Pop Culture Pick: Loki
Another Marvel from the MCU's new TV team.
Image Credit: Disney+
Welcome to Pop Culture Pick, a catch-all for subjects I want to highlight outside of the usual weekly Weekend Watch columns. In this edition, Marvel’s god of mischief finds himself at the mercy of a mysterious bureaucracy. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite
As one of Marvel’s most popular characters, evolving from troubled villain to anti-hero, Loki feels like a truly natural fit for a Disney Plus series. And, thankfully, anchored by the usually charming performance from Tom Hiddleston, it works wonderfully.
Loki picks up moments after the post-Battle Of New York Loki grabs the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame and escapes. Unfortunately for him, this marks him as a “Variant”, a person out of time who is creating a rogue timeline. In order to correct this, the crafty adoptive Asgardian is arrested by the Time Variance Authority, a celestial bureaucracy charged by powerful creatures known as Time-Keepers with maintaining the “sacred timeline”.
If that feels like a lot to take in, then you should prepare yourself for a lot of exposition in this initial episode. In Loki’s favour, however, writer Michael Waldron, a veteran of Rick And Morty shows a keen skill for putting that across with wit and style. And it doesn’t hurt that Hiddleston is a past master at delivering this sort of material with a wink and a smile. He also has the advantage of Owen Wilson to play off of. As the laconic, funny Agent Mobius, Wilson is born to play this sort of role, fitting so seamlessly into the MCU it’s as though he was there all along (you’ve not met him to this point because, as he says, “you didn’t need to”). And the supporting cast is stacked with talent, including Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Eugene Cordero, and voice acting veteran Tara Strong as cartoon mascot/expository device Miss Minutes.
The show’s first episode truly succeeds by stripping Loki down to his core (literally at one point, dispatching his luxurious Asgardian leather outfit), and starting to peel back the layers to figure out who he truly is, under all the smug god bluster. He’s vulnerable in his own way, troubled and bitter, hiding all that in speechifying and confidence. Glimpses of his future, including the death of his mother and his own final moments, shake him more than we’ve ever seen in the MCU. His experience at the TVA truly humbles him, making him realise that he’s nowhere near as powerful or impactful as he thought he was.
And talking of the authority, it’s a wondrous place, a cocktail of Douglas Adams, Brazil, Mad Men and The Good Place. Director Kate Herron marshals some astounding imagery, from desert landscapes to sweeping sci-fi vistas and the most mundane office details, all in the service of the story.
“Glorious Purpose” is the episode’s title, but it could also describe the show, which in true MCU style, lays seeds for future storylines and hints at threats to come. It achieves all of that with flair and truckloads of substance, deepening our understanding of the title character and introducing a remarkable new side to the cinematic universe. This is one I know I’ll keep watching.
The first episode of Loki is on Disney Plus now. New episodes will arrive every Wednesday.