Loki - Rambling review of episode 1: Glorious Purpose

i have been burdened with glorious purpose to review the latest thing to come out from the mcu on disney plus [Music] i'm not actually burdened like no one's making me do this i'm doing this because i want to and i'm dropping this here because this feels like a bigger deal and you know i had debated whether or not to do things like the wand division or the falcon winter soldier reviews here on the main channel or over in the break room where i actually ended up doing it a break room of geeks subscribe if you're not but uh we're gonna at least do the premiere here i may or may not continue to do episode by episode reviews here depending on what the view numbers are frankly but i'll keep doing them regardless they may just move to the break room we'll see again subscribe there if you haven't loki first episode glorious purpose it's kind of hard to judge the show too much based off this episode because this is very much a setup episode premieres tend to be one of two things most often what they are is um something that will spend maybe the first quarter of their run time establishing everything that needs to establish and then try and be an expression of what a standard episode of a show is meant to be like the other option which is what loki is is something that is just devoting the entire runtime of the premiere episode to the setup now honestly that's kind of what all the mcu shows have been so far because none of these are at present designed with the intent that they continue on for multiple seasons they might uh well maybe not one division but falcon and winter soldier conceivably could depending on how this ends this probably could but they're not being designed with the standard network mentality of we want this to last for as many seasons as possible so we have a set formula for what an episode is that's not what this is doing so it makes sense to devote pretty much the entire first episode to establishing what needs to be known and it does a pretty good job of that especially because it can be hard to do what is basically an exposition dump episode and also have it be entertaining that's not an easy thing to do and this does it well largely buoyed by the charm of the actors involved tom hiddleston obviously right up there he actually does some really really good emotional work in this i'm going to come back to that but also owen wilson with his laid-back owen wilsonness the dynamic between him and loki is wonderful the two of them are just so not similar at all which makes for really good chemistry because they just bring such different vibes to the table watching them bounce off each other is just delightful i think largely i'm going to end up talking about some of the logistics of what we've learned in this because like i said plot wise there isn't really anything going on here that you couldn't have gathered from the early trailers this is the loki that escaped during the events of avengers end game with the tesseract he has now been apprehended by the time variants agency uh who takes it upon themselves to maintain the one sacred timeline as they call it um that is suppose what is supposed to happen and loki is now a variant and is deviating from that however instead of simply resetting him and making time the way it is they are going to recruit him to try and deal with a bigger problem that they've got going on elsewhere in time that's what happens that's pretty much what anyone could have guessed was going to be the premise and this really is nothing but premise setting so let's talk about some of the details of some of these premises i am so far pretty good with the time variance agency first of all i like that it is incredibly bureaucratic i always love just in general the idea of these massive powerful almost god-like entities in terms of what they're able to do and their capabilities and their sight in it you know they see all they know they can do all in like it's just an office it's just a bureaucratically run office i just love that as a premise i that's not something i really will ever tire of it's one of the things i love about beetlejuice where the afterlife is this messy bureaucracy or something like the adjustment bureau which was a movie that i really liked for some of those same elements so i like that in general so i'm here for that some of the things that they let well first of all can we just call right now the time keepers or whatever they're going to turn out to be either corrupt or dead or a lie that never existed in the first place like it's it is incredibly conspicuous that a we don't meet any of them b that they seem to basically have taken it upon themselves to decide what is or what isn't the thing that is supposed to happen and they answer to nobody so like there's no way that's not gonna get called out like these sorts of things that always happens ultimately it happened eventually with the time lords and doctor who it happened with the time agency in um legends of tomorrow and you know it's always what happens so i don't even think it's a spoiler to claim that that's going to be where things go i am going to talk about this episode pretty freely so i guess swirl the warning i should have given earlier except that like i said it's pretty much all set up except for the thing that happens at the very very very very very end which i will save to the end of the review okay so moving on from that i do like some of the things that this manages to pretty seamlessly let us know about how things are operating within the mcu first off it is established that there is not at present a multiverse there used to be a multiverse but the multiverse its very existence caused tension and war and problems so we're seeding two ideas here that can and probably will be picked up later one multiverses are inherently dangerous and two there is not one right now or at least there is not supposed to be one they even kind of drop and things that feel like they're setting up at least towards an indication of what multiverse of madness with doctor strange is gonna be about less about um i think what some of us probably thought it was discovering the scope of the multiverse and more about realizing oh this is just bad if this if this thing exists or is reintroduced or if we accidentally created it somewhere along the line or what have you the other thing that i kind of like because i i had my own um head canon for this but they kind of confirmed it more or less which is that i like that the time the accepted timeline includes time travel so what i mean by that is you know when loki got taken out because he was a variant who was messing with the established timeline i did immediately think well the avengers were messing with time as well now before the show even addressed i thought well like yes but then they also like made a point of going back and reset and like trying to get things back to the way they were so that they made as little ripples as possible maybe that's why they got away with it and i honestly would have been fine just thinking that without an explanation but instead they actually say no that's what they were supposed to do so i kind of like that the accepted version of time includes messing with time like that that's that's a nice little inceptiony kind of layered thing like i just that that's nice i dig that i'm slightly iffy um this is largely going to come down to whether or not they talk about it further and how they talk about it so right now the way the idea of there's a way that time is supposed to go is being framed largely like the timekeepers have decided this is what should happen which makes it seem like fate i'm not big on fate as a i mean as a general philosophical concept nor as a narrative tool because it's kind of lazy i mean like i said the easy way to undercut that is to determine that these people had no business determining people's fates anyways but that would be something for down the road but just the idea that like ultimately there is no free will and if you do stuff you're not supposed to you're going to be forcibly put back to what somebody else has decided is what you're supposed to do there are ways around introducing that as a notion and still having it work at least for me one of them is um taking something like this the way doctor who tends to look at is like look it's not that you have no free will it's that everything has already happened and the doctor can just travel along the full scope of it so it's not that you are not you don't have the freedom to choose it's that you have already chosen but if something forces you to do something other than what you yourself would have chosen or if in retaliation you forcibly break what it was you yourself were choosing to do that was part of the established set timeline that's where things get messy now that's a little bit heady it's a little bit metaphysical and it might be more than the this show is willing to do and like i said there are ways to sort of adjust it moving forward depending on what happens ultimately to the tva or the timekeepers or whatever by the end of the season like all this stuff might be shaken up but it does basically it does basically present a world in which everything we've seen up to this point was predetermined by these beings that we don't know i love that as an implication but we'll see where they go with it if they go anywhere with it if they just kind of leave it as is i'm a little bit like however talking about established and uh timed them what was supposed to happen i mentioned tom hiddleston did some really good acting and he does i mean first of all he is wonderfully exasperated and he can be charming he's got a great sort of glare when he's ticked off but honestly watching him see the reel of the events of what was supposed to happen to him his mother dying odin dying reuniting with thor fighting for the people of asgard and then his own death watching him watch that that was really really good stuff he sold so much with smiles and little breaths and tears i felt like i was on that emotional journey with him as he was seeing it for the first time that was really well done and it's pretty much all down to his performance it could have been really it could have felt like just a cheesy recap of hey remember this is what was supposed to happen but it's like the emotional high point of the episode so that that's pretty dang impressive now there's a lot of little things that i could bring up like i think they had a lot of fun use of the uh sort of technology that the tva has in terms of like blipping people here and there or like uh when that agent like smacks loki with this thing and he basically like reacts in slow time while she's still in normal time um like basically hitting him with a time dilation rod like that's i want to see more of that kind of tech that was really cool or just the idea that this this agency has infinity stones littering the office because here they don't mean anything and they are jumping into so many different timelines they've got multiple sets of infinity stones and it doesn't matter who cares they're paperweights again sort of bringing in the mundanity of what it is that they do and i like that but now let's spend a little time on what is legitimately a spoiler so there's your warning i'm talking about the thing that is brought up at the very very very very end which is that and this i kind of called um and i'm now going to make further calls having now discussed this so we see agent mobius that's owen wilson's character you know step in on a on a situation where some agents have been killed when they were trying to fix something this is something that's been ongoing i figured it was a version of loki right off the bat as soon as it was mentioned oh they were stabbed like the other people i'm like well like who else in the mcu uses knives and they're not going to just introduce a whole new character because there would be no point in this kind of build up that way it has to be somebody we already know knives are loki it's loki so we don't really see this other worse dangerous version of loki now there's a couple here's what i like about this twist right off the bat it gives immediate context for why owen wilson not only feels that this version of loki that we know could help him but also it really gives a methodology behind the kinds of questions he was asking him like do you really enjoy hurting people like trying to get to the heart of loki to figure out if i try and recruit you to help are you just going to make the problem worse or is there something underneath the cruelty that you put front and center and to see him drill at that and get and crack through it at least a little bit really good stuff so the fairly easily guessed twist at this point would be that the version of loki that we're going to be combating that is the villain is going to be some equivalent of the female version of loki so a couple of things quick reminder loki the ancient norse mythological figure is genderfluid he actually is the mother of the multi-legged horse that odin rides i really hope they bring that up somewhere along the lines um and also in the comics loki is and has been for a period of time a woman and it's not like the thor situation where what happened where a woman took up thor's mantle no loki himself became a woman and was a woman for a stretch of time now i do have some concerns about this i actually talked about those over on the break room although at this point my main concern over whether or not they were even going to go there is probably moot now while we don't confirm that this is female loki the fact that we don't see the face of this version of loki that would be the main reason to do it so i have a hard time believing it's going to be anything other than the female version of loki so assuming i'm correct i'm everything i say after this is on the assumption that i'm right about that which i'm pretty sure that i am um like and it's it was rumored for a while anyway that this might be what happened so i'm gonna be really curious to see how they kind of explain her existence and mainly what i mean by that is are they just going to chalk it up to she escaped from some kind of alternate timeline that wasn't supposed to exist in the first place where loki was always a woman or are they actually going to present the idea that loki can change gender because they could feasibly go either way and why it kind of matters to me is up until this point any sort of shifting changing of appearance that loki's done has always been illusory so i'm very curious as to whether this female loki is going to be established to be the same i mean like not the same because like variance or whatever but like was originally at some earlier point within their own timeline the same as the male okie we now have and did choose to completely physically transform into a female version that's what i'm kind of hoping because the alternatives are to either not really address the gender fluidity properly at all if it ends up just coming down to completely different timeline you know wasn't supposed to exist in the first place was always a woman like i said that just dodges the issue but the other thing is if it gets kept as being illusory the way we've seen loki's powers largely work up to this point i worry about that in the sense that it has the potential to reinforce the idea that gender non-conforming or gender fluid hi or trans people are pretending it's an illusion and underneath they are really whatever they were assigned at birth intentionally reinforcing that no but it's it's a common undercurrent and it's a big part of the main reason why i get very iffy about um cisgender people playing any kind of trans uh or non-binary role because having them there at all does on some subconscious level reinforce the idea oh but they're really this standard binary gender because the audience knows that the performer is really that standard binary gender and is just pretending so it's one of the things that makes me nervous about introducing the gender fluid aspects of loki at all because since tom hiddleston is says and like look i'm not going to suddenly say they shouldn't have cast tom hiddleston they're bringing this element of the thing in way way way way later and i i there's no way you're ever going to convince me they were planning to go here eventually always because if that was the case then i would say maybe get somebody at least non-binary but like they didn't this is something they're adding in after so nothing against him and i don't think there's anything wrong with this casting originally but now that he's in the role i am nervous about how that will be handled and depicted and it's gonna largely come down to the fine details and the nuances of the situation and whether or not it gets addressed at all or whether it's just a gimmick and honestly if it is just a gimmick that is potentially less damaging than if they try and dig into it and just do it badly i've said in the past that bad representation is better than no representation i stand by that but i would say that just presenting a female loki and not really touching on it you could put that in as like kind of neutral leaning bad representation because you don't do much with it you just did it i i would prefer that over if they try and dig into it and screw it up i mean there's the sliver of the possibility they try and dig into this and actually nail it i i have faith in marvel on a lot of things i don't have a ton of faith on them on representation um and not because they've like massively screwed up but like they have been so slow to even try and touch on this stuff and other departments of disney have legitimately screwed this stuff up uh very fully so it's gonna i'm gonna be nervous i i'm at this point i'm expecting lady loki i kind of want to see lady loki but i'm gonna be really nervous the whole way through every step of the way for all the fine details of how this is depicted how the character is talked about and how this is handled by loki prime but we'll see going forward fingers crossed is good because this is a solid start there's a lot of good foundation here to do some fun stuff we'll see loki glorious purpose what'd you think about it whatever your thoughts are drop something down the comments let's talk about it i have a patreon that is what pays the bills allows me to afford disney plus and be able to do these reviews at all rewards at every tier including getting to see videos early naming the credits and others also there are youtube memberships if you want to go that direction but you don't have to like share subscribe that helps me out as well hit the bell why not but you don't even have to do that i'm not going to tell you what to do i'm not a time keeper you're the counsel i just run the meetings and until next time this council is adjourned [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow [Music] oh

Channel: Council of Geeks

Views: 10,956

Rating: 4.9239669 out of 5

Keywords: loki glorious purpose, loki episode 1, loki premiere, loki episode 1 review, loki episode 1 spoilers, loki glorious purpose review, loki glorious purpose spoilers, loki premiere spoilers, loki disney+, loki mcu, mcu disney+, loki gender, loki genderfluid

Id: buQq28J4S6I

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021