I watched Loki. On one hand, I enjoyed it. On the other hand, if I were the casting department at Disney/Marvel, I would spend all my days aflame with resentment that I went to all this trouble of casting the perfect people and ensuring they all have excellent chemistry together, only to have the company chuck the whole thing out the window by trying to use six episodes to tell a full television season’s worth of stories.
My frustration with Loki is partly a bigger frustration with the trends in TV. Around the time of your Mad Mens and your Breaking Bads, we as a culture recognized that not every television show needs to run for twenty-two episodes per season. Hooray! Good point, us! As we rounded the corner on your Game of Throneses, we acceded to the premise that good television should have shorter seasons and that should be the move and that’s what we’re doing now.
It turns out I really hate this and I want to go back to before.
What I love about TV, and I’m discovering it’s kind of a major thing that I love about TV, is that its format makes space for weirdness and experimentation. TV shares this trait with comics, actually! Comic books get to tell big, weird, sprawling stories with detours and cul-de-sacs and bottle episodes and one-offs that they never have to explain and we don’t even care. There’s a playfulness that’s possible in long-running comics and television shows that you don’t get in other formats. I’m thinking of the Hawkeye comic from the dog’s point of view, or the WicDiv that’s all magazine profiles; the “Midnight” episode in Tennant’s run on Doctor Who, or “The One Where No One’s Ready” on Friends; “The Zeppo” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
These episodes and issues are often created for practical reasons such as Catherine Tate is exhausted and needs a bit of a rest, but the results can be absolute magic. Because they don’t need to move the story along too much, these stories can dig their teeth into the characters and relationships. The payoff is deeper immersion in the world or the characters; and besides that, going on these little detours are just fun.
I know that short seasons are the fashion now. I don’t even necessarily object to it in some cases, because some stories just do make better sense in six or ten or twelve episodes. But other stories, particularly when they involve a gradual shift in the protagonist’s character, require more space to breathe. Loki on Disney+ should have been one of those. (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier should too, but if I wrote a post about that one it would just end up being a list of St. Bernard Parish-specific topics I believe the show should have covered, and I admit that my curiosity about Sarah Wilson’s views on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project and its impact on the fishing industry is, um, niche.)
What Actually Happens in Loki
Here’s a quick rundown of what happens in Loki, with spoilers: Loki from 2012 steals the Tesseract and goes on the lam. A mysterious agency called the Time Variance Authority nabs him and brings him in; their job is to ensure that the main, preordained, least-chaos timeline is preserved. The TVA’s best soldier, Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), and their judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), want to disintegrate him. Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) wants to use him to find a time terrorist who’s killing all the TVA’s soldiers. Why? Because the time terrorist is another variant version of Loki, and Mobius thinks they can use Loki to find Other Loki.
Loki figures out that the Variant is hiding out in times of disaster, and he tracks her down. The Variant is a woman version of Loki, called Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). She and Original Recipe Loki team up, sort of, and go on the run and develop a grudging respect. Sylvie reveals that the TVA has been lying to its employees, who are all variants nabbed from different points in the timeline and wiped of their memories.
Loki meets a whole bunch of other Loki variants, and he and Sylvie find a way to get to the person who’s really pulling the strings at the TVA. He (Kang) offers them a choice: They can kill him, ushering in entire chaos, or they can become the new rulers of the TVA, ushering in a new era with similar rules but maybe different policies? Loki wants to do new policies, which Sylvie takes to mean he wants to Rule Everything. They fight; she stabs Kang to death; and Loki ends up in an alternate universe version of the TVA. Roll credits.
This is. a very good cast. The episode where Sylvie and Loki form a grudging respect as they work together to escape a doomed world is top-notch, mostly because it actually gives these characters some room to breathe. Tom Hiddleston and Sophia Di Martino are great together! I actually really felt it in the following episode when Loki thinks Sylvie is dead. I felt an emotion. It is the only emotion probably that I felt throughout this whole godforsaken series, which I’m mad about because it’s a whole lot of fun and I liked it, but then also it’s a bowl of piping hot nonsense and it didn’t have to be.
Loki spends virtually no time on its characters, assuming–I guess–that we’ll be sufficiently charmed by Owen Wilson’s broken nose and Tom Hiddleston’s big sad eyes and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s everything that we won’t notice they’re ciphers. In the rare instances that the show needs a character to have a motivation for a thing, it carefully explains to us, in dialogue, the type of person this character is and how that has led naturally to what they are about to do. Why do Hunter B-15 and Mobius care that they’re variants? What sort of life does Loki want to lead, ideally? Both the MCU and Loki the show give us some hints of the answers to these things, but that’s all they are: hints.
What Could Have Been
In an eighteen-episode season, we’d start the same way this one starts, with Loki getting recruited to the TVA to hunt down the other Loki. The five episodes following the pilot could function like procedurals, so we’d get a sense of how the TVA functions on a normal day and also how Loki functions on a normal day. How do they win fights? What are their weak points? What things is the Variant doing that’s really fucking them up?
The gift of serialized television–and it’s weird that Marvel doesn’t seem to know this because it’s kind of central to the genre–is the ability to make a single episode do double duty for you. Every episode should do at least two of four things: advance the plot; explore the world; build the characters; advance the relationships. These first six episodes would be the ones where we get to know Loki, Mobius, and Hunter B-15, and you could slide a lot of exposition in there without, like, scenes and scenes of Mobius sitting at a desk explaining things. Have one episode where the disaster-of-the-week hits Hunter B-15 in a personal place. Have one episode where Renslayer has to come back for one last job and we get to see how she and Mobius used to work together in the old days before she got promoted. Show us why the TVA trusts Mobius enough as a company man that they’re letting him take Loki along for the ride.
End the sixth episode with the Sylvie reveal. Episodes seven through twelve are dedicated to the build-up of Sylvie and Loki’s relationship. One of these episodes could also be a Sylvie-centric episode, where she’s running through space and time doing chaos! You’d love that! It could even be a mirror episode to something from the first set of six episodes. Like maybe in episode four, we saw the TVA come very close to catching her but they’re always one step behind her; now let’s see those same events from her perspective. Build in some lovely parallels between her idealism and Renslayer’s, build up their enmity so the internet can write some real good enemies-to-lovers fic about it. Then on to the stuff where Loki and Sylvia are on the doom planet trying to get off the doom planet before doom o’clock.
Back at the ranch, spend a lil time with Mobius and Renslayer working on that relationship, which we also do actually need to care about oh my God this show makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. And the driving force for Hunter B-15 to realize she wants to break free from the TVA is sitting right there! Why didn’t they use it! If we’d just spent six episodes learning that Hunter B-15 will do anything to protect her fellow TVA soldiers, it would make a ton of sense for her to be bewildered and angry to lose C-20 in such an unceremonious, unexplained way. Have her start digging into what happened there, maybe find a few hints that all is not well. Toward the end of this run of episodes, Sylvie can tell Loki that the TVA staff are all variants, leading us into:
The final six episodes! Wherein things come to a crisis point with Mobius and Hunter B-15, Loki and Sylvie figure out next steps, and they use the encounters with the other Lokis to learn more about the TVA and who might be pulling the strings. You know, foreshadow the ending instead of making poor Jonathan Majors deliver a twenty-minute monologue in the final episode. Imagine the comedic potential of a whole episode watching variously long flashbacks of various Lokis getting variously closer to figuring out TVA stuff. Ironically, the alligator gets the closest. Then have the Loki/Sylvie betrayal and the fracturing of the timeline. The end.
Why Would You Waste a Time Loop Like This?
If you have managed to sense, over the course of this post, my frustration with Loki and its goddamn six-episode length, please know that it came to a head in episode four, when they wasted a whole time loop premise on some nonsense with Sif’s hair. I fucking love time loops. I love them. Imagine a proper time loop episode where Sylvie and Loki are both stuck in time loops where they actually get to figure out some stuff about themselves, instead of Loki just twiddling his thumbs until Mobius swings by to save him. I cannot abide a wasted time loop, and this, somehow, was my breaking point.
Much as I love things about living in the era of Peak TV, I do wish that writers and showrunners and, like, conglomerates would keep in mind that the point of television isn’t meant to be a mad assembly line of as much plot as possible delivered at breakneck speed. (I can’t believe I’m saying this. I can’t believe this is what Marvel has driven me to. Y’all don’t know how much I love plotty shows. If everything could be as much like season 2 of Vampire Diaries as possible that would honestly be great for me.) As it turns out, character development is necessary scaffolding for plot! If all you’re doing is dumping a bunch of hot charismatic action figures into a box and shaking the box, don’t be surprised when the result is lifeless.