Is ‘Loki’ your new favorite Disney+ series?

So far, the Disney+ Marvel world has been very good but sometimes struggled to make it all the way to great. We’ve had a creatively weird show that turned into a more generic superhero conflict in the end and a show that started out as a generic superhero conflict but added in some fun and social commentary in the end. I liked both WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier a lot, so I was really looking forward to Loki. Not only is Tom Hiddleston super entertaining to watch in the title role, but everything about the teasers looked weird and fun like something out of Thor: Ragnarok or the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, my favorites in the MCU. After checking out the first two episodes, I’m even more excited to see what this show is cooking up for us in the rest of the run.

This series sees Loki immediately after escaping with the tesseract in Avengers: Engdame. He’s apprehended by the TVA or Time Variance Authority for his crimes against the timeline. From there, we meet Mobius (Owen Wilson) a TVA agent who investigates dangerous time criminals. Mobius and Loki have to team up and fight bad guys…and that’s about as much as I can tell you about the plot in a non-spoiler review.

Loki was an easy favorite back in the early days when most MCU villains weren’t quite as three-dimensional. Sure, he had his straightforward bad guy moments, but there was more to him than just a dude who wanted power or his own Iron Man suit. His relationship with Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Odin (Anthony Hopkins) was always engaging, even in Thor: The Dark World, largely considered to be one of the weaker entries in the blockbuster world of Marvel movies. There was just something so charismatic and fun about him.

And most of that can be attributed to Hiddleston’s performance. After playing Loki for so long, he really got the chance to shine in Thor: Ragnarok, which felt like the first time we truly got to see our favorite Asgardians breaking out of their “Shakespeare in the Park” box, as Tony Stark put it in the first Avengers film. Sure, Loki is the kind of guy who might literally stab you in the back, but he’s also just as likely to be the guy who would turn around and save you from real danger. That uncertainty made him interesting, and Hiddleston’s performance helped make him fun. 

We get to see a lot of that Loki in the series, and it’s actually nice to have the spotlight firmly on him in this case. Where sometimes the Disney+ shows can feel like supplemental material that’s probably skippable as far as being able to follow the plot of the MCU overall, this feels like the kind of detour we want to take. Having seen Avengers: Infinity War, we know what happened to “our” Loki, of course, but this is a different version with different experiences, so it’s more interesting to see what he’ll do in each situation. 

On top of that, the time hopping lets this show get weirder than a traditional story like The Falcon and the Winder Soldier. Weirdness was one of the things I liked most about WandaVision, so this is huge for me. “The god of mischief’s adventures with the time cops” already sounds like a fun idea, but when you amp that up with stellar performances from Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Wunmi Mosaku, then throw in a funky, retro aesthetic, you’ve got the recipe for a great show. 

So even though I can’t tell you a lot about the plot, I can tell you that Loki is absolutely worth checking out.