Loki season one review: Tom Hiddleston brings sci-fi hijinks to the MCU on Disney+

After dropping WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier essentially back-to-back in recent months, Marvel’s continued dominance of the pop-culture landscape continues with Loki, a new 6-episode series premiering on Disney+ on June 9.

Loki stars the endlessly charming Tom Hiddleston as The God of Mischief, the meddling half-brother of Thor whose plans for world (universe?) domination have been at the root of most of the chaos that has plagued the superheroes of the MCU.

After vanishing from the clutches of the Avengers in Endgame with the powerful Tesseract in hand, the series begins with Loki falling out of the sky in a desert landscape and immediately being captured by members of a mysterious organization known as the Time Variance Authority (or TVA for short). The TVA operates behind the scenes, ensuring that no one violates the true timeline, which could lead to the creation of endless conflicting multiverses.

A chagrined Loki is then brought to trial before the TVA for his numerous time manipulations over the years where he is defended by Mobius (Owen Wilson), who wants Loki’s help in tracking down a time-jumping killer. It turns out that Loki’s time dalliances have come at a cost – a variant Loki is now causing havoc throughout the universe, and Mobius wants Loki to help the TVA track him down.

A sci-fi time jumping adventure starring everyone’s favourite MCU villain (sorry, Thanos!) is a great concept, and for the most part, Loki lives up to its exciting premise. Hiddleston is as watchable as ever as Loki’s grandiose posturing gets taken down a notch by the TVA’s power-sapping technology, leaving him only his intellect and his fast-running mouth to work with.

Hiring Wes Anderson favourite Owen Wilson as Loki’s by-the-book partner/chaperone is a stroke of casting genius, and the best moments of the show so far (we were sent the first two episodes of the show to review) are the often antagonistic banter between the unlikely pair.

Smartly directed by Kate Herron (Sex Education) and with Michael Waldron (Rick and Morty) as head writer, Loki looks and feels unlike any other Marvel property to date. The opening episode’s Byzantine space bureaucracy is a welcome nod to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and the snappy dynamic between Hiddleston and Wilson feels right out of the Men In Black mold. And while there may not be a prominent phone booth featured just yet, the time-travelling central plot owes more than a passing debt to Dr. Who.

If the first two episodes of Loki have any drawbacks, it’s the excessive amount of plot details that are crammed in. Some of this is handled well – a welcome ‘60s-inspired animated sequence from the TVA explains to Loki the dangers of disrupting the time flow – but in other cases, there are long segments of characters walking down hallways and endlessly spouting space-time jargon. While it often feels like Loki is actually the God of Exposition, hopefully, the next four episodes can focus on the characters and the intriguing central plot, one that is sure to play a pivotal role in future MCU films. (Waldron also wrote 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness film, so we aren’t done with those pesky multiverses just yet.)

With a pair of endearing performances at its core and a sprawling sci-fi plot that has more in common with Philip K. Dick than the superhero smash-‘em-ups we’ve come to expect from the MCU, Loki is a thrilling new series that sets itself apart from anything we’ve seen from Marvel so far.

The first episode of Loki debuts on Disney+ on June 9, with new episodes dropping each Wednesday.