‘Loki’ More Than Lives Up to Its Glorious Purpose

Disney+’s Loki is, like the trickster god himself, burdened with glorious purpose. True, it’s the third TV series from Marvel Studios this year, the latest in a salvo of episodes fired at audiences like War Machine strafing the barrier on Wakanda’s battlefield. But of the inaugural trio of series first announced by Disney+ years ago, Loki always felt like the one to watch and also the biggest gamble. WandaVision had the leeway to do whatever it wanted, as neither Wanda Maximoff or Vision were even close to as clearly defined as Tom Hiddleston’s villain. Falcon and Winter Soldier enjoyed slightly bigger profiles in the movies than the witch and the robot, but the series had the buddy action movie genre locked in. We knew what their show would look like. Loki would star just Loki… and what the hell does a show starring the God of Mischief even look like?

Fast forward a few years to June 2021 and we have the answer: Loki is a surrealist, kafkaesque mashup of True Detective and The Office—and it is a sight to behold.

All of Loki (the series) is built around Loki’s (the villain’s) most memorable line—his boast that he’s “burdened with glorious purpose.” It’s a brag that says everything you need to know about Loki. He’s vain as hell, but he acts as though his greatness is his cross to bear. He doesn’t conquer because he wants to; he conquers because he simply cannot be any less than the best. Of course this is a lie. This is part of Loki’s illusion—and illusions, among many other get-out-of-jail super-MacGuffins in the MCU—don’t work in the TVA.

The series primarily takes place in the labyrinthine headquarters of the Time Variance Authority, which is like a high-stakes DMV where not having the right paperwork could get you disintegrated—and Loki clearly sticks out.

This is why Loki’s premise is genius, despite initially feeling a little bit at odds with the character. Loki and the TVA were part of nearly opposite ends of Walt Simonson’s epic Thor run. How would the two fit together? Wouldn’t the TVA, all sci-fi bureaucracy, make more sense in a show like next year’s She-Hulk, a Marvel/legal comedy? In fact, She-Hulk’s interacted with the TVA more in the comics than Loki! But after seeing how the TVA operates, there really is no better place for Loki to be set—and it’s all because of that damn line about his glorious burden.

In the TVA, Loki learns that he has no purpose. Everything has been predetermined, by a trio of Space Lizards nonetheless. This is a “taste of your own medicine” moment, as we’re reminded that Loki’s leadership strategy was to rob all of humanity of choice. And as Agent Mobius—a wonderfully cast Owen Wilson—continually points out, none of his schemes have ever given Loki any glory. A realm where magic is worthless and choices are pointless is hell for the god of lies.

Much of the premiere episode is a two-hander between Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson, thus earning Loki the True Detective comparisons. It’s more than that, obviously, because you can’t put two actors like Hiddleston and Wilson in a room together and expect anything other than the unexpected to happen. Watching these two perform against each other is like watching a high-wire act.

Loki and Mobius are drastically different characters, but they have one thing in common: they vacillate between scary and silly, morphing not only as the narrative momentum demands, but in reaction to their scene partner. The end result are scenes where you’re never truly aware of how much Mobius or Loki knows, who is actually in control, and who is conning whom. That’s pretty perfect for a show about Loki.

Production designer Kasra Farahani and his team deserve an infinite amount of praise for the look of Loki. They, along with director Kate Herron, have created a setting that feels so creepily familiar yet so unsettlingly off. The TVA’s vibe is very Groovy Business Casual Dystopia, with shades of THX 1138, A Clockwork Orange, and The Prisoner. Everything is blazing orange or sterile concrete, and the aesthetic—the logo, propaganda posters, instruction videos—look like 1950s cereal boxes and old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. It looks like nothing we’ve seen in the MCU before, and all the TVA employees have the enthusiasm of Dunder Mifflin office drones. Space lizards, paperwork, time travel, and a mythical god in a prisoner’s jumpsuit—what the hell is this show, and what the hell isn’t this show?

This show is, top to bottom, a perfect encapsulation of what makes the MCU such a rich pop culture experience over a decade into its run. This is something that Disney, Marvel Studios, and Kevin Feige never get enough credit for: they continually take risks. At this point, the myth-makers know exactly what buttons to push to make the money machine generation billions of dollars. They could just keep pushing those buttons over and over again—but they don’t. That actually describes the MCU of 2013 to 2016, where the franchise churned out a bunch of movies about an unlikely hero who’s called to a higher purpose of stopping a bad guy from crushing buildings.

But the MCU of today? It looks like WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki—three shows that could not be more different from each other. Loki couldn’t be a bigger gamble, either. It’s a TV series that stars Tom Hiddleston as the most evil version of his character in a setting that has absolutely nothing to do with Thor and features no familiar faces from the mind of Michael Waldron, a guy who was a producer on Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty. The show should not work, but it does.

Loki (the series) was burdened with glorious purpose from the start and, unlike Loki (the character), you can consider that purpose fulfilled.

Loki premieres on Disney+ on June 9.

Stream Loki on Disney+