It’s sort of crazy to think that Loki is the third Marvel series to wrap up this year already! Right off the bat I’m going to tell you that it still doesn’t beat out WandaVision as my favorite Marvel television offering, but it’s got Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, so it’s up there. Be warned there are some spoilers ahead!
At least I thought this was slightly more interesting than what went on in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. However, I’ll give the same critic I gave that show: not a whole lot happened. I understand the purpose of some of these shows is to set up what’s coming next, and when you’ve got six-ish hours instead of two it’s easy not to pack as much in as you can, but it just felt like there wasn’t a lot of forward movement.
Anyways, I digress. The show starts in a scene from the “Battle of New York” where Loki steals the tessarect and thus creates an alternate timeline. He gets captured almost immediately by an organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Rather than be locked up, he agrees to help find another Loki variant who calls herself Sylvie. When the two do meet, Sylvie is at first intent on killing him, but the two agree to work together to stop the TVA because their workers are actually other variants. They do finally get to the mysterious “Timekeepers” but they are revealed to be android decoys. Before they can do anything else, Loki is “pruned” and sent to the time void where he meets other Loki variants.
Sylvie prunes herself as well because she believes the true Timekeeper is in the void. Together, all the Loki variants end up finding the citadel where “He Who Remains” is housed. He reveals that he is indeed the keeper of time and that he’s seen how it all plays out. He asks that if they kill him that they take over the TVA, otherwise, his more evil variants will cause a devastating multiversal war. Sylvie though, seeks revenge, and sends Loki away before killing He Who Remains. We immediately see the branches going haywire off of the main timeline, and Loki was sent back to a timeline where Mobius, his ally, doesn’t know him.
That’s a bit of a cliffhanger, but luckily we will be getting a second season of Loki! I’ll be curious to see if He Who Remains will pop up in anything else before the second season, or if more problems need to be addressed in the show before we get there. Who knows! It sounds like the second season is already underway in some capacity, but I haven’t heard how long we’ll all have to wait for it.
Like I said before, this show was just alright. At least there was a big bad here, even though he really didn’t do much. I suppose it’s the doom he’s foreshadowing that makes him more compelling than Karli from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The introduction of so many Loki’s was really cool, with my favorites being Classic Loki and the Gater Loki (those scenes had me dying of laughter). What I thought was somewhat poorly done was stating, if not outright, that Loki was bisexual, but then falling for the female version of himself in Sylvie. Seems like a missed opportunity, although I suppose he really is just in love with himself. I guess I don’t really know how to feel about it. Regardless, that’s all I’ve got. Certainly not something you should skip, but Marvel has yet to impress me the way they did with WandaVision.