There's a new trailer for Loki, Disney +'s third MCU show, which is set to premiere on June 11th. The show looks bonkers - a different sort of bonkers than Wandavision, though definitely looking more in tune with that style of high concept comic book storytelling than the action movie vibes of Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Spoilers for Infinity War and Endgame to follow - at this point I imagine that those who care have already seen them, but if you're, say, finally getting into the MCU, I'll do a spoiler cut.
So, here we have a general premise:
At the beginning of Infinity War, Loki dies trying to keep the Tesseract away from Thanos. Having finally proven himself a loving brother to Thor and someone who will actually risk himself for the good of his adopted people (remember, he's technically a Jotun, not an Asgardian, which is consistent with Norse myth) his arc is more or less complete, and so while it's tragic that he and Thor don't get longer to be at peace with one another, it's a fitting end to a satisfying arc.
In Endgame, however, time travel shenanigans essentially create a new Loki. In the aftermath of the Battle of New York, while the 2023 Avengers are trying to steal the Tesseract/Space Stone from where it was in New York in 2012, bad luck causes 2023 Tony Stark to be knocked down by 2012 Hulk, and the Tesseract winds up at 2012 Loki's feet. Never one to miss an opportunity, he grabs the infinity stone and uses it to escape punishment.
That Loki is the one we see in this show - one who didn't experience the events of Thor: the Dark World, or Thor Ragnarok, and certainly not Infinity War.
I'll just remind readers here that I don't know much about the comics, but I've gleaned a few things about this show:
Loki winds up taken by the Time Variance Authority, which seems to be the Marvel universe's time police. Time travel stories, especially those in heightened universes, often have some organization whose job it is to prevent disruptions in the Timeline. Owen Wilson plays Mobius M. Mobius (guess what the M stands for,) who is in charge of (or at least a high-up) in the TVA.
It appears that Mobius is looking to recruit Loki to work for him, but I also imagine that there's some deception going on here - after all, restoring the timeline would mean putting Loki on his path to death, and while the reformed Loki might consider his sacrifice worth it (well, or at least understand the emotional motivation behind it,) one imagines that a just-post-Avengers Loki would find such a fate utterly unacceptable.
One thing that really excites me about the whole vibe they're going for with the TVA is the combination of insane cosmic power with a kind of ultra-mundane mid-century aesthetic.
The TVA offices look like they were built in the 1960s. I think this look and feel is perfectly encapsulated by a scene in the trailer in which a TVA bureaucrat presents Loki with a printed transcript (that looks super small for an ancient being like Loki who famously likes to talk a lot) on that old printer-paper with the perforated edges with holes, and tells Loki to verify that that stack of paper is everything he's ever said. Loki responds "that's absurd," and a new page prints out to add that to the list. Yes, this omniscient bureaucracy can monitor everything an individual has ever said, but prints it out on equipment from the 1980s.
I don't know why, but that aesthetic is one I'm kind of obsessed with.
I guess for me it's that, having been born in the mid 80s, a lot of the space-age modernism that had been so prominent when my parents were growing up had now weathered and aged. There's a kind of beautiful irony to the way that what was designed to look "futuristic," like big plastic chairs with no straight lines or cars that had fins to make them look like rocket ships, by the time I came around, looked old-fashioned.
And I can't think of a better encapsulation of the implications of time travel than making the future seem retro. After all, what's brand new now will, in a decade or two, be very old. I remember when a video game like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was utterly bleeding-edge in terms of graphics, and now we've hit a point where some people are recreating N64 graphics as a kind of throwback nostalgia thing (not as commonly done as SNES sprite visuals, but I'll cite Minecraft as a throwback to early 3D games - though even that's been around long enough that there are probably some young adults who feel nostalgic for that game as well.)
Indeed, I watched a video talking about "liminal spaces," that covered a similar feeling for a lot of the kind of aesthetic I grew up with as a kid in the 90s. In fact, the video makes me feel very odd in that it talks about how these spaces might mean more to someone born in the 90s or 2000s, given that I connected with them so much despite being a child of the 1980s. When we were kids, the kind of broad, primary colors of the shopping mall were constants for us as young consumers, but as we've seen that business model collapse in the face of the internet marketplace, the old arcades and pizza restaurants (with arcade machines in them) have died off, leaving these massive spaces a contradiction of our memory of immediate consumer satisfaction with distant and kind of depressing realization that it was always kind of cheap and superficial.
One of the really fun things about time travel as a genre is how it works as a metaphor for memory, nostalgia, and our imagination of how things were (or might be.) How wise we are in hindsight, looking to the ideas about the past that were proven so very incorrect.
Anyway, I'm really excited for this show.
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