Spoilers

Loki – the highly anticipated and heavily trailed spin off featuring Thor’s treacherous brother and well trailed all the way back to Avengers Endgame.

The show starts right there – with Loki picking up the tesseract and making off with it. He doesn’t get very far before he’s pulled into the sphere of influence of the TVA, or Time Variance Authority. Don’t worry – if, like me, you don’t know what that is and how it fits into the Marvel universe, the show does a really rather fantastic job of world building. It’s slow but it does a lot of lifting without it feeling like there’s too much exposition going on.

Most importantly, the world building is consistently funny and smart.

If you’ve played a game called Control (and if you haven’t you should go seek it out), the aesthetic of the TVA has really serious FBC vibes going on – down to the point where the same colours and even the same retro decorations were in play. Part of me wanted to immediately fire up the game just to luxuriate further in the design of the Loki version of the TVA.

As the major new player in this series, and probably with deep implications for all of the MCU, the TVA is a really interesting organisation, presenting itself to us and to Loki with a singular purpose – to ensure that the universe unfolds as it was meant to. They hunt down errors and variants, pruning them to ensure time doesn’t get all out of whack.

In a series of really playful and then, poignant, scenes the show questions the challenge of squaring freewill with predestination. It doesn’t present any deep answers to this except, for the time being, it’s clear the TVA is on the winning side of predestination.

Loki has always come with a sense of black humour and that’s on full display, especially an extended gag about a fish. However, what also works really well, particularly with some of the powers on display here, is the slapstick available to people who can control time down to the second.

I’m a sucker for slapstick – done well it has the other people on the house pausing the TV until I stop laughing, so take that as you will, but if a moment of actual lip smacking doesn’t have you at least chortling then I honestly don’t know what to say to your cold, dead, heart.

Why is this humour important? Because the show could otherwise be tediously portentous and entirely too serious. Leavening the script and visuals with a solid dose of well executed humour is the sugar the medicine of world building needs to be swallowed easily.

Hiddleston shines in this respect but his supporting cast are also excellent. Clearly Owen Wilson had a lot of fun with this but at least three other characters get good lines and agency on screen not simply related to making Loki’s story flow more easily.

Indeed, as Owen’s agent Mobius tells Loki, “it was never your story.”

In another smart move, the writers dial back Loki’s character development from where we left him in Infinity War and the dying minutes of Ragnarok all the way to the defeated self-important curmudgeon from the end of the first Avengers movie.

Loki goes through an entire character arc in this episode – not rushed, not forced and not complete (not properly – you get the sense that Loki is adapting rather than growing). It’s a smart bit of plotting and writing – to remind us Loki has changed through the phases of the MCU and was the villain of the first Avengers movie for good reason.

From there his journey, involving rather more infinity stones than he’d ever expected to see, is one of realising there might be more to the world than he’d ever dreamt of.

Which is to say that both the world building and Loki’s arc are, in some ways, prologue for the real story this series wants to tell and which we really only see hints of in this first episode.

Is episode 1 a prologue? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No, I don’t think so – there was a lot of world building to be done and a bad tempered god-child to provide with motivation, and this achieves both of those things comfortably.

Verdict: A solid start but now I’m excited to see what the story actually is when episode 2 drops next week.

Rating? 7 bad dates out of 10.

Stewart Hotston