So, I'm going to start with a qualifier: since watching Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Back to the Future as a little kid, I've been obsessed with time travel stories - the mechanics, the aesthetic, and the mind-bending possibilities that make it insanely difficult to write (well).
On top of that, I've got a fascination/fixation on the sort of 1960s, midcentury modern architectural and design aesthetic - I think because it's from an era in which people were extremely future-oriented, looking to space travel and the dawn of the electronic age, but it also just look so cool, even when it's intentionally as uncool as possible.
I'm not alone in this admiration for the style. In fact, in other shows that adapt comic books and involve time travel, there's a kind of default assumption that this is what "the establishment" looks for: you see a similar style in the Company in Umbrella Academy, as well as Division 3 in the second season of Legion. So, I think you could fairly levy a criticism for Loki for unoriginality, but I won't because I freaking love the look so much.
What's the premise of this show?
Well, the whole show is a walking spoiler for a two-year-old movie that was itself the culmination of 11 years of Marvel movies. At this point, though, does anyone who cares enough about the MCU to worry about spoilers actually not know what happens in Endgame? Can I possibly spoil the biggest blockbuster cinematic event ever?
Screw it, we'll do a spoiler cut just in case. I guess I'm going to be writing about the episode anyway.
Loki's arc, over the course of the Thor movies and the first Avengers movie, was all about a complicated and fraught brotherly relationship. Loki has been at times cruel, at times manipulative, at times remorseful. Things tied together quite beautifully at the end of Thor: Ragnarok, in which Thor sort of let Loki off the hook for being such a different person than he was, and accepting him anyway - and that acceptance (something Loki always feared he would be denied thanks to his frost giant ancestry) was what allowed Loki to turn his talents to the protection of his adopted people.
His death in Infinity War was heartbreaking - so soon after he and his brother had finally reconciled - but it was also a satisfying end, dying in an attempt to do the right thing.
Endgame's time travel shenanigans mucked it up, though, and because of some bad luck involving the Hulk and some stairs, a 2012 version of Loki got his hands on the Tesseract and bamfed away.
That's precisely where the Loki series starts. We're looking at a version of the character who has just recently been defeated in his attempted conquest of Earth, who has not gone through the loss of his mother in Thor: the Dark World, has not teamed up with his brother to escape Sakaar, and obviously has not died trying to keep the Tesseract and the Space Stone within it from Thanos.
But just as he's teleported to Mongolia, the armored enforcers of the TVA, known as Minutemen, show up and dump him into a bizarre otherworldly office, where Loki, a literal god, finds himself in way over his head.
The first hour (or however long the episode is) takes its time to establish a couple things:
First off, we've got the TVA - the "Time Variance Authority," whose job it is to maintain the "Sacred Timeline," created by a trio of space-gods (which I guess are more powerful than Norse ones). The people who work there look human, and seem to more or less be human, except that they were all created to work at the TVA in various roles.
We see the TVA's capabilities, which are absurdly powerful - the other "variant" we see (people who have branched off of the proper timeline) gets seemingly erased from existence ("pruned") after he fails to get a ticket to await trial. Likewise, we see them occasionally visiting time periods, and leaving behind some sort of bomb that "resets" the timeline - which I suspect strongly is a euphemism for eradicate.
We later see that the TVA is so powerful that one random desk jockey has a drawer full of assorted infinity stones - the power level here is so absurdly high that questions of morality become really hard to answer. That being said, I think there's a good chance that the TVA will become more of an adversary to be fought in the future, given how terrifying they are.
The show primarily focuses on introducing us to two characters. One is Loki himself. The other is Agent Mobius, who seems to be some kind of investigator for the TVA. Owen Wilson plays him with a humility to match Loki's arrogance, while we're left with the impression that he's actually the smarter of the two (at the very least, he does his homework.) Mobius pulls Loki out of an imminent erasure in order to get his help on a case he's working, but before he can do that, he needs to break down Loki's guard.
Having one character essentially psychoanalyze another can be a cheap trick to tell rather than show a character's mind, but Owen Wilson is entertaining enough in these scenes, playing off Tom Hiddleston quite well, that I can forgive it. Ultimately, Loki justifies his role as a villain by claiming that he's freeing others from the pains of free will, but he's eventually humbled enough (the drawer of infinity stones is the last straw) to admit that he's the one lashing out with violence out of fear and self-loathing.
Mobius is enigmatic: he's likable, again, thanks to the performance, and he seems to be the only one in a heartless bureaucracy to actually empathize with Loki. But the place he seems to be getting Loki to is to have the TVA dominate and dictate to him just as Loki claimed he wanted to do to Earth.
Of course, it's not all just setting and character. We've also got a mystery. In the end of the episode, Mobius finally reveals the case he's gotten Loki for - someone's going around killing TVA Minutemen. And the person doing that is... well, Loki.
Now, the straightforward reading is that this is a different variant. But again, time travel stories are tricky in that regard. I'm going to toss out now the possibility that we're actually looking at this Loki (we can call him Loki B, as Loki A died in Infinity War - there is an actual designation for him the TVA gives him, but I can't remember it) and that the one that, for example, flame-broils a bunch of Minutemen in 1858 is actually just the same Loki B from a future episode. Maybe we'll find he has good reason to. (Yes, I know that broiling is when you heat from above, which means that that's not technically the correct phrase.)
This is the MCU, though, so there's already some foreshadowed connections to future films. In a retro animated video explaining the TVA to new arrivals, they explain that a "variant" is someone who branched off the sacred timeline due to a "nexus event," which calls to mind the final fake commercial from Wandavision for "Nexus" antidepressants. The video then goes on to talk about how an alternate timeline allowed to persist would result in "madness" and a chaotic "multiverse" sure seems like it's foreshadowing Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
I mean, the Scarlet Witch is totally going to break time in order to get her semi-fictional kids back, right?
But to pull back to the show at hand, Loki himself is given a crash course in his own would-be future character development: first being shown that his actions led to his mother's death, but also seeing his father accept him as he passes on and then his reconciliation with Thor. And then, of course, his death at the hands of Thanos.
It's not clear that any of that future is even available to Loki B, and his laugh at the sight of himself being strangled to death by Thanos, ruefully recalling his own proclamation of his "glorious purpose" suggests that whether for good or ill, he's realized that he's going to have to change his expectations and ambitions.
The show could go in just about any direction imaginable, and I'm eager to see where.
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