10 Thoughts on Loki Episode 1

I just watched the first episode of Loki for the second time and I feel like this will have WandaVision like questions after each episode. Here are 10 thoughts after the first episode.

1. If this show were nothing more then Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) talking, I’d watch every episode. The dynamic, which I was expecting, was amazing and lived up to my expectations.
2. Hiddleston is a good enough actor to pull off being the hero and villain of the show. At the same time, it’s kind of close to what they did in WandaVision with Wanda being the hero and the captor of the town. While we only have 1 episode, recency bias could impact the bottom line of the show.
3. So far, the limited supporting cast has been great. Hunter B-15 was a lot of fun as she captured Loki and pursued him throughout the episode. Casey was enjoyable comic relief.
4. The best part of the show for me was undoing Loki’s character arc after the Avengers, and rebuilding it with him seeing the flashbacks. It was huge fanservice to show Loki’s story in flashbacks, but it established how far he came and that his family didn’t give up on him when he was pretty shitty.
5. I think the “devil” nod was a shot at the WandaVision Mephisto speculation that popped up the whole show.
6. After a pretty straight forward show in Falcon/Captain American and the Winter Soldier, I think we’ll be back to 6 weeks of speculation with this. There are a ton of questions after week 1 and I’m expecting more after Wednesday. Will we see Kang the Conqueror or Immortus (more on this in a later post)? Does Dr. Strange pop up? How many variations of Loki do we see and where does the villain Loki come from? Could be we setting up Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars? We’ll be doing this for weeks.
7. After 10 years of building up the Infinity Stones, Loki knocks them down in less then an hour. While the stones might be the most powerful artifacts in the MCU, there are a lot of more powerful items in the comics. I think Marvel could be setting up new weapons by making the Gauntlet just another weapon.
8. One of the fun things with a time travel show is playing with previous events. The Loki as D.B. Cooper gag was awesome, and it didn’t even happen as part of him in the TVA. The question becomes was what the bet with Thor and why would they need money from Earth, which would probably have no value on Asgard?
9. It was a tragedy losing Loki Infinity War; he’s one of the top 10 characters in the MCU and had progressed a long way. Is it possible that we get him back in main timeline at the end of the show? Or will this be more of a Legends of Tomorrow, fix the timeline for multiple seasons type thing? I’d be fine either way.
10. For those people that were hardcore Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fans, there could be closure with this show. It would be very easy for them to confirm if the show was part of the MCU or somewhere else in the Multiverse. They already touched on Loki “killing” Agent Coulson, but there were a lot more ties to the MCU in the show, including Asgardian Lady Sif showing up. They don’t have to devote much to it, but show a screen with “Earth 72” that shows Coulson, May, and Quake so can end the “is it canon or not” questions.

I’m sure we’ll touch on this on this weeks PC Bombcast and I’ll be back next Monday with 10 more thoughts on the show.