I must confess I was never one of those people who were waiting with baited breath to watch Loki. Don’t get me wrong, the character is a wonderful, constant in the MCU who has died so many times that he has left people coining the “Marvel Fake Death Universe” moniker.
When the series first hit, though, I was entranced. The first two episodes were so utterly engaging. It was something extremely different from the rest of the MCU and opened up the world of the multiverse that will, obviously, be explored further in both Spiderman: No Way Home and Dr Strange: Multiverse of Madness.
The series opens at the moment in Avengers: Endgame where Loki, somewhat confused with circumstance, chances upon the Terreract and is able to escape, disappearing into some form of portal. He appears in a desert where, shortly after, he is accosted by people who look like soldiers appearing out of portal doorways to take him into custody. We then learn they are from the Time Variance Authority (TVA), an organisation put together by the mystical Time Keepers who can see all events across all time. Any divergence from their view of the ‘right’ course of events forms a splinter timeline whereby the perpetrators become ‘variants’ of themselves. The variants are then hoovered up by the TVA and the errant timeline eradicated, thereby restoring the “sacred timeline”.
Loki is put in the custody of Mobius (Owen Wilson) and so begins a quite wonderful partnership involving learning on both sides. It transpires that Lokis skills could be quite useful since they have a rogue ‘variant’ that they’ve not been able to apprehend who is threatening all of the known universe with utter chaos. Mobius feels that Loki would be the ideal person to help capture this perpetrator because, well, it’s another Loki variant!
So begins the tried and trusted trope of find the bad guy, apprehend them, realise they’re not so bad after all and then go after the REAL bad guy.
To be honest, this is where the series really went downhill. The first couple of episodes were utterly fabulous. I could not WAIT for the third. When it arrived, however, it ended up being what can only be described as filler. Now that term gets banded around a lot and, most of the time, I disagree with it because there is some form of character development or sub-story that ultimately transpires to be fundamental to the overall plot. In this case, however, no. There was a single revelation made in the episode that was delivered as a throwaway line in seconds. Outside of that, precisely none of the episode really developed anything.
Episode Four restored my faith. It was a rip-roaring ride that moved at a Hell of a pace, and also featured the series first post-credit scene that lined up what should have been something utterly whacky. Episode Five, however, did not live up to the hype. It was enjoyable, yes, but the writing was frankly poor. The dialogue was delivered mostly through cliche and the action sequences veered from the utterly nonsensical and useless to completely hammed up, over-acted nonsense.
The final episode was kind of “meh”. It answered the fundamental question of who was REALLY behind the TVA, provided a wealth of information delivered through exposition about what is likely to be explored through the upcoming Spiderman and Dr Strange movies but then, pretty much, just fizzled out.
Overall I found the series unfulfilling. It promised so much early on and then the delivery just ran into something of a brick wall. It wasn’t awful – well, aside from Episode Three which, frankly, was. It did, however, fail to deliver on its initial promise. I can’t help but feel if the effects budget hadn’t been blown on Episode Five and Episode Three had just been entirely re-written, the reveal of the big-bad in the last episode could have been brought forward with more natural examination of their past, what was currently happening and what is likely to come next. As it was, it felt like a series painted into a corner as if it were a book where the entire climax had to be described in the last five pages. It doesn’t matter how well that ending is executed, it still feels constrained and desperate.
There are, of course, some positives. Any time both Loki (Tom Hiddlestone) and Mobius (Owen Wilson) were on screen was just gold. I won’t say who but the ultimate big-bad was acted in a beautifully eccentric and OTT manner. Richard E Grant was also brilliantly bonkers. But all of them, at one time or another, had to fight against swathes of awfully-written dialogue that utterly overshadowed the moments of writing brilliance that did sporadically appear.
Given the series we’ve had so far – the superb WandaVision, the action-packed Falcon & Winter Soldier and now Loki, the latter is by a very large margin the runt of the litter.
Are Marvel spreading themselves too thinly with Ms Marvel, Moon Knight, Hawkeye, Shang Chi, Eternals and Spiderman all still yet to come this year? Maybe. It’s not often that I would be critical of the writing of Marvel material but Loki was certainly a case of “D-. Could do better” in that department.
