Remains of the millennia

In the new Disney+ series Loki, Tom ­Hiddleston reprises his role as Marvel fans’ favorite villain, the Asgardian god of mischief.

But this Loki isn’t the lovable rogue who completed his redemption arc in the Avengers movies. This series features an unrepentant version of Loki who escapes from his timeline thanks to the events of Avengers: Endgame. The seemingly all-powerful Time Variance Authority immediately picks him and puts him on trial for deviating from the “sacred timeline”—the acceptable version of history. Rather than “pruning” the variant Loki, the TVA enlists his help in tracking down an even more dangerous variant seeking to unravel the timeline. High jinks ensue.

Time-travel stories can get a little knotty, but this series is at its best during the philosophical banter between Hiddleston’s Loki and his TVA handler, Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson). Though Hiddleston is the star, when Wilson is absent from the screen too long, the show loses its shine. The action scenes, while exciting, don’t always make sense, and we don’t spend enough time in the TVA’s humorously soul-crushing bureaucracy.

The series is rated TV-14. Besides superhero violence, two of the first three episodes contain occasional bad language. Disney also panders to progressive gender ideology: Loki’s TVA dossier lists his gender as “fluid,” and the third episode includes a brief, forced line about having romances with both men and women.