The least that can be said about Marvel Studios’ new run of Disney+ streaming service series is that they are generally impossible to second-guess. WandaVision kept the audience guessing until deep into its run and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, more traditional in style, still had plenty of shocks and surprises up its six-week sleeve. Loki keeps up the tradition in its colourful third episode which audaciously abandons (temporarily?) the ‘buddy’ format of the first two episodes which saw Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and Owen Wilson’s Mobius K Mobius establish a nicely balanced comedic/dramatic relationship to send both the story and, indeed, Loki himself, into entirely new directions.
Loki chases his female Variant Sylvie (Sophie Di Martino) through a portal which deposits the pair back at the TVA headquarters where they indulge in what appears to be a bout of fisticuffs with a handful of Minutemen (it’s genuinely hard to tell… much of the episode takes place in, at best, the half-light… come on, Marvel, turn a few lights on now and again). The pair nip through another portal, landing on the unstable planet Lamentis-1 in the year 2077. Frying pan and fire spring to mind as the planet is on the brink of destruction, on a collision course with its own moon. Anxious to find a power source that they can use to open up an escape portal, the pair inveigle their way onto a train heading to an evacuation vessel. After spending a bit of downtime that allows the script to flesh out the curious relationship between these two apparently conflicting sides of the same coin, the pair are discovered and thrown off the train. They make their way on foot to the evacuation ship site but the planet is in its death throes, its moon looming large, the battered surface bombarded with flaming meteorites. Unfortunately one of these meteorites destroys the vessel, leaving our mismatched pair stranded and the planet’s population doomed.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of Lamentis because it’s such a volte-face for the series – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s clearly an episode designed to capitalise upon and develop the relationship between Loki and Sylvie and to that end it works reasonably well. Sylvie prefers not to recognise her Loki persona, she has little time for Loki himself, and Loki is fascinated by this variant version of himself. This inevitably leads to scenes where Sylvia snidely puts Loki down and dismisses him as a fool rather than the wily God of Mischief. The dialogue between them is glib and snappy and occasionally uncharacteristically abrasive; Sylvie calls Loki’s plan “shit”, later telling him to “piss off” before calling him an “arsehole.” How well this lands depends on whether you think your Norse Gods should behave and talk like noble Norse Gods rather than teenagers on a wild night out.
At the halfway mark Loki is still something of an enigma and it’s still not quite hit the sweet spot as we might have expected or hoped. It’s full of ideas, the spectacle level rose up several notches in Lamentis (many of the visuals here are MCU-quality and would look great on the big screen), but there’s something about the story – whatever it is – that isn’t quite sparking just yet. But there’s clearly a lot more to come as the story wends its way back to the TVA; there are hints here that it really isn’t quite what Loki has been led to believe (and certainly the audience will have suspected that all isn’t as it seems in Mobius K Mobius’s world) and we’re hoping that whatever’s in store across the next three weeks will finally make this meandering journey worth the effort as it clearly paves the way for much of what’s to come in Phase 4 of the MCU itself. Loki is never less than delightful but we’re yet to be convinced it’s as daring and groundbreaking as it thinks it is and we (still) hope it will be.
