MCU series: yes spoilers

Ah okay, so that wasn't the comic book Kid Loki. Or was he? I guess he could have been a variant who caused Thor's death somehow.

EDIT: Alligator Loki without makeup.

Maybe I've been listening to too many "Relaxing thunderstorm" videos while napping lately or something, but I tried three times to watch the ending of the episode where Loki and Sylvie are trying to get inside the scary smoke monster, and fell almost instantly, deeply asleep every time. Perhaps I need to try watching it again with the sound off and captions on.

Cheap shit that was never meant to last, yet has persisted - The TIF?

Anyway, simple and elegant, generally speaking. Modernist, especially of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh school or anything of that ilk. Elegant but not overstated. Nothing overly fussy, not a fan of rococo or Louis Quinze or all that Liberace shit. Furniture I tend towards solid wood pieces, chunky may also be a word that can be usefully deployed here. 

I'm pretty sure my style is somewhere in the realm of "early 1970's mobile home", with a touch of "hobos threw this away", but if I had the means I'd go for a more retro-futuristic Barbarella aesthetic.

Welp, that was mostly boring af. Almost an entire episode of exposition, and not even necessary exposition at that imo.  

And as much as I am always prepared to roll my eyes out of my head at the Loki stans and their “no one understands Loki like we do” hand-wringing, they are absolutely right about one thing -  Loki has been really OOC throughout the entire series. I get that the studio is trying to make him less of a straight-up villain, but they’ve completely defanged him & removed the actual trickstery aspects of him, which is 100% the most interesting part of the character.

I will never understand creators who go “Hey, the audience really likes this (aspect). We should completely change it!”

I thought I had a handle on (or at least a sufficient headcanon regarding) Endgame's time travel shenanigans, but to be honest I never really understood the premise of Loki. How are there variants/alternate dimensions if there's only supposed to be one "sacred timeline"? I could have sworn the show said that the TVA's role is to make sure there's one universe and one timeline, but then it doesn't make any sense that you'd end up with a girl-Loki or alligator-Loki or any other variant of anybody to prune. Or is it that there's still a multiverse, but the TVA is monitoring events in each parallel universe so that each universe is following the correct timeline, but there's still room for variation so long as everyone behaves properly? And the role of Kang Immortus He Who Remains is to, I guess, manipulate events so that the various versions of himself are either never born or never discover each other and start another multiverse war? I'm not sure why killing him would immediately fuck everything up, but I guess that makes sense otherwise.

I’m always for character growth, but my understanding is that comics- Loki swings from ~~evil~~ to ally to slippery bastard to chaotic neutral pretty regularly, and yeah, that’s what a trickster is supposed to do, not immediately become chummy and, well, blatantly needy in from of total strangers who kidnapped him and are using coercion to get him to do what they want. 

And yeah, I’m not sure what the point of shoehorning in a hilariously masturbatory “romance” angle was - I mean obviously 
Loki would definitely fuck himself & you’ll never convince me otherwise, but it’s not like they have any intention of giving something like that that sheer weirdness it deserves. Although I’m still pretty sure it was a distractionary tactic on Sylvie’s part.

I didn’t really like it overall; I loooove me some alternate universe & time travel shenanigans, but in general, I can take or leave Loki, because they can’t actually decide if they want to use him as a villain or just an antagonist, so his characterization is very inconsistent IMO. And it definitely wasn’t the mind-fuck they were clearly aiming for. I  don’t think it hung together very well, and I think a huge part of that is because they were spending a great deal of time setting up things for the next Dr. Strange movie, rather than focusing on Loki. It’s a Loki series to the same degree that Civil War was a Captain America movie.

I think my final review is that while the budgets and movie characters are nice, it’s a shame all these shows are getting saddled with so much franchise table setting. “MCU-set Doctor Who except it’s about The Master” should have just been…a bit more fun than this?

My take is that Kang is better at time travel than Tony Stark and Tilda Swinton. As for the instant change to the TVA, my No Prize submission is that it's all due to time travel. Alternate timelines flowered and produced Kangs and the Second Multiversal War happened and a Kang came out on top. Once one Kang won, he changed things so that he had always been in charge. From Loki's perspective at the end of time this all happened immediately, but in theory the whole conflict could have been like millions of years long. But how exactly does this all work? Insert the David Tennant video from the angels episode.

Yeah, I liked the show too. A lesser Kang actor would have really made that exposition drag more. But I also agree that I'm more into the show for its vibes - particularly the music and the production design - than the actual story. In fact, I'm really not into how the show pivoted to be about Loki and Sylvie. I thought Sylvie was actually more interesting as a hidden presence than as an actual person. The show did not stick the landing for her character.

Anyway, this is my ranking for these superhero shows:

1. Loki
2. Wandavision
3. Falcon and the Winter Soldier

There HAS to be something like this involved. I mean, UnKang told Loki and Sylvie that they could run the TVA without the deception from now on...but really? How would that work? Would you just tell everyone they're variants but they HAVE to keep working to keep the timeline secure? How would you replace lost/killed employees in that case?

If only that's what it had been! Missy could (and indeed has) effortlessly anchored her own seasons where she's the lead and yes there's a lot of fun to be had there. And that's pretty much what Episode 1 was and, I think, how audiences were pretty much sold on the premise. But then that doesn't last and we get five other episodes which are just "other stuff" - usually quite fun but ultimately rather fragmentary. I still feel this show leans way more towards Legends Of Tomorrow than Doctor Who, but I get why people use Doctor Who as a useful reference point.

If I say this was the best MCU TV finale I am very much damning with faint praise. It was better than Wandavision's bog-standard MCU ending and TFATWS's foregone conclusion, but it still felt pretty shrug-worthy. It was also weirdly directed in places - Mobius's "who are you?" right at the end ought to have been the huge dramatic cliffhanger - if we're sticking with Doctor Who as an analogy, this is where the big sting would be and the theme crashes in as suddenly the rug is pulled out from under our feet! But all Loki does is pull the rug out from under our feet every episode so it's a bit "and...?"

It was also oddly underplayed and the emphasis felt off, and that's kind of Loki's problem in a nutshell. It's really exciting to have a show where anything can happen and things swap up episode by episode, but you need a really strong tonal through-line to anchor that and "hey, maybe Loki will snog Loki!" isn't it, and Sylvie isn't that interesting of a character anyway. The show just can't pick a side, so we get six episodes of entertaining but largely inconsequential stuff, even when we're discussing multiverse wars and whatnot. It's all so terribly abstract. Which also leads us to the usual MCU problem of jeopardy inflation. We threatened the whole universe with Thanos, now hark as we threaten the multiverse with He Who Remains! Yes, but but but... maybe give us a reason to care? The stakes aren't meaningfully changed they're just bigger numbers and because this episode is mostly standing-about-expositing (again - entreatingly, but still) He Who Remains might as well have been reading a fairy-tale for all the emotional impact this has, and muttered warnings about branching timelines just doesn't cut the mustard. I know the upcoming Main Range movies will cover some of this - not the stakes thing, MCU movies are not particularly great at tying Big Gods Fight to Why We Care - but that's not really an excuse for this show.


So - not bad, Hiddleson's great, but needs more to work with.

I agree with many of the comments above. My reaction at the end was "wait, what the fuck was that?" It's like Marvel watched Game Of Thrones and were like "hey, people loved this series, and it ended with a super-rushed, completely contrived, and incredibly shitty ending; that MUST have been what people loved about it!" and proceeded to give their shows super-rushed, completely contrived, and incredibly shitty endings.
I'm pretty disappointed because the first 3 or 4 episodes of Loki were great (and I still absolutely adore the 70s aesthetic and I don't care what anyone says) and then it was just, well, "shit's gonna happen in the movies and we don't want the movie-only crowd to be too confused if they didn't watch the shows too?" This is especially rich coming from Disney, since I still haven't played Kingdom Hearts 3 because I haven't played any of the 27 games that take place between 2 and 3 without which the plot makes even less sense than it would otherwise.
He Who Remains To Be Seen did have a good scene, and it's nice to be somewhat justified that the Big Bad was, indeed, who the comic book clues pointed to (the statue of Kang's dopey stripe-face outfit, Renslayer as a main character) instead of "HAY IS IT MEPHISTO COMING COULD IT BE MEPHISTO ha ha no why would you think that" and Sharon obviously being the Power Broker by like episode 3.

Eh. This is sort of how it inevitably is though, right, when the characters are so powerful? I think of the Ancient One death scene in Dr. Strange, where Tilda Swinton talks about having prevented countless world-ending events, and there's always another and another.