I was enchanted by the idea of a Loki mini-series, as Tim Hiddleston breathed new life into this mischief maker in the Avengers movies he turned up in. Unfortunately, he was let down by a script filled with so many pot holes that it was amazing that he managed to get out of it alive, well almost anyway.
Fortunately, the 6-episode series doesn't take itself too seriously, so you can forgive the many oversights. However, the episodes quickly begin to drag once the plot is revealed and we are left with a whole bunch of time jumping in a desperate effort to avoid the TVA hunters.
Without giving away too many spoilers, I will sort through this mess to try to make sense of the time construct the writers conjured up to explain how the Marvel universe is held together. They drew from everywhere and anywhere without successfully tying much of it together. If Sylvie, Loki's female alter ego, was pruned as a child, she should still be a child as time essentially stops once you are removed from your timeline. Yet, the writers wanted to create a romance within the story, so Sylvie somehow manages to age a few years so that Loki won't add pedophilia to his long list of crimes against humanity. I guess it was all that hiding out in apocalyptic timelines.
I don't know if it was a coincidence that the Time Variance Authority has the same acronym as the Tennessee Valley Authority, but given all the love for nostalgia in this series I assume the writers picked up on it. Retro is cool, as the sets look more Steampunk than state of the art, especially for an organization that apparently was created in the 31st century. Maybe He Who Remains fell in love with Giger and socialist realism art, morphing the two together for his central headquarters.
As it turns out, time is a fascist construct holding us all together whether we like it or not. These time lines are kind of like the rings of Saturn and woe be it to anyone who tries to jump across them Loki, being a mischief maker, openly flaunts this order and is pruned from his timeline by Mobius, a detective of sorts, who is after a bigger troublemaker, who has been killing TVA hunters right and left. Owen Wilson makes for the perfect straight man to Tim Hiddleston's half-crazed demeanor, making the first two episodes a lot of fun to watch. When we finally do meet this terror of the time line, the action shifts as Loki tries to figure out what to make of his female alter ego.
Loki almost becomes incidental. He is constantly being upstaged by Sylvie, who seems to have greater powers than he does, namely the ability to "enchant" the hunters and do away with them as she so pleases. Turns out the hunters were not raised in test tubes but were variants themselves at some point. She digs deep into the recesses of their memories to pull up who they were before and use it against them.
The sole occupation of the TVA is to keep the circular time line from branching. Each time Sylvie or Loki cause mischief, the time line starts to branch, so the TVA sends out hunters to prune them. The greatest fear is that Loki and Sylvie will come together and create a "nexus event" that will be unmanageable, and send the timelines branching out of control.
Women dominate this series, literally. The titular head of the TVA is a young woman who goes by the name of Ravonna Renslayer. She seems to be the perfect bureaucrat but she becomes ever more treacherous the more you find out about her. Perhaps the most interesting female character is Hunter B-15, a ruthless TVA hunter who doesn't take any guff from anyone, certainly not Loki, who finds himself stripped of his powers once inside the central authority. What's also interesting is that the authority figures are all Black. I'm not sure what the motivation was here, but it is clear that Black lives matter in this television series.
Ravonna is none too pleased by Sylvie's innate gift and is determined to do away with her once and for all. However, Mobius, who has faithfully served Ravonna for years, comes to realize all is not what it seems at the TVA and begins to doubt his origin. Ravonna tries to lead him back to the straight and narrow but it is too late, and he ends up getting pruned too. Sorry.
However, like in the American Horror Story franchise, no one really dies, they just get consigned to a time zone lorded over by a smoke monster that appeared to come straight out of the old Lost television series. I suppose everything is fair game when you can play with time the way "He Who Remains" does. We can thank Jonathon Majors for making the master of time very entertaining. Unfortunately, the first season comes to an abrupt halt and we have to wait for season two to see how it all turns out. Maybe they will tighten up the script a bit over winter.
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