then immediately goes back to the place he escaped from. It’s writers like this who scrap the Council of Elrond in favor of people screaming at each other. Trust your audience, folks. There seems to be this tug of war between the needs of episodic television, where each 50-minute chunk needs its own climax and resolution, and the needs of a miniseries, where the action can rise over the course of several episodes. There might be a happy medium, but this isn’t quite it.

As a result, I’m not quite sure what Loki’s motivations are. Is he determined to change his life around, or just sees the TVA as a way of getting what he wants? Leaving it vague and confusing might be a deliberate choice but if so, probably a mistaken one. We just had one series—Wandavision—that was all about obfuscating what was going on in the plot. We don’t need another one. Show me what your protagonist wants to do and let me enjoy the ride with them.

The episode’s ending does not inspire confidence in the writers’ desire to let the viewer in on the plot. There’s a twist reveal that was fairly obvious from Mobius’ line of questioning to Loki, so I give them credit for a proper setup there, but it is then immediately followed by a cloaked figure doing a bit of murder. Having just revealed who the antagonist is (supposedly), not showing their face in the very next scene is a dead giveaway you aren’t being entirely straight with us, show.

I do so very much hope they aren’t going to play J.J. Abrams Mystery Box keepaway with the plot all season. No more three-quarters reveal of who the real antagonist is. Here’s the protagonist, here’s the deuteragonist (Wow!), here’s the antagonist, these are the stakes, let’s get to it. Boom. That’s all you need to do, show.

Wither next for the series? Well, I’m not keen on the initial setup’s assertion that the entire history of the universe is already known, as that doesn’t leave much room for free will. Personal taste there, but Loki does voice objections to that thinking, so although it might be wishful thinking I do hope the whole idea of a deterministic universe gets a little exploration. Maybe the conclusion of the show will be that there is not one timeline, but many, and the TVA was wrong to try to police it in the first place? Like I say, the TVA do wear a little too much black to be the good guys here.

Side note: Not a fan of criticizing writers for everything their characters say, as some characters are SUPPOSED to say shitty things, but telling the villain the purpose of his existence is to help people be their better selves is, however narratively true, kind of a big middle finger to everyone Loki ever killed. I mention this because Marvel does kind of have a thing where the lives of normies don’t really matter, they’re just props for our heroes, and the line is said by Mobius who I think is supposed to be kind of sympathetic, a put-upon middle manager fighting against red tape in his own organization.

As for the cloaked figure at the end, I’m betting that presages a more radical variant of Loki than the one we’ve gotten to know. There’s been a lot of talk on social media about Disney and Tom confirming Loki is “genderfluid” so I’m betting the antagonist is a female version of our antihero. Either that or the show is a perfect loop and Tom ends up pursuing a future iteration of himself.