Loki: Season 1 Review

Marvel’s Loki is the third series to debut on Disney Plus. Tom Hiddleston reprises his role as the titular character; along with Cars superstar Owen Wilson as Agent Mobius. The show revolves around a group of people, called the TVA (Time Variance Authority), who are all set on one goal, to maintain the Sacred Timeline (the events in which the MCU cannon takes place). However, with movies such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness coming up in Phase 4, it is safe to say that the Sacred Timeline’s time is probably up.The show picks up after the events of Loki taking the Tesseract in Avengers Endgame, and hits the ground running. With all of that being said, how does Loki stack up with the other Disney Plus series, and is it worth the watch?

Things that I liked:

I think it’s safe to say that Tom Hiddleston is one of my favorite actors; not to mention that Loki is my favorite villain/anti-hero/good guy? So in terms of things that I liked in Loki, I have to point out that I just generally like Loki and the man who plays him. I can’t think of anyone else who would have better suited the god of mischief, so props to Marvel for casting Tom Hiddleston.

Along with Loki, the buddy cop genre that Loki decided to play on a little bit with the introduction of Mobius really worked in this show. Any time that Loki and Mobius are on screen together is a good time. The two have a chemistry that just worked and they were enjoyable, even funny, to watch. I think Owen Wilson was perfectly cast as this character as he is easily lovable in any role he plays. Sadly, we did not get a signature “wow” from him in this role, but regardless of that the relationship that he and Loki has is one of the best in the MCU and I am excited to hopefully see more of that.

As for Mobius, the group that he works for is the TVA. We learn that they were all created by a group of beings called the Time Keepers, whose sole purpose is to maintain the Sacred Timeline. How do they do that? Well, any time someone does something that does not go into accordance with the Sacred Timeline, they create a variant of themself. The TVA then steps in and vaporizes them along with their timeline so that more timelines don’t branch off. If you are a fan of Marvel then this is a pretty simple concept to understand. If not, I don’t really think you’d be reading this review as Loki isn’t the first thing you’d start out with if you were trying to get into the MCU. I thought this concept was really interesting and that it was a good introduction into what Phase 4 is going to be; chaos. We must also keep in mind that the Sacred Timeline is not just one timeline, but many timelines that are all coexisting together. Think of a braided rope, the MCU that we have seen so far is one strand of that braid, while there are other strands that are all part of the same rope. This is how we get multiple versions of the same person, such as the female Loki (Sophia Di Martino), who calls herself Sylvie.

Sylvie is another aspect of the show that I really liked. I thought that she was a really cool character and I loved the overall idea of there being multiple versions of the same person who exist among other realities. Her relationship with our Loki is one that can be described as… awkward? I don’t know how many people guessed that there would be some type of romance going on in the series, but it does make sense for Loki to fall in love with basically himself. Sylvie is a super badass version of Loki who has basically been running from the TVA her whole life. She is clearly a more superior version of Loki as she will do anything to accomplish the mission at hand and I really enjoyed her character development throughout the series.

The overall plot of the series is something that I also found myself intrigued by. I’ve stated before that time travel is something that I don’t tend to love in stories, but when it comes to Marvel, the concept is just so interesting. Having multiple timelines and dimensions where there are an infinite amount of versions of the same person is exciting. It opens up lanes of story telling that you wouldn’t be able to have with just one story line; which is why I’m impatiently awaiting Marvel’s What If… series. I think that Loki did a great job at gearing us Marvel fans up for what is to come in the future and I’m excited. The TVA, the Sacred Timeline, and the villain of the show are all things that I can’t wait to see further explained in the MCU.

Things I Didn’t Like:

As great as I thought this show was, there are still some things that I didn’t like about it. The first thing I didn’t like is surprisingly the same thing that I did like, and that’s Loki. This Loki doesn’t feel like the Loki from the first Avengers film; which it’s the Loki that this is. He’s not as intimidating as he was in those films and he acts more like the Thor Ragnarok and Avengers Endgame Loki that we have come to love. I was hoping to see the 2012 Loki again, but sadly we didn’t get that. Instead we got a weaker push over Loki who changes his attitude too quickly and is more focused on flipping his hair back at every chance he can get. Again, I still loved Loki in this series and Tom Hiddleston brings a lot of charm to the role, but this is not the Loki that I think any of us were expecting when watching the show.

I also wasn’t a fan of a few of the episodes in the series, more specifically episode 3. There was a lot of filler in that episode that just didn’t need to be included in the show and if you were to skip that episode, I don’t think you’d be too lost, especially since every episode has a “Last time on Loki…” introduction. Especially with only 6 episodes to complete the story, this episode just wasn’t needed. I think that’s where a lot of these Marvel shows have struggled. They create a series with 6-8 episodes, and 2-3 of them end up being filler episodes to lead into the bigger story. I’m all for filler episodes when it comes to series that are 20 or so episodes long, but when you’ve only got 6 episodes of content to work with, every episode needs to really get to the point and get us excited for the next.

That brings me into the next thing I didn’t like about the series, and that is, it was a series. Unlike the previous two Marvel shows to hit Disney Plus (Wanda Vision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), Loki will be getting multiple seasons. Does the show need multiple seasons? Yes, but only because they set it up that way. They could have easily had this show not end on a cliff hanger and most people would have been content with the conclusion. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the show, it was actually my favorite of the three so far, but I think that the one season would have been good enough. I think that with Marvel creating the universe that it has, it would have been fairly easy to pick things up where they left off in another film. There is so much Marvel happening right now, and I think that in order for Season 2 of Loki to be successful, it really has to be something special, because in my opinion it is unneeded. In fact, going off of my previous comment about what I didn’t like about the show, this series could have just been a movie. Cut out those couple of filler episodes and you’ve got a pretty good 2 and a half hour film that leads into the next MCU film.

Final Verdict

Overall, I think that Loki is the best of the three Marvel shows to hit Disney Plus thus far. With it’s chemistry that Loki and Agent Mobius have, the introduction of Sylvie, and the overall explanation to how the MCU will get its Multiverse of Madness, Loki is an exciting show that I think that every Marvel fan will enjoy. However, with the few things that I didn’t like, such as parts of Loki’s character filler episodes, I can see where some people would not enjoy the show. Despite this, Marvel definitely backtracked with their original statement that people would not have to watch the TV series to understand the movies as the final scenes clearly set up the next films, so even if you don’t think you’d enjoy the show, it’s probably beneficial to watch it if you’d like to not be lost with what’s going on in the MCU because this show sets up the next big villain. With all of that said, my final verdict for Loki: Season 1 is an 8/10.