The first season of Loki – and it is specifically the first season of a show rather than a complete story like Wandavision was, since a season two has already been confirmed by Marvel – has been a tumultuous one. The first episode plucked out the protagonist from a point earlier in his character arc, and had to dedicate its time to getting them up to speed on where the audience expects them to be. The second sets up an engaging premise and Buddy-cop duo that could support a whole series. The third tears that down and gives us a secondary protagonist. The fourth reveals the proposed main villains of the show as a facade. The fifth (and probably the strongest of the bunch) gives us the unbridled chaos promised by the concept of an infinite amount of Tom Hiddlestons.
This puts a lot of the strain on the final episode, which starts where the fifth episode gets off. Loki and Sylvie have gone to the end of time and sneaked their way past a giant cloud monster, to a castle where the person behind all of this is hiding. That person, the so-called “He Who Remains”, is revealed to us early in the episode, a godlike and irreverent being played by Jonathan Majors. Anybody who has read the comics – or anyone who, like me, is online and listens to people who have read the comics – will immediately identify him as a version of Kang the Conqueror, a time-travelling villain who has already been announced to appear in the MCU later (in 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania).
Majors is magnetic in the role. He plays the part with a theatrical panache, clearly enjoying himself as he teleports around, casually lounging on all surfaces and eating apples as he delivers ominous speeches. Marvel is clearly investing in more openly fun villains, as evidenced by Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha in Wandavision, and this version of Kang is clearly in that mold, and is very enjoyable to watch.
The problem is, the episode he’s stuck in is very boring.
The structure of the episode renders the protagonists inactive very early on. It brings them to the castle looking for answers, and they don’t have much to do but wait for those answers. First they meet Miss Minutes, who speaks to them before leaving, and their situation doesn’t change them. Then they meet Kang, who immediately invites them to come and receive exposition. They try to impact the plot by attacking him, but he simply teleports away every time they do – since he knows everything that is going to happen.
This is actually a really interesting idea that the episode brings up. Kang knows everything that will happen to them, every word they say. He looks over the entire flow of time and ensures that it proceeds as it is supposed to, editing out the branches that don’t fit. He is essentially the author of the story they exist in, and he speaks like one. He literally hands them a script at one point containing every line of their dialogue. He talks about character journeys and quests, prompting them at various points to make a choice, like an author plotting out their story would. He mentions “crossing the threshold”, a specific step in Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”. This is a true post-modern conflict; Loki and Sylvie have realised they are in a story, and now are trying to break out and kill the author.
Except, as Kang explains, they are still in the story. He knows what is going to happen. He is kind of an avatar of the Author, rather than the author himself. The true villain, the true Kang, the true author, is somewhere beyond, in the midsts of time. He is a shadowy figure that will come to lay waste to them all if the story is disturbed, like a disgruntled writer scribbling out bad lines with a pen. This is the essence of the danger Kang explains in this episode – if he is killed, then the multiverse war will resume, billions will die, and a bigger, scarier Kang will take control.
All of this renders Loki and Sylvie essentially static for a good half-hour of the episode, until the point that Kang (somewhat arbitrarily) declares they have “crossed the threshold”. It doesn’ come at a moment relevant to any character actions, but just the moment the exposition is finished. It’s rarely a good idea to render your protagonists so passive in the story, but that’s what happens here. They become receptacles for lore dumps. This show has been compared multiple times to Doctor Who in its aesthetic, and its ability to casually jump across time and space, but unfortunately the resemblance bears out in this episode, to the even more turgid finale of season twelve, The Timeless Children, where the protagonist is also rendered literally inactive, so she can receive a massive lore drop from the villain.
Let’s talk about that lore-drop too. It’s presented as a big twist, a meaningful load of information that changes the characters’ perspectives on the events. Yet, the actual contents of the lore don’t fundamentally change anything we already knew. I complimented the information video in episode 1 that explained the purpose of the Time Variance Authority: Once upon a time, there were many universes. They ended up fighting each other, and the multiverse was chaos. The Timekeepers came and decided there should be one universe, so they set up the TVA to keep one single universe under control. They control time under the premise that if they don’t, Very Bad Things will happen. Loki pretty much immediately calls this out as fascist bullshit and fights against them.
The information Kang gives us is essentially the exact same information, with a couple of names changed. Once upon a time, Kang discovered there were many universes. They ended up fighting each other, and the multiverse was chaos. Kang decided there should be one universe, so he set up the TVA to keep one single universe under control. He controls time under the premise that if he doesn’t, Very Bad Things will happen. It’s the same story. The only difference is the name is swapped. And let’s be very clear – the name does not matter. The fact that this character is Kang the Conqueror is meaningful only for comics fans that recognise it. Even for them, it doesn’t really matter, because the MCU version of the character will of course be different, with a different look, an actor imbuing him with their performance, altered motivations and plotlines. This character could be called Flimflam the Almighty and it wouldn’t make a difference. This is a television show that should stand on its own, and Flimflam the Almighty means as much to the show as we have seen it so far as Kang the Conqueror does.
Bizarrely, our protagonist reacts to these revelations as if they mean anything. While before he called the TVA out as bullshit, he now takes Flimflam’s words at face value. I honestly struggle to see why. You could argue that Flimflam is very impressive and his mastery over time justifies believing that he has godlike omniscience and knows exactly what will happen – but the TVA were stupendously impressive too. They also handed Loki a script with everything he ever said, and were so powerful that Infinity Stones were used as paperweights. The justification given in the show is that Loki, as a liar, can tell when somebody’s lying. Not only is that not consistent with other versions of the character (this guy got tricked by Thor in Ragnarok, remember), but it’s also just an arbitrary justification that means nothing to me, the viewer.
I don’t actually believe that Flimflam is lying about any of this. It’s clear that Marvel want to set him up as a Big Bad, and it makes sense to believe what he says based on that. But that doesn’t justify any in-universe character actions. The story hinges on Loki believing and effectively siding with Flimflam, but I’m at a loss for why he does so. Again, he doesn’t believe Ravonna or the TVA when they claim that the Timekeepers control the flow of time for the greater good, and why does it matter whether those Timekeepers are in fact space lizards, or robots, or Kang the Conqueror, or Flimflam the Almighty? It doesn’t. This revelation could’ve come at the end of episode 4 and would have changed nothing.
There’s also the uncomfortable fact that the TVA was explicitly linked to fascist institutions and metaphorical queer opression earlier in the season. It made perfect sense – what is more fascist and oppressive that an organisation that insists it knows the “correct” way for a person to exist, and kills anyone who diverts from that part. That was good, juicy stuff when it seemed like we were revving up to a revolutionary finale, where the heroes do go and overthrow the fascists, kill the author, and bring true freedom to the universe. But this turn changes all that. It’s now a story about how it’s dangerous to upset existing structures, and that even if the organisations in place now are bad, they should be kept in place because they apparently prevent something worse. It’s a dull, reactionary mindset to have, and it’s horrific to think about the moment you try to compare it to any real-world equivalent. It’s the “Mussolini made the trains run on time” argument, and it’s exhausting to see infecting what should be escapist entertainment.
The closest thing to a justification for Loki’s actions comes in the form of his confession to Sylvie that all he wants is for her to be safe. The music swells and they share a passionate kiss. The show has been framing this pair as romantic since episode 4, and if I’m honest, it’s been a millstone on the show ever since. There are some corners of the internet that are debating whether or not this is “problematic” or incestuous, and I have to say, that’s a load of nonsense. Who cares if you snog your alternate universe equivalent? Go nuts with the clonefucking, I say. It’s not anything that has any relevance to real life, so why should anyone have a problem with it. What I do have a problem with that it’s the most boring possible option for these two characters.
The idea of a gender-swapped version of your protagonist is really fertile ground for character exploration. Like it or not, sex and gender play an intense role in the way we all interact with ourselves and the world around us. Even if we buck against assigned roles, the existence of those roles inherently affects us. It’s a really interesting idea to take a character and explore how a different gender might affect the composition of their personhood. However, we didn’t really get that. What we did get was a pretty standard-issue love story. Two people meet, they bicker, they get to know each other, realise that they’re alike in some ways, fall in love, and have a big kiss. It’s a cookie-cutter recipe from every rom-com ever made. So this originally very unique dynamic between two characters becomes one of the least unique things about the show. It’s boring, it’s unimaginative, and I’ve seen it before.
I also want to mention the spectre of Loki’s bisexuality, confirmed in episode 3. To preface: I am saying this as a bisexual woman. There has always been an issue with media portrayals of bisexuality. For a start, they’re always reluctant to say the word “bisexual”, and Loki is no exception. It is couched in vague references and stock phrases. And when it is mentioned, it is often used like decoration, as it kind of is here. To be fair, it is tough to avoid any stereotype about bisexuality. We’re called gays in denial and straight people looking for attention, so if you pair a bisexual character with either gender, you’re unavoidably playing into stereotypes. Even if you try to alternate 50/50, that’s its own stereotype that doesn’t reflect most bi people’s experience.
And I want to be very clear – a bi person dating somebody of the opposite gender is no less bi for it. But. This show is filled with many male versions of Loki, and several other male characters. Loki has no romantic tension with any of them. In isolation, there is nothing wrong with that. But the show has made a choice here. It chose to introduce one female variant, and then decided that the best use for that character was as a love interest. On paper, that’s fine, but there is no doubt in my mind that if Sylvie were a male variant, there would be no love story here. It reeks of enforced heterosexuality. Marvel can pay lip service to queer representation in one-off lines, but when faced with two opposite-sex leads, it can only default to romance, and would never consider a romance between two same-sex leads.
The show ends with Loki returning to the TVA, now not recognised by Owen Wilson (who, sadly, was criminally underused in the back half of the season). He realises the multiverse has started to collapse. Kang is dead, and so the nastier Kang is coming. Cue theme music. It’s a cliffhanger, a set-up for movies yet to come, and a season two likely many years away. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of set-up – it was clear from episode one that this series was going to set up the Multiverse of Madness. But the way it is handled renders everything else irrelevant. Loki becomes irrelevant in his own story, and the set-up is all that matters. He doesn’t cause the multiverse – that’s done by Sylvie. He doesn’t prevent it, or even affect it – he is left only to react. We have more content to create, we can’t be dealing with this problem now! Character arcs and meaningful conclusions disappear, crushed in the service of set-up. The author cannot die, because more content needs to be written. Everything must be in service of the future.
This is an issue Marvel has often been accused of, and I haven’t usually agreed. But that was the overwhelming feeling that I was left with here. The show went through many different phases, touched on many different premises, but it never committed to anything. It never coalesced into an actual show. It was entertaining for sure. The actors were brilliant, the sets and music sparkled, the direction was engaging, the ideas it threw up were really rich. But it’s not a show. It’s six episodes of set-up that might as well disappear into the aether now they have done their job. It’s a puff of air that we have passed through on the way to more content. It was fine. Good, even. But that’s about all it is.
Episode Grade: D
Season Grade: B-
Insect Reflection 