The first season of Marvel Studio’s Loki Series has come to an end and if you are left with more questions than answers, you are not alone. If you are a part of the population who watched Loki this past season, it is likely that you’ve gone through a lot of emotions while watching the show as with all things we tend to get attached to. Something that a lot of people may struggle with, a big emotion you might’ve felt while watching, Loki was apathy.
This first season of Loki was very hard to get into for a multitude of reasons. While the cast was solid and the acting was serviceable, the actual storyline left a lot – and I mean A LOT – to be desired. Now before you click out of this article because I said something against your favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) character, take a second and look past your love for Loki as a character and look at Loki the television show for what it actually was: a very long and convoluted commercial for the next phase in the MCU.
With that said, here are 3 things that made Loki a total yawn of a television show and why there is a need to start taking things off pedestals.
Sideways Character Development
The Loki we get in the Loki television series is not the Loki from when we last saw him in Avengers: Infinity War when he died at the hands of Thanos. As we saw in Avengers: Endgame, Loki from the Battle of New York had taken the Tesseract and escaped through a space portal. Loki the series follows a completely different Loki than the one we saw develop over the years and leading to his death in Avengers: Infinity War. This is not a bad thing if handled properly and can even yield some awesome stories from it. What we got, however, was a lot of fan service that actually forgot all about the fans. It’s not enough to just have a character that is widely liked by many people on the screen if you don’t add another dimension to them, this is especially the case for Loki because he had so much character development over the years to the point where his death meant so much to the series.
Loki’s character development in the series was a rehash of the bland and boring storytelling we got in the first two Thor movies. From the music to the Shakespearean-esque way the dialogue is delivered. I honestly fell asleep in the middle of the first three episodes and I’m a person who loves exposition. Sure, because Loki is a Marvel property there was some humor in it, but going back to the same things that made the first two Thor movies bad, doesn’t make Loki good. This is especially true because the MCU has already let us know that they have a set definition of what space is which is every 80s stereotype you can think of. Instead of upward character development, there was more of a lateral development than a progressive one and because of that, the story suffered.
Focusing on What’s Next Instead of Being in the Moment
I’ve had a lot of conversations about Loki with a plethora of fellow geeks and I found it comforting that I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time getting into this show. I’ve also spoken to a lot of people who absolutely loved this show and from those talks, I figured out why this show missed the mark and it had a lot to do with Avengers: Age of Ultron, or as I call it Trailer: The Movie.
Almost everyone I spoke to who loved this series said the same thing. They liked it on the virtue that it set up so much for the future of the MCU and that got them excited and they took that excitement as “this must be a good show.” Now far be it for me to say that being excited about the future is wrong, it’s not. However, if your glorious purpose as a show is to just set up other things in the future and that’s it, the show won’t be good from a narrative standpoint. Let’s all be honest, at this point in the game, we are automatically hyped for what’s coming in the MCU. While setting up things in the future is a necessary part of franchise storytelling, you still have to focus on what’s happening now to make people care.
Setting up future projects by sacrificing the story being presented to us right now is a huge failing point for Loki. It’s like getting ready on Wednesday for Thursday but not doing anything of note on Wednesday, you’ve functionally wasted an entire day and you’ll likely find yourself asking “where did the time go?” This is what it felt like watching 5 episodes of Loki, by the end of each episode I had no idea what was going on and honestly questioned myself about my attention span. Getting people hyped for the future should not come at the expense of the present. Tell a good story and people will naturally want to see how it ends.
An Audience Taken for Granted
We all know someone who loved this show based solely on the strength that it was Loki. As a matter of fact, when they first rolled out the advertising for this show, I thought we were going to get a series of episodes with a different Loki each episode and we’d get some wacky adventures out of it. We did not get that at all. While there were a bunch of different Lokis, we really didn’t get to spend much time with them and the ones we got felt a little “too little too late”. A big reason why a lot of our expectations weren’t met can simply be attributed to the MCU taking its audience for granted.
There’s a lot of people who loved this show merely because of the title character yet they couldn’t tell you a thing about the story. The fact that the finale was 80% exposition from a brand new character who was there to set up another character that you have to wait for shows how little thought was put into constructing what could’ve been a great story.
Did we get a great story from the first season of Loki? No, we didn’t. We got a bunch of setups for other things, that I hope won’t be setups for other things. Because if everything is just getting us ready for something else, yet what we’re watching now isn’t hooking people in, what’s the purpose?
