Loki
I will start this out by saying, like many MCU fans, I love Loki as a character. The MCU, as always, had a perfect casting with Tom Hiddleston. Combined, the writers, directors and Hiddleston himself, have crafted a fun, charismatic, mischievous, dark counterpart for Thor in Loki. So, after not liking Falcon and Winter Soldier, I was very hesitant to start Loki. I wanted, no, needed Loki to be good.
And the first two episodes were good. The chemistry between Loki and Owen Wilson’s Mobius, was palpable. The ancillary characters like Renslayer, Hunter B-15 and even the very innocent pencil pusher Casey, felt real in this crazy stuck in time (out of time?) place. I believed that Renslayer and Mobius had a long history, I believed that Casey had never been in the real world and would never get a promotion. And I believed that when faced with the death of his mother as well as the things he had been trying to collect for so many years, the Infinity Stones, that Loki would have an existential breakdown.
The first two episodes were fun, funny, heartfelt, and had plenty of action and mystery. And kudos to the creators for digging into the already existing comic lines to pull out good stories.
But then we made it to the third episode. Lamentis. It was an aptly named episode. It was worse than bad Doctor Who. And I understand how cruel of an insult that is. It was a boring filler episode and almost the entire thing consisted of Loki and Sylvie walking way too slow for the situation, and talking. Massive piles of steaming exposition. And the exposition was completely out of character for Loki. There is no way Loki would have admitted any of that with anyone. Let alone some rando he just met. There could have been an argument that Loki might finally admit to himself (or a variant of himself) the stuff he spewed, but first you would have to prove that Sylvie was a Loki Variant. Because from what I’ve seen, there is no way those two are the same person, no matter where their paths veered off.
And nothing made any kind of sense. The entire episode wasn’t believable. No one acts like any character shown. And Loki … You can’t spend however many movies shaping a character and then completely ignore everything. Loki was a pathetic, mewling … you get the picture. He was not the God of Mischief. I understand the creators were trying to make Sylvie look really good next him, but you can do that without bringing Loki down uncharacteristically. It was the same thing that happened in Ant-Man and Wasp. I get that you are trying to show that the women are just as good if not better than their male counterparts, but you can do that without devaluing the other characters. And the chemistry between Loki and Sylvie was non existent. How in the world can you make such a colorful character like Loki fall flat? And for the first time it felt like Tom Hiddleston was acting.
And as frustrating as the episode was, it was even more frustrating that it was completely unnecessary. The only important nugget of info we needed was the reveal that all of the people working for the Time Lords, er I mean Time-Keepers, were all variants themselves. So this entire episode could have been just one line of dialog. So frustrating.
I’ll probably continue to watch Loki next week, hoping it gets better, but I don’t have much hope. So until Wednesday I’ll go back to watching Sweet Tooth and trying to keep cool.
