Loki: What the Must Watch reviewers think

Thursday 24 June 2021, 8:52

Every week, the Must Watch podcasters Hayley Campbell and Scott Bryan review the biggest TV and streaming shows.

This week Morgan Jeffrey from the Radio Times joins Hayley (while Scott’s on holiday) to share thoughts on Loki on Disney Plus.

Tom Hiddleston reprises his role as the Marvel villain (and sometimes anti-hero) Loki for this spin off series. After the events of Avengers: Endgame, an alternate Loki is captured by the Time Variance Authority, a bureaucratic organisation that exists outside of time and space.

Disney +

Morgan says: “Marvel does Doctor Who”

“I would say if you’re not a Marvel fan, this is not going to turn you around. It’s very sci-fi and it’s quite dense in its mythology, but if you are a Marvel fan and heavily invested, I would say yes it’s a Must Watch. Loki is a treat. You had WandaVision, which kicked off the Marvel run of the Disney+ series. That was more off-beat and surreal and then you had The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which was more of a straightforward action movie. This is a bit like Marvel does Doctor Who. So for me, it ticks all the boxes.

“Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson just have this really easy chemistry between them. They’ve worked together before and that chemistry really helps to sell the outrageous sci-fi concepts that Loki throws at you. There is a lot of exposition, particularly in the first episode to set up the series. That one’s very talky and what carries it is the double act of Tom Hiddleston as Loki and Owen Wilson as Mobius.

“On top of that, you do have with Loki all of the gloss and the blockbuster sheen that you expect from Marvel so that’s not lacking but actually I think that is what Disney+ shows offer that the movies don’t. Movies are more concerned with the ‘crash, bang, wallop’ of the action. You can’t really replicate that on the small screen so what can you do? You can do something that’s more focused on character, which Is what WandaVision very much did. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier maybe didn’t as much and that’s why most people say it’s the weakest of the three we’ve seen so far.

“Tom Hiddleston has been playing Loki now for over a decade, I think this show does something new with the character, which is what I like. By having him in thrall to these god-like beings at the TVA, you’ve got this arrogant supervillain, who’s on the back foot a little bit and that’s a lot of fun to watch. You really get to see a new side of him - something that the movies maybe wouldn’t have had the time to explore amidst all the pyrotechnics and so on.”

Disney +

Hayley says: “I really like what they’re doing with these Marvel shows”

“I think this is a Must Watch, but you should definitely watch two episodes before you decide if you’re in or out. Things only starts happening in the second episode and my opinion changed towards the end of that one. I really like all the Time Variant Authority office stuff. They're like the accountants in The Good Place, keeping track of everything that’s happening, making sure it’s happening the way it’s supposed to. And if any tricksters like Loki start interfering with the timeline, they go out and arrest them.

"That’s basically all you need to know. But I agree with Morgan, that you definitely need to be a Marvel fan in order to understand all the mythology, but only because Marvel loves to overcomplicate things and they make this sound more complicated than it is. If you just accept that it's time travel madness and stop trying to figure out every little detail, it could be fun. But this is a show that’s tailor-made to be one of those you have to pause in order to explain to the person who’s sitting beside you because the first episode is trapped in The Bog of Eternal Exposition. By the end of second, the stuff starts to happen and it turns into this sort of buddy-cop movie, or a parallel universe Doctor Who.

“I really like what they’re doing with these Marvel shows. They're making interesting choices, although Loki is much more interesting than The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, which was a more standard superhero thing. I really like the fact that they have taken what is currently the world’s most mainstream entertainment and they’re choosing to do interesting stuff with it. They could very easily just make it a superhero thing with one guy punching another guy and they don’t. We’ve seen some other superhero stuff recently that was horrible, most notably Jupiter’s Legacy on Netflix. We hated it. But this one is weird and strange, like Marvel’s version of Doctor Who. I like it.”