What would you do if you went through life convinced that you were “burdened with glorious purpose” when you were, in fact, just another cog in the machine? What would you do if you found out the artifacts of power you so desired were mere trinkets that other folks used as paper weights? What would you do if you believed you were in control of your own destiny, only to discover that you are the plaything of greater beings whose life story has already been written? And what would you do if you thought you were the protagonist, only to realize that you are a mere springboard to help others become their best selves?
It would probably drive you to do some soul searching. What I like about Loki in its opening stanza is that the show is equal parts meta, goofy, and existentialist in the shadow of these big questions. There’s not a lot of action in the series’s debut. Instead, there’s a lot of table-setting, throat-clearing, and conversation. But this first episode, aptly titled “Glorious Purpose”, ably sets the tone for Marvel Studios’ new villain-fronted series. The vibe is irreverent to be sure — as befits the “mischievous scamp” at its center — but also willing to delve into personal pain and deeper self-examination that feels just as true to the MCU’s trickster god.
On the meta side, Loki’s opening hour features myriad winks at the title character’s status as a villain. His handlers and captors poke fun at him for being a side character who fancies himself the lead. One particular stretch goes so far as to deconstruct Loki’s need to be the bad guy, as a pose or posture meant to compensate for his own perceived weaknesses. There’s plenty of gags about his penchant for speechifying and betrayal, laced with deeper (if still funny) explorations of why he falls into these self-destructive cycles. These moments smartly double as both psychoanalysis and knowing nods toward the very nature of superhero storytelling.
More than anything though, the show starts out as an amusing curio, distinct within the MCU’s increasingly colorful backdrop. The series’s first episode sets up the basic premise. Loki finds himself in a Silence of the Lambs-type situation where he’s tasked with helping a timeline detective pursue another temporal agitator. The setup works, but it’s more fun to simply hang out in the world that creator Michael Waldron and his team have conjured up. Waldron is the screenwriter for the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (which gets a name drop here) and has credits on the equally metatextual Rick and Morty. He and his team put their penchant for off-the-wall, science fiction-y fun in full view here.
"Time is important, and I am a clock."
Their vision for the offices of the Temporal Variance Authority, an organization policing the “sacred timeline” to prevent multiversal war, are of a piece with works as varied as Beetlejuice and Defending Your Life. The show frames this afterlife-esque realm as a Catch-22-like bastion of bewildering bureaucracy, where gods become just another packet of paperwork. Watching Loki flail through ridiculous set pieces of processing, judgment, and interrogation that would make Terry Gilliam smile remains a treat throughout. And the mixing of the wild and fantastical on the one hand with a sense of humdrum civil service on the other works like gangbusters.
In the same vein, Waldron declared Mad Men his favorite show of all time, and it’s a palpable influence on the series’s premiere. The references go beyond star Owen Wilson cutting the spitting image of fellow MCU denizen John Slattery (who played Roger Sterling on Mad Men and Howard Stark as recently as Avengers: Endgame). The entire production design has a Sixties kitsch vibe, which makes the show’s take on a space out of time all the more distinctive and fun. Seeing clean cut office drones, bulgy computers, and a brilliant homage to classic animation gives the place a flavor that would be missing from the MCU’s standard “ten minutes into the future” set design. One key moment even features an homage to Don Draper’s famous carousel speech.
And yet, as entertaining as it is to watch Loki stumble through a byzantine tangle of afterlife-like red tape or engage in time-dilated shenanigans with judges and enforcers, Loki aspires to something deeper amid its gonzo antics. In the early going, at least, the show contrasts our personal sense of agency and importance in the universe, with disquieting epiphanies about its depth and breadth.
However much we (and Loki) may value ourselves and our decisions, the show introduces beings with powers and interests far beyond our understanding and control that seem to render those choices inconsequential in the grander scheme. Loki enters the TVA believing himself a god in control of his destiny. He eventually leaves it a man knocked around by forces he cannot comprehend, forced to confront himself (in more ways than one) and find a new purpose beyond his usual practiced megalomania.
"Wes Anderson has me stand like this for flat composition all the time."
That is — separate and apart from the show’s fourth wall-cracking bent, inventive world, and existentialist allegory — the most promising aspect of Loki. The series promises to be, like so many of the MCU’s best outings, a character piece. The first episode may offer a de facto recap of Loki’s journey to date and poke fun at his persona both in- and out of the universe. But it’s focused first and foremost on the changes these realizations provoke in Loki, what his connection to his family members will spurs him become in the coming years, and the well of pain and insecurity he’s trying to make up for with this timeline-skipping jaunt.
Like the stories Loki pays homage to, the series promises to match its humor and outsized premise with real pathos and meaningful reflections. Finding the right tone to do each is a tricky business, but also a trademark of some of television’s best projects. With a wry, talky vibe; creative production design to spur the imagination, and a plot that offers enough twists to keep casual fans talking for six episodes, the series has plenty going for it out of the gate. Despite those advantages, I don’t know if Loki, or the show that bears his name, will be able to find a satisfying answer to such grand questions, but I’m excited to see both try.
