“Loki” Series Review

By Quinn Marcus

Welp, we’ve made it to the third series to come from Marvel, following the once-promising WandaVision, an originally intriguing, very well-acted portrait of grief that collapsed into just another generic blockbuster explosion by the finish; The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a more action-based series that had some interesting political commentary, only to lose track of what made itself so entertaining and thematically rich towards the end. The point is, neither previous shows managed to finish strong, they ended up being relatively good overall but turned themselves into throw-away, unsatisfying crap with their conclusions. However, as the saying goes, “third time’s the charm,” and it most certainly is, because I am very pleased to say that Loki surpasses both on almost every aspect. This show surprised me greatly, the majority of it put a huge smile on my face the entire time, it reminded me of adventure movies and tv shows I used to watch as a kid. It took a while to have an episode that wowed me, in fact, the only episode I’d consider pretty incredible was the finale, but the rest of the series maintained my interest the whole way through.

Loki tells the story of Loki after he escaped during the Avengers: Endgame time heist at the battle of New York, he’s pulled into a world that exists outside of time, known as the Time Variance Authority. After he’s saved from being erased from existence, because he’s a “time-variant,” he’s called upon by detective Mobius to help him catch a different version of Loki who’s been wreaking havoc on the sacred timeline, only to discover that the TVA is not what it seems.

Tom Hiddleston is, as always, an absolute joy to watch as this iconic character, his chemistry/bromance with Owen Wilson was on point, hilarious, and even intellectually fulfilling. Granted, I found most of the cast to be pretty annoying, and even over-the-top at times, but the three leads were wonderful together, I didn’t have too many problems with the core group of heroes. There were quite a few philosophical concepts interlaced into the show, and I thought the script dealt with them really well, using intelligent, character-focused conversations that were a lot of fun to watch. Although visually weak at points, there were certain scenes that I thought looked absolutely fantastic, the use of CGI actually wasn’t too bad, and the set pieces were nothing but solid eye candy. The last episode in particular looked the best of them all in my opinion, but I thought everything from the set designs, to even the costumes, were pretty well done. Loki did have the danger of taking itself too seriously, but thankfully, it doesn’t, it understands that its concept is ridiculous and occasionally nonsensical, but it does so in a way that isn’t cheesy, but rather, kind of clever.

I couldn’t help but be sucked into the irresistible absurdity of the TVAs world, a time police force apparently managed by space lizards, I mean, come one, how much more awesome can you get. In regards to issues, a couple of the episodes felt a lot like filler episodes, especially a very tedious one involving Loki and Sylvie riding a train for 30mins, and as I said before, I wasn’t a fan of the supporting cast, except for a highly promising debut into the MCU from Jonathan Majors. Also, I could tell that the show thought it was smarter than it is during certain scenes, and the writer’s thought that big complex words would make the show sound more intelligent, but to me, those bits of the dialogue felt very forced and ironically simplistic, only existing for expositional purposes. Besides that, I had a blast with this show, it’s not the best thing the MCU has done, but what I appreciated the most about this one was how excited it got me for the future of this grand studio, I can’t predict what will happen next, but I’m ready for more.