First Look: Loki (2021)
The awaited day is finally upon us. Disney finally hit us with Loki, its third Disney Plus exclusive series taking place post-Phase Three of Marvel Cinematic Universe. With the comfort of watching from my bed instead of having to go to the theater, I decided to give it a quick look.
Honestly, I didn’t like Wandavision. Falcon and Winter Soldier was good, but only for its comedic banter between Bucky and Sam. Truly, these exclusive shows could be just Disney’s way to emphasize that despite the two-year gap between Far From Home (2019) and Black Widow (2021), the comic book franchise still exists. Or, they want to hit Netflix hard with consecutive punches to gain more market share.
Anyway, here is my three responses to its first episode.
First: There’s the TVA (Time Variance Authority), which is the traffic-regulating police, but for time. Well, I quickly inferred about what they do from what I saw in Doraemon. They’re cool, they’re powerful, and they arrive on time.
Second: Look at the bureau itself! From the moment he steps into the headquarter, Loki goes through all the red tapes leading to his trial. All the agents working there seem to be white-collar employees who do not want to violate the procedures.
I really adore the aspect of the series. Yes, it is an overused trope; we’ve seen how The Good Place and Soul imagined how the affairs in the afterlife would look like if organized in the most rigid way possible.
However, the take is interesting since Loki is not a human; he is a god who is accustomed to the ways of Asgard, where the governance is swayed by more or less emotional decisions, not dictating SOPs and exhausting checks-and-balances.
Finally: Loki’s crisis of purpose. Mortified by the clip of himself in the other timeline, we saw how devastated he is. In Infinity War (2018), we are exposed to the unfathomed power of the Infinity Stones that wiped out half the universe. In Endgame (2019), we learned the superiority of human determination to counteract the horror, using the same stones. Yet, here, in the TVA, those stones are useless.
Here’s the question: If Time Keepers who are all-powerful and all-knowing, exists, does that mean that everything that is supposed to happen is inevitable? Does free will even exist? What is a god supposed to even do?
Anyway, this first episode is enough to make me invest in the series. It would be interesting to see how two Lokis, one ‘original’ and one changed, would fare in a face-to-face battle.
Besides, that Mobius guy looks cool.
A Kafkaesque nightmare indeed.
