Marvel’s trickster god gets series off to a nimble start
Judging from the first two episodes, the six-part Disney Plus spinoff series “Loki” is my kind of Marvel. It’s lighter and more “Doctor Who”-y on its feet than most of the franchise’s billion-dollar-grossing mayhem-athons. Like “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017) the series (so far), it favors comic possibilities more than apocalypse and personal grief (though there’s some of both). And it’s guided by a fantastically droll central performance from Tom Hiddleston.
In the first minute of Episode 1, which premiered June 9, Hiddleston reprises a scene from “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), where the Asgardian trickster god snatches the precious blue Tesseract and disappears, zwip, through a time door. This time, for the benefit of the new show’s explanatory needs, the scene focuses on Loki’s responses to what’s going on in the 2012-set flashback, and his surprise at his sudden good fortune. At the 42-second mark — I’m trying to be as precise as Hiddleston is with his double takes — the actor fills a simple reaction shot with two decades of classically trained British performance technique, put to the service of some fabulous mugging.
So far “Loki” exploits its title character’s blatant, deadly untrustworthiness very nicely. Creator and screenwriter Michael Waldronand director Kate Herron have a ball with the multiverse and competing-timeline angles. While the show’s overall narrative apparently feeds into the forthcoming 2022 “Doctor Strange” sequel, which Waldron worked on, these first two episodes
work on their own. That’s what the “WandaVision” fans said about “WandaVision”; I was all over the place on that show, whereas “Loki” is all over the place, but more wittily.
Sprinting out of the “Avengers” storyline, Loki is captured in the middle of the Mongolian desert by soldiers delegated by the Time Variance Authority,or TVA. Loki’s Tesseract escape has muddled the sacred timeline, threatening multiverse-style chaos and world destruction, which is what he wants.
Under arrest as a “variant,” Loki catches the attention of TVA middle manager Mobius, played by Owen Wilson. Someone’s killing the time cops, all along Earth’s timeline, from 16th-century France to the middle 21st century. (The present-day scenes in “Loki” take place a few decades from now.) The plan, if “history’s most reliable liar” doesn’t doublecross Mobius, is for Loki to redeem his evil ways by helping Mobius track the variant responsible for the killings.
Episode 1 finds Loki suffering the numbing bureaucratic nightmares of TVA processing and paperwork. (“Please sign and verify that this is everything you’ve ever said,” mutters one
employee, shoving a high stack of papers in Loki’s direction.) The serious bits in “Loki” work, too, as when Hiddleston reluctantly spells out what makes his trickster character tick. “I don’t enjoy hurting people. I don’t enjoy it. I do it because I have to,” he says, speaking in code for half of the (temporarily) ruined male Hollywood power brokers of recent years. “It’s part of the illusion. It’s the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear.”
Waldron’s first-episode script is followed by Elissa Karasik’s Episode 2; they’re simpatico in both tone and pace, and some choice wisecracks. (Loki: “If you could possibly sheath your smarm for a moment ….”)
Already there are signs that “Loki” may throw invention and wit under the bus, to make way for the inevitable destruction melees on which Marvel has made its billions. We’ll see. So far, though, so good.