Review - Loki

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, July 2nd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the show Marvel fans have been waiting for.

In the new Disney+ streaming series, Tom Hiddleston reprises his role as the fan-favorite villain, Loki. Reviewer Collin Garbarino says the Asgardian god of mischief is as entertaining as ever, that is until he’s forced to bow to woke ideology.

LOKI: I am Loki of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose.

COLLIN GARBARINO, REVIEWER: That glorious purpose is always just out of reach in the Avengers movies, but this Loki doesn’t know it yet. He’s not the same charming rogue who completed his redemption arc in the films. This series features an alternate version of Loki who escapes from his timeline thanks to the time-hopping events of Avengers: End Game. Loki’s escape causes him to run afoul of the TVA, that is the Time Variance Authority.

HUNTER B-15: Appears to be a standard sequence violation. Branch is growing at a stable rate and slope. Variant identified.

LOKI: I beg your pardon.

HUNTER B-15: On behalf of the Time Variance Authority, I hereby arrest you for crimes against the Sacred Timeline. Hands up. You’re coming with us.

In the Marvel universe, when someone goes back in time and changes the past, it doesn’t change the present and the future. Instead, it creates another version of the universe. The original past, present, and future still exist, but a second present and future created by the change branch off from the original storyline.

The TVA’s job is to prune those branches, ensuring that variants don’t create a multiversal chaos.

Renslayer: Laufeyson. Variant L1130, AKA Loki Laufeyson, is charged with sequence violation 7-20-89. How do you plead?

Loki: Madam. A god doesn’t plead. This has been a very enjoyable pantomime, but I’d like to go home now.

Renslayer: Are you guilty or not guilty, sir?

Loki: Guilty of being the god of mischief? Yes. Guilty of finding all this incredibly tedious? Yes. Guilty of a crime against the Sacred Timeline? Absolutely not, you have the wrong person.

But rather than pruning Loki for stepping off the Sacred Timeline, Agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, decides to recruit him.

Mobius: I specialize in the pursuit of dangerous variants.

He needs Loki’s help to track down an even more dangerous variant who wants to dismantle the TVA and unravel the universe.

Mobius: I’m Agent Mobius, by the way.

Loki: Are you taking me somewhere to kill me?

Mobius: No. That’s where you just were. I’m taking you some place to talk.

Loki: I don’t like to talk.

Mobius: But you do like to lie, which you just did. Because we both know you love to talk.

And there’s lots of talk in the first two episodes of this series. It turns out that time travel and multiverses demand lots of exposition. But honestly, the talk might be the best part of the series.

Loki: I’d never stab anyone in the back. That’s such a boring form of betrayal.

Mobius: Loki, I’ve studied almost every moment of your entire life. You’ve literally stabbed people in the back, like, 50 times.

Loki: Well, I’d never do it again, because it got old.

Mobius: [chuckling] Okay.

Loki and Mobius play the odd couple to perfection. And even though the plot takes a while to get going, I hardly noticed because I was too busy enjoying Owen Wilson play the straight man. The two men don’t trust each other, but in the clever banter we see them learning to be friends.

Their chats sometimes take a philosophical turn, not uncommon for time travel stories. Where do we all come from? Does life have any meaning? Are we all just playing a part, or do we have some measure of freedom? But the show raises these questions with a playful style less common in the genre.

Perhaps most interestingly, we see characters struggle to live in light of philosophies they espouse but don’t necessarily understand. Mobius says he believes in the absolute plan of the Sacred Timeline. But he also wants to believe Loki can reform.

Renslayer: Look, I know you have a soft spot for broken things.

Mobius: I don’t think so.

Renslayer: Yes, you do. But Loki is an evil, lying scourge. That is the part he plays on the sacred timeline.

Mobius: Maybe he wants to mix it up. Sometimes you get tired of playing the same part. Is that possible? He can change?

Renslayer: Not unless the Time Keepers decree it. And then it shall be so.

While it’s interesting to have a superhero show raise these philosophical questions, we probably shouldn’t expect it to answer them satisfactorily. We also shouldn’t expect Loki and Mobius to save the Sacred Timeline. After all, this series is just a setup for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness which comes out next year.

Mobius: Existence is chaos. Nothing makes any sense, so we try to make some sense of it. And I’m just lucky that the chaos I emerged into gave me all this… My own glorious purpose. Because the TVA is my life. And it’s real because I believe it’s real.

Loki is rated TV-14 for superhero violence and occasional coarse language. But after the first two episodes, I admit I was hooked. Witty, stylish, unique—it was my favorite television series of this year.

But then the third episode came out, and I wished I could call in the TVA to prune it from the Sacred Timeline.

Miss Minutes: The TVA has stepped in to fix your mistake and set time back on its predetermined path.

Hiddleston is supposed to be the show’s star. But if Wilson’s Agent Mobius disappears from the screen for too long, the story loses its shine. Mobius is completely absent from the third episode, and everything that made the show excellent and unique vanished.

Even worse, Disney decided to pander to progressive gender ideology. In the first episode, we glimpse Loki’s TVA dossier which lists his sex as “fluid.” That could be reasonable considering he’s a shapeshifter. But the third episode includes a brief, forced line about his having romances with both men and women. It’s a shame for such a smart show to be so clumsy in seeking the Twitter mob’s approval. It’s almost ironic for Marvel’s time-travel series to succumb to chronological snobbery by confirming the trendy ideologies of our own cultural moment.

Thankfully, Wilson returns for episode four. But with only two more episodes to go, I’m not sure whether this series can fulfill the sense of glorious purpose it began with.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

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