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.