Entertainment

Review – Loki | 1st episode

Published

3 years ago

June 10, 2021

Robert King

[ANTES DE COMEÇAR A MATÉRIA, FIQUE CIENTE QUE ELA ESTÁ RECHEADA DE SPOILERS]

If you haven’t watched Loki’s first episode, then don’t read this article to avoid spoilers.

After the first month without Marvel Originals releasing every week on Disney +, it looks like Loki’s series has taken forever to kick off. Well, now that the first chapter is out, we can say that it was the most basic “pilot” of this new series of Marvel series so far. It’s not a demerit, it just means it fits more into the narrative patterns established so far. Either way, in about 51 minutes, the first chapter establishes important points not only for the development of the series itself, but for the future of the MCU as well. We’ll cover this in more detail in the next paragraph, so beware of spoilers.

The series picks up where Avengers: Ultimatum (2019) left Loki (Tom Hiddleston): escaping the alternate line of the Battle of New York in 2012. He takes the Tesseract and flees to Mongolia, where he is captured and tried. by the time control agency, TVA. And this is where things get weird. With a retro futuristic look, we see the temporal civil service judging cases and solving alternate realities with a big reset.

In this story of erasing alternate timelines that run out of hand, it is said that the reality that Loki came from has been erased. For TVA agents, it was a way to resolve the confusion of the Avengers in their quest for the Infinity Gems. However, for those who don’t live in that reality, it ended up feeling more like a lazy script. After all, they’ve ruled out the possibility of showing the heroes or SHIELD of this universe joining forces to find the fugitive Loki. It would be interesting if it worked well, but they ended up throwing that reality away.

In that same TVA intro sequence, another sooty prisoner is shown who claims to be the son of a Goldman Sachs board member and that one phone call will destroy the guardian’s career. This joke may have escaped some, but it turns out the company the boy is quoting is a top international investor, famous for its multibillion dollar profits and exploitation of employees. In other words, the series attributes the company’s success to a young time traveler. Let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to make safe investments when you know what’s going to happen in the future.

While the series has been badly at rejecting the alternate Avengers timeline, it has been too successful in developing the multiverse. One of the explanations for TVA’s existence is precisely to keep the flow healthy and to avoid “multiverse madness,” in reference to Marvel’s upcoming film-event: Doutor Estanho: Into the Multiverse of Madness, which the release is scheduled for 2022. In the explanation, they say that the creatures of the Nexus may end up straying from the course of the Multiverse, causing collapse and “madness.” As we saw in WandaVision, the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) is a Nexus Being. And, it seems, Loki tends to be one of them as well.

However, before speculating on the future of the anti-hero, the first episode is a real therapy session with the cheating god. Initially, he would be reset like all other criminals, but Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) emerges and has his sentence changed so that Loki can help him find a criminal who messes up deadlines and messes around with VAT. .

As expected, Loki refuses to help and tries to escape, still being hampered by the time control collar placed on him. Then Mobius begins to show bits of failure from Loki’s past, trying to get him to understand the reason for his actions. None of them seem to work, until he walks into the future and shows Tricky’s God what the future of his timeline has in store for him: the death of his mother (Rene Russo) that occurred because of him. As well as having a fundamental weight for the character, this moment strongly values Thor: O Mundo Sombrio (2013), one of the studio’s most criticized films. This ruins the head of Loki, who manages to escape and is confronted with several Infinity Gems being used as a clipboard.

Enjoy watching:

This is when the climax of the episode comes. After escaping from prison, Loki begins to be harassed by TVA agents. Instead of trying to escape from there, he realizes that his reality has been erased and his obsessive search for the Tesseract, which has resulted in countless defeats in his life, has been in vain, for there was even more power in a region where Infinity Gems had no effect. So, half shocked at the lack of meaning in existence, he returns to the room where he was imprisoned and begins to look at his life. In tears, he sees more defeats, a deal with his brother, Thor (Chris Hemsworth), until his death in Avengers: Infinite War (2018). Heartbroken by the absence of a goal and always motivated by the thirst for power, he somehow accepts his current insignificance, “comes down from the pedestal” and agrees to participate in the mission of TVA. This “therapy session” was quite unexpected in the first episode, although it did occur in every other Marvel series on Disney +. And the way it was designed here, given that he played directly with one of the MCU’s three most arrogant characters, is one of the highlights of this first episode.

Then, at the end of the episode, when Loki agrees to work with Mobius, it is revealed that the demon that appears in a stained glass window in France was not Mephisto, as some speculated, but Loki himself. And the mission of the God of Cheating with TVA would be to find this other Loki, capture him, and prevent him from messing up the deadlines.

Theory time

The motivation of this (or that) other Loki has not yet been revealed. We only know that this criminal version steals weapons charges that reset other timelines. It would not be absurd to assume that the “Evil Loki” had his reality erased by TVA and, with nowhere to return, he decided to take revenge on the agency by preventing it from destroying the reality of others. Besides being an interesting approach, reversing the roles of heroes and villains, it can result in a well-crafted plot with a lot of potential.

Going from a possible theory to a confirmed theory, this first episode showed that fans got part of the plot right because of a scene in the trailer. When the preview came out, many believed the scene of Loki jumping from a plane was related to a historic case in the United States. And isn’t it?

DB Cooper’s sketch served as the basis for Loki’s costume.

During the sequence in which Mobius shows parts of Loki’s past on a screen, he plays a video from the 1970s when Loki hijacked a plane, demanded a $ 200,000 ransom, and parachuted after getting the money. Considered the only aerial crime in US history to have been solved without being solved, Dan B. Cooper’s bomb threat unfolded exactly as shown in the series. And the criminal was never found, because he fled without a trace. According to the series, he was never taken to be Loki and to have been transported by Bifrost to Asgard. The cause? Well, Thor won a bet… This imprint of historical events from the past that unfold due to the influence of Loki and the company is a success that can give the series some memorable moments, if it is. explored.

Anyway, while not the most innovative narrative-wise, Loki’s first episode is very well executed and already gives a hint of what to expect from this series. In other words, it fulfills its role well and opens the door to what looks like another good Marvel series that we will be following for the next five weeks.