Loki Premiere Spoilers Below
Loki, as usual, will find his way out of any detrimental situation except in the hands of Thanos, but the Disney+ series takes place before the events of Avengers: Infinity War. Towards the end of the Loki premiere, the shows titular God of Mischief is at it again. As Tom Hiddleston’s Loki variant plots his escape from the Time Variance Authority, he searches for the Tesseract — the glowing blue cube he used to bring the alien invasion to New York and to escape his imprisonment on Asgard. In the TVA, Loki finds himself powerless.
Once Loki retrieves the cube after threatening to turn a desk worker into fish, he finds loose Infinity Stones just laying around inside a desk drawer. As if they are of no importance.
“Infinity Stones?” Loki asks Casey, shocked. “How … how do you have these?”
“Oh, we actually got a lot of those,” Casey responds casually. “Yeah, some of the guys use them as paper weights.”
Up to this point, Loki didn’t believe what he’s been told about the TVA and its responsibility to protect the “Sacred Timeline.” He finally accepts that he’s inside probably the most powerful place in the entire universe.
Loki faces the hard truth that he is not “burdened with glorious purpose” after all. He actually has no real purpose at all. His life has been a predetermined path controlled by the Time Keepers. Loki sees his life end in the hands of the Mad Titan, Thanos. This part of the episode was actually pretty emotional as Loki watches good and tragic moments in his life. We’ll get to that later.
But just like the Marvel movies that developed Loki from a mischievous God to a selfless brother sacrificing his life, he gained a new purpose in the Loki premiere. A new purpose that will set the stage for the rest of the Disney+ series. He must help the TVA hunt down another version of himself that’s terrorizing another timeline.
What is The Time Variance Authority?
First of all, we’d like to applaud the design of the TVA. We’re loving the mid-century retro futurism look and feel — the 1950/60s view of how the future would be. It’s like Walt Disney’s vision of Tomorrowland.
The Loki premiere is mostly an introduction to the TVA. Loki goes through the bureaucratic processing of the Time Variance Authority. A variant is basically anyone who wanders off the course of their predetermined timeline. If you don’t follow the procedures correctly, you’ll find yourself being vaporized. Actually, even if you do follow it correctly, you can still be vaporized.
“Long ago, there was a vast, multiversal war. Countless unique timelines battled each other for supremacy, nearly resulting in the total destruction of, well, everything!” an animated, clock named Miss Minutes says. “But then, the all-knowing Time Keepers emerged, bringing peace by reorganizing the multiverse into a single timeline: the Sacred Timeline. Now, the Time Keepers protect and preserve the proper flow of time for everyone and everything.”
Miss Minutes explains in the Loki premiere that variants like Loki create something called “Nexus Events” when they don’t follow the Time Keeper’s path. When that happens, they are potential chances of another multiverse war.
The TVA’s task force called Minutemen, like Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15, captures variants to answer for their crimes before a judge sentences them to be “reset.” TVA agents like Mobius (Owen Wilson), who is the only one who see’s Loki as an asset, specializes in tracking down dangerous variants like the Loki who’s been killing Minutemen.
The Loki Premiere Showed Us The God of Mischief Can Be Broken Down and Humbled
Through multiple MCU films, we always see Loki as a mischievous scamp that redeemed himself eventually before meeting his fate. This Loki variant isn’t that Loki…yet.
After seeing that even all-powerful Infinity Stones are just paper weights inside the TVA, Loki finally understands that any attempt to escape is pointless. Loki willingly returns to the interrogation room he’d been trying to escape to watch the rest of his cinematic life. This was an emotional moment in the Loki premiere as see’s his mother’s death in Thor: The Dark World, his father dying and some touching brotherly love in Thor: Ragnarok to finally seeing his own death in Avengers: Infinity War. This was a clever way to pack all the character growth that Loki had gone through after the invasion in New York — and it left him emotionally broken and humbled.
“I don’t enjoy hurting people,” Loki says. “I don’t enjoy it. I do it because I have to, because I’ve had to. It’s part of the illusion; it’s the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear.”
Just like Wanda Maximoff in WandaVision faced a lifetime of loss and grief, and Sam struggling to take up the mantle of Captain America in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, the Loki series will explore who the God of Mischief is with different variations of himself in a vast multiverse.
Loki Series Will Have Great Impact On The MCU
As the Loki premiere explained how a variant can have major implications to other timelines, Marvel Studios president and chief content officer, Kevin Feige, told Empire Magazine that the Loki series will have a significant impact for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“It’s tremendously important,” Feige said. “[Loki] perhaps will have more impact on the MCU than any of the shows thus far.”
This could be a potential hint that Loki will lead into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which Loki head writer Michael Waldron also wrote. And just like WandaVision, the latest Marvel Studios series is shaping up to be another story that can potentially set off more multiverse events.
New episodes of Loki premiere every Wednesday.
