SERIES REVIEW: LOKI

 

SERIES REVIEW:  LOKI

This is one in a few of the Disney Plus Marvel series that I'm going to do a series review on, so expect a few more from the past shows WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  But in this edition, I'm going to give my thoughts and review Marvel's latest show to dazzle us:  Loki.  Yes, our favorite God of Mischief got to have his own series (produced by Tom Hiddleston at that), and we got into a much deeper dive into this character, as well as an intricate story that ties into what's coming forth in Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  So, let's see how the 6 episode season played out, and why this show was so good.

When we begin this story, we're taken back to 2012, when Loki (with the help of alien invaders), tried to take over the Earth by attacking New York.  This brought in The Avengers for the first time, and he was, of course, defeated.  However, we also go back to when the Avengers were also trying to get the different Infinity Stones to stop Thanos by going  back in time, and they needed the Tesseract.  However, Hulk's impulsiveness allows for confusion, and Loki notices that Ant-Man was trying to get the Tesseract, but it ends up at his feet.  Though bound and gagged, Loki takes it, and disappears.  When next we see him, he's in the desert where he's approached by members of the TVA - the Time Variance Authority, where he's arrested for crimes against the "Sacred Timeline".  When arguing his case in front of Judge Ravonna Renslayer, he blames the Avengers for going back in time, but she says that was supposed to happen.  

Loki is then taken by TVA Agent Mobius M. Mobius to the Time Theater to relive his crimes, which they have on record.  Mobius takes him on a journey through his life, and how his misdeeds cause not only the founding of The Avengers, but the death of his mother Frigga on Asgard later on.  Loki tries to escape (even so much as getting the Tesseract back, but it's worthless in the TVA...as are the Infinity Stones).  Loki then goes back to see how his life plays out---and he witnesses the death of Odin, as well as his own at the hands of Thanos.  Mobius has him agree to help him find the "Variant" that is causing problems with the Timeline...and Mobius says the "Variant" is him.  We then witness the Variant Loki killing several TVA agents, and stealing their time-reset charges. 

Later on, in Oshkosh, WI, they're at a Renaissance Faire, investigating the deaths of agents at the event in 1985 by the Variant.  Loki tries to con Mobius and Agent B-15 to be able to meet with the Time-Keepers, who're in charge of keeping the Sacred Timeline moving along.  It doesn't work, and Renslayer objects to his involvement, and wants him "pruned", and thus eliminated.  Mobius convinces her that he's of some use to them.  Loki then conducts research in the TVA library, and finds out that the Variant is hiding out in apocalyptic events where they have no effect on the timeline.  He and Mobius travel to Pompeii in 79 AD to test his theory.  No matter what Loki does, it's not disrupting the timeline, and thus, proves his point.  They find out that the Variant is hiding in Alabama in 2050, where a hurricane is set to wipe out the area.  Once they arrive, Loki manages to meet up with the Variant of himself, who uses a few patrons of a Roxxcart (a play on Roxxon Oil, and Walmart), as well as Agent B-15 to tell Loki of their plan.  Loki tries to persuade his Variant to join him in taking down the TVA, but they'll have none of it.  They fight a little, and then the Variant shows themselves as a female version of him, and she sets off the charges she collected from the agents she killed, and had set at various points along the timeline.  This creates several branches that the TVA has to handle, and she escapes through a portal, with Loki following her. 

Loki and his Variant....now calling herself Sylvie....wind up on the doomed planet Lamentis-1 in the year 2077.  The TemPad that the TVA Agents used (and Loki had stolen), stopped working, and Sylvie agrees to work with Loki to try and charge it.  They sneak aboard a train headed towards an ark that was and evacuation ship, and could charge the TemPad, but Loki gets drunk, draws attention to them, and they get thrown off the train.  The TemPad is broken, and they're stuck on the world, trying to find a way off.  They plan on hijacking the ark to escape and get back to the TVA to destroy it.  It's here that Sylvie reveals that everyone at the TVA are variants grabbed at certain points, and had been reprogrammed to be agents of the TVA.  Just when they try to fight through the crowds to reach the ark, meteors from the destroyed moon above smash the ark, thus trapping Loki and Sylvie on the planet, seemingly there to meet their doom with the remaining denizens. 

In the 4th episode, we get a look at Sylvie's past, as we see the young version of her arrested by the TVA, and how she escaped, and has been hiding out in apocalyptic events in time in order to avoid them.  Her and Loki begin to form a bond.  This creates a branch, and the TVA eventually captures the both of them.  Loki is thrown into a time loop as punishment where he's constantly beat up by the Lady Sif, with whose hair he had cut as a joke.  Before he'd been tossed into his "prison", however, he reveals to Mobius that he and the rest of the TVA agents are variants.  Meanwhile, Sylvie manages to show Agent B-15 that she was a variant, and Mobius actually steals Renslayer's TemPad, and sees that she had interrogated Agent C-20....whose mind Sylvie had freed back in Episode 2, and she had revealed everything to Sylvie---including the location of the Time Keepers.  This is why Renslayer had her put away, and Mobius wasn't allowed to interrogate her.  Mobius finds out that she's alive because of Renslayer.  He goes to Loki, and says he believes him.  But before they could do anything, Renslayer captures them.  They are brought before the Time Keepers along with Sylvie.  Renslayer says she tried to protect Mobius, but he wants to know what he was before the TVA, and she ends up having him pruned.  Agent B-15 shows up, and she helps Sylvie and Loki fight off the TVA agents, and then Sylvie throws a sword at the Time Keepers, and finds out that they're just androids.  As Loki and her have a moment, he's pruned by Renslayer.  Sylvie overpowers her, and wants the truth about the Time Keepers, meanwhile, in an extra credits scene, we see Loki having been transported to another realm, where he meets variants of himself.  

Sylvie wants to know what happened to Loki, and Renslayer said he was pruned to The Void...a place at the end of time where nothing returns.  They figure out that the TVA's true creator lies beyond the Void....somewhere beyond at the End of Time.  Sylvie wants to know how to get there, and Miss Minutes - the cartoon looking voice of the TVA, stalls for time until agents arrive to help Renslayer.  They have Sylvie trapped, but she ends up pruning herself in order to get to The Void, and find Loki.  Loki is taken to the lair of his alters:  Classic Loki, Kid Loki, and Alligator Loki. They tell him that there's no escape from the Void.  Sylvie arrives in the Void, and sees Alitoh...a cloud-like creature who destroys everything in its path.  She makes a run for it, and is rescued by Mobius.  Loki, meanwhile, tries to get the other Loki's to band together to get past Alitoh, and get to whomever is beyond the creature.  They laugh him off, and then another Loki shows up with his little army, looking to take over.  But there's a fight that breaks out among the Lokis, and our Loki escapes, along with Classic Loki, Kid Loki, and Alligator Loki.  They meet up with Mobius and Sylvie.  Sylvie comes up with a plan to enchant Alitoh in order to have it open up and allow her and Loki to pass through to what's beyond the Void.  Mobius heads back to the TVA to take it down, and Classic Loki sacrifices himself to help Sylvie and Loki to enchant Alioth, which they do, and they Intheup seeing a citadel just beyond Alitoh.

After her confrontation with Mobius, Renslayer is in search of "free will".  Miss Minutes gives her info on "He Who Remains", the TVA's creator.  In another time, Agent B-15 shows other agents that they are variants by showing them Renslayer as a vice-principal of a school.  At this point, Sylvie and Loki have arrived at the Citadel at the End of Time, where Miss Minutes lets them know they can have everything they want.  They meet He Who Remains, and he tells them about how he found out about the Multiverse, and that the Multiverse War that nearly destroyed everything.  He created the TVA to streamline time to maintain the peace.  He offers to have BOTH of them run the TVA, and exist in the same timeline, because he's old and tired, and would rather have them do the work.  Sylvie is all for killing him, but Loki rethinks things, and tries to reason with Sylvie.  They fight, with Sylvie thinking all Loki wants is a throne.  But actually...he just wants HER to be okay.  They kiss, and then she isn't him, and pushes him back into the TVA headquarters, where he tries to warn Mobius and and Agent B-15, but they don't know who he his, as he tries to warn them about He Who Remains, as he's killed by Sylvie, thus having massive branches spring out from the timeline, creating various realities.  In the final scene, we see Loki look out at the TVA city, and sees a statue of He Who Remains, and realizes he's in an another universe.  

This show...from the beginning, gave us A LOT of questions about who and what the TVA was, and during the course of the series, peeled back the layers in a very methodical way.  We learn that there's been one timeline, and some mysterious beings known as "Time Keepers" have been in charge of it, and the TVA enforces the "peace" of the timeline, and makes sure it stays in place.  They go after "Variants"....people who're disrupting the timeline, and bring them to "justice", and then "pruned" into a Void where they're never heard from again.  The Loki they capture is one that escapes capture from  the Avengers back in 2012, as they had tried to fix everything Thanos destroyed five years prior.  He then spends the series trying to get a meeting with the Time Keepers, wanting to take them down.  He finds out, through Mobius, that his life has already been mapped out---from life to death.  That all his mischief making and dastardly deeds get him nowhere.  He just keeps losing.  

As we meet characters like Mobius, who thinks he'd be an asset in finding the variant responsible for the deaths of many agents, and causing disruptions in the timeline, Loki ends up meeting this variant....another version of him....a female who ends up calling herself Sylvie.  Sylvie was captured by the TVA as a child for crimes she had not even committed yet, but was sentenced to be pruned.  However, she escaped and had been hiding in pockets of time where cataclysmic events happened...which she had no control over, and she did not disrupt the timeline by being there.  We see the deviousness in her, but as her and Loki are trapped on the doomed planet Lamentis-1, we start to get her story, and we see WHY she wants to take down the TVA.  We also get a bit of the deviousness of the TVA, through Judge Renslayer, who prevents Mobius from interrogating an agent who was affected by Sylvie, and shown the truth---that everyone in the TVA is a variant who had been taken at some point in time, and turned into agents that would serve the purpose of the Time Keepers. Judge Renslayer leads the TVA, and she's uncompromising in her job.  The same can be said of Agent B-15 until she's with Sylvie---who shows  her what she was before the TVA, and reveals the truth.

Over the course of this series, we see Loki form relationships with both Mobius and Sylvie...almost to the point of being romantic. He also comes into variants of himself....and comes to the realization that Mobius was right about him:  all he craved was attention, and he needs to feed his ego.  But the problem is, as he himself realizes, that even HE is too much.  Watching all the variants of him fight, lie, and betray one another gives him perspective that what his ideology of his "glorious purpose" is...and it's a joke.  When he sees Sylvie...and sees HER purpose---it changes him.  He sees that the TVA must be stopped.  But then...as they meet He Who Remains----and this mastermind tells them that he knows all, sees all, and can give them what they want---to be in the same timeline together...run the TVA...he thinks killing this being is not a good idea...especially with the ensuing chaos that will occur.  Sylvie wants revenge...and he just wants HER to be okay---hence thinking of someone OTHER than himself.  That's a huge change for Loki.  But alas, it falls on deaf ears, and Sylvie banishes him to the TVA...but it's in an alternate version, as he sees that He Who Remains has his statue outside the TVA now, and Mobius and Agent B-15 have no idea who he is.  So, it seems that He Who Remains and his predictions come true.  Despite Sylvie killing him, he still comes back.  But now, with him temporarily dead, it's caused a massive crack in the timeline, and various branches have sprouted, thus creating a multiverse.  

With the breakage of the Sacred Timeline, this story will directly lead into Doctor Strange & the Multiverse of Madness.  Whether Loki will play a part of that is unknown, but we DO know the Scarlet Witch will be.  As for Loki---he gets a season 2, and we get to see the fallout of what Sylvie did.  It leads to more intrigue.  

The characters we meet in this series are fascinating in their own way.  Mobius is a guy that just feels like he's doing job to the best of his ability.  Easy going and laid back, but VERY sharp.  He's one of the few who actually challenges Loki on an intellectual level, and knows Loki's games and tactics.  We see their banter and relationship grow into a friendship---something Loki really hasn't had in his life.  Agent B-15 is very by-the-book, and doesn't really care much for Loki.  However, her change happens when she's affected by Sylvie.  Sylvie manages to show her the life she USED to have before she was plucked from her time, and made into a TVA agent.  Judge Renslayer is also by-the-book, and really doesn't bend the entire series.  She continues to uphold the Time Keeper's rule of law.  She did form a bond with Mobius...a friendship...but the problem is, Mobius' curiosity causes her to protect him at times, and then eventually has to prune him to protect the timeline when he questions her tactics.  She eventually takes off to find "free will".  When next we see her, we see a variant of her as a school vice-principal, shown to TVA agents by B-15.  

The main relationship that Loki forms is with the variant of himself---Sylvie.  She manages to open his eyes to what's going on, and how his life has been controlled by He Who Remains the whole time, and hasn't had as much free will as he had thought.  She is the one who makes him see that there is something else to care about in the universe...someone else to care about.  At the end of the season, we see Loki has become different, his perspective changed...and we see genuine fear in him about what's about to happen, now that he's finally understanding what He Who Remains meant when he said madness would ensue with the timeline branching out, and the multiverse expansion.  

Overall, such an amazing series, and the acting was top notch.  We got A LOT of humorous moments, and I LOVED Tara Strong as the voice of Miss Minutes.  She kept everything VERY cheery throughout the series until she had to change tone once Loki and Sylvie reached the Citadel.  Owen Wilson was fantastic, and I look forward to seeing more of Mobius and Loki's interaction together.  Not sure what Sylvie's fate is....but look forward to what will happen with her next.  And as for He Who Remains----we all know his name is Kang.  And the actor who played him was also fantastic.  I truly enjoyed this series, and can't wait until 2022...where I HOPE we get the fallout from what happened here....and in Doctor Strange.  

How did YOU guys feel about this series?  Subscribe and leave a comment below.  Next time, I will give my review of WandaVision.