Loki is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's third foray into the world of television, following WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Photo / Jasin Boland / Marvel
Loki is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's third foray into the world of television, following WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Photo / Jasin Boland / Marvel
Tom Hiddleston's Loki of Asgard is back and once again "burdened with glorious purpose" in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's third foray into the TV world, which might just be its best yet.
Following the successful transition of the MCU into television with the acclaimed Earth-based WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki effectively resurrects one of its best-loved characters opens up a multiverse of possibilities.
Keen Marvel fans will recall that Hiddleston's God of Mischief – brother of Aussie Chris Hemsworth's God of Thunder in three Thor movies and three Avengers movies – met a noble end at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, having completed his journey from villainous protagonist to reluctant antihero.
In this scene from Thor: Ragnarok, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) stands next to his brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) Photo/ Jasin Boland / Marvel
But during the "time heist" of Avengers: Endgame, an earlier, unreconstructed version of Loki accidentally escaped the clutches of Earth's Mightiest Heroes using the Tesseract, and it's this more self-centred, Machiavellian character that audiences meet at the beginning of his first solo outing.
Following on directly from his Endgame escape, Loki is immediately taken into custody by the Time Variance Authority, a mysterious organisation that exists to protect the so-called "sacred time line", so that events unfold in the way they should according to the dictates of the even more mysterious Time Keepers. This version of Loki is an unauthorised "variant" – and his very existence has potentially created a dangerous alternative reality – so he is given the choice between being permanently "deleted" or helping the agency track down an even more dangerous variant, who is wreaking havoc across Earth's time line from the Middle Ages, to the modern day and even into apocalyptic events yet to come.
Owen Wilson's Analyst Mobius M. Mobius is well aware of Loki's penchant for lying and trickery but is convinced it takes a thief to catch a thief and the interplay between the two leads as they verbally spar and test each other's intellect and resolve is a joy to behold.
After a decade playing the part, Hiddleston knows his character backwards and easily slips between charm, humour, pathos and menace as he's made to confront his misdeeds – past, present and future – as well as his mortality.
Tom Hiddleston has been playing Loki for a decade now, his first time being in The Avengers in 2011. Photo/Marvel.
Likewise, Wilson's laconic, laidback delivery is spot on as the slightly jaded, jet ski obsessed Mobius, who is as fascinated by Loki's unpredictable, capricious and sometimes cruel nature as he is wary of it. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wunmi Musaku also impress as a suspicious judge and a no-nonsense agent respectively.
But where Loki really shines is in the world it has created. Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige says Loki will be hugely important to the MCU moving forward and it certainly looks like nothing we've ever seen before. In dreaming up the stunning aesthetic of the Time Variance Authority, writer Michael Waldron (Rick and Morty) and director Kate Herron (Sex Education), have blended the fantastical and the mundane to breathtaking effect. Drawing on Herron's own experiences as an office drone, the TVA is all coffee stains, roped off queues and filing trolleys, but out the window are towering retro-future vistas that hint of a world just beginning to be revealed.
If you put Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Matthew Weiner's Mad Men in a blender, you'd come up with something resembling this uniquely intoxicating cocktail of office chic and administrative drudgery.
With six hour-long episodes – and plenty of reveals and revelations in the first two alone – Loki promises more twists and tricks than its namesake and with Waldron also having penned the upcoming Doctor Strange sequel, the tantalising prospect of a lasting impact on the MCU's next phase.
