Loki's Location

A strangely dull Loki last night considering all that happened in it. Maybe I was too tired from a busy day, I don't know. It came from writer Eric Martin whose previous most prominent credit was writing a Lifetime movie called The Other Mother. Really, Disney? This is the best you can do? Martin also worked as an assistant on Rick and Morty so, along with showrunner Michael Waldron, who wrote an episode of Rick and Morty, it seems someone at Disney, maybe Kevin Feige, felt the MCU needed to move to a tone somewhat akin to that cartoon series. I haven't seen Rick and Morty but I feel like the odd plot problems on Loki do seem like they come from people trying to write a series drama who are too used to working entirely with cartoon logic.

I found myself darkly amused, contemplating the possibility that the deaths of Owen Wilson's and Tom Hiddleston's characters last night were permanent. The show did a good job setting them up, establishing a relationship between them, and allowing chemistry to accrue between the actors. So there is at least some emotional weight when simple-hearted Mobius feels betrayed, though it's more and more frustrating that he and everyone else seems to be cleverer than Hiddleston's Loki. Killing him off now, though, would be sort of like killing off Scully in season one of The X-Files. The possibility of one or both of these characters really being dead would out-boner the boner joke from WandaVision. Hiddleston's Loki appearing in the post credits sequence would seem to suggest the writers aren't quite going that far. Probably.

I do like the idea of a romance between Loki and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) and the weird narcissism of it. Though it's still not as weird as actual Norse mythology, of course.

This one episode sets up drama, and escalates to a showdown, between Sylvie and Ravonna (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). I felt like I was supposed to be more interested in it than I was. Even less satisfying was the sudden importance of Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku). When Sylvie shows her her true past she says, "I looked happy," as though she were seeing her memories in third person. This is a clear example of Eric Martin thinking like a cartoon writer, failing to get into the head of a character. She should have said, "I was happy."

I liked the design of the Time Keepers, being pretty close to their appearance in the comics, and the effect on their voices. Their deaths were another thing that felt way too premature.

A lot of this show reminds me of arguments I used to have with kids in Junior High School when my friends and I used to create our own fictional beings. One of us would create one all powerful being and then another kid would say, "My all powerful being is even more powerful." Then another kid would say, "My guy can eat planets!" and another kid would, "My guy can eat the universe!" I think of this as the moment I was born as a fiction writer, the moment when I realised that power in itself is really, really boring.

Loki is available on Disney+.