It’s a mask. He’s inspired by Doom who he considers a relative. You can see it’s a mask when you realize he’s the same guy as Rama Tut and Immortus.
I've spent a good part of the past 24+ hours reading reactions to the episode. Definitely all over the place. People loved it, people hated it, it made perfect sense to some, it was completely confusing to others.
What do you mean it didn't establish anything new? It showed that Wanda actually had powers before Hydra injected her with their experiments. Plus, why does a show have to establish something new to be good in the first place? I'd rather it just be well written, which is something Loki was not.
Yeah, apparently there are people who feel that if something isn't groundbreaking or revolutionary, then it basically sucks and was a waste of time. That seems like an incredibly awful way to experience things, in my opinion.
That’s been my complaint for a while. Fandom reactions and interest reactions in general, have become very polarized. Either it’s the most amazing life changing thing ever or it’s irredeemable crap and you’re crap for liking it. I just was listening to someone talking about the phenomenon that if a service gets a 9 on a 10 point scale then the company reacts as if it failed. It’s very weird. Overall the post Endgame stuff has been solidly fine. I’ve liked Loki the most, and TFATWS least, and that’s including Black Widow and Spiderman FFH.
Yep. When I worked at Best Buy we would have these employee surveys customers could fill out and if we didn't get anything but 100%, it was frowned upon by corporate. Like when you go through the questionairre, say the question is, "How would you rate your experience in finding what you were looking for?" and you rate it a 7 because the store only had half of what you came in to buy, and gave every other answer a 10, the score would be a 90%, and that was a poor score despite the question not having anything to do with the employee itself. That's why if I ever do surveys like that in restaurants or something I just mark the best score on every answer and don't even bother reading the question to give the employee a 100% rating.
The ironic part about "Loki" is that it made arguably the largest change to the MCU that has ever taken place. But apparently that's not good enough for some.
Although the TVA as it presented itself was there to control free will, it actually didn't. Free will still existed in the universe in that people still made their own decisions; pruning was done to remove the outcomes of free will that would ultimately restore the many Kangs. It's actually a similar approach to what Doctor Strange did in IW & Endgame - in IW he viewed 14,000,605 timelines and pre-pruned them down to the ones that could lead to the one they could win, and in Endgame he pruned the remaining failures when he told Tony he couldn't reveal in advance how they won. As far as the TVA were concerned, Loki's escape was a "Kang level threat", they just hadn't been made aware by their boss that that was part of his own retirement plan.
Seen this mentioned a bunch of times. As I understand it, Strange went forward in time (in that specific, singular timeline) and viewed 14 million possible outcomes of their plan to defeat Thanos. He wasn't looking at other timelines or universes. Unless we're saying that everyone's choice at any moment creates a new timeline. In which case... fuck.
This and this. It's not the cliché "evil authority trying to curb free will." It's more like boring bureaucracy that is put in place to make sure we don't get multiple Kangs. The TVA has fascists wallpapers and policies but the interesting twist is that the leader is invisible (by his own choice). When Loki and Sylvie meet Kang/Immortus/LastGuy he acts wacky but also manipulative. He ultimately wants to retire from running things or he understands that Sylvie killing him will actually put him into greater control/power. And you can see that he's even more powerful after he is killed by the change in the TVA's statue. I'm not getting hung up on the whole free will vs determinism debate because (a) the MCU is not where you go to thoroughly explore these topics and (b) everything is just an excuse to set up conflict, so why get hung up? The purpose of the Loki series is to give Loki a nice character arc and to set up Kang as the next Big Bad. It is cool that the time travel shenanigans that solved End Game are now setting up the next multi-movie MCU crisis. When you "zoom out" you can mildly start seeing connections between everything that's so far been released post-End Game and that's really neat.
He made it pretty clear that he wanted a worthy successor and in order to be one, he wanted someone who could figure out how it all worked without his help. I was hot and cold on Kang as a whole, but this part wasn't weird at all that he did that. He was millions of years old. He said "series finale." Shows having cliff hangers is pretty typical. I wasn't crazy about the lack of resolution, but it is how a lot of shows set inside of major stories are.
That's exactly what it is. Any possible outcome is the result of a different set of choices which would have resulted in time happening differently - different potential timelines. It's the entire premise of the time travel in Endgame, too - each timeline is the result of some decision being made at some point. The Doctor Who episode Turn Left illustrates this idea quite well. Either Strange pruned the dead-ends or all those 14,000,605 timelines would still have happened and we just follow the one that won.
As mainly an X-book reader in the 80s and 90s, I have little to no idea who Spoiler Kang or Immortus are. So I was pretty confused at the ending. I love Loki/Hiddleston but dislike time travel so not sure how to feel overall about this season. Wasn't bad by any means.
I definitely have to go back and watch "Loki" (season 1) in one sitting again to absorb everything, and to get a better understanding of how "timelines" work.
Just realized that Loki has a connection to both big bads. He was working for Thanos at first and now Kang has kind of made his first appearance in his show.
Yeah, season finales do different things than series finales do. A season finale needs to leave you with something to bring you back. A series finale needs to wrap the character journeys and themes up in a satisfying way. There’s a reason the final episode of Wandavision was never going to bring in Mephisto. That was a series finale and you don’t introduce new characters there. You don’t even do big revelations there, hence why “Agatha All Along” happens in the next to last episode. With Loki having a season 2 already planned it makes sense to bring in a new character as the man behind the TVA. I’d point out that TFATWS had a bad series finale because the power broker revelation happens at the end and isn’t resolved at all.
While I agree with you, I think the intention of the Power Broker revelation (which, come on, was that really a reveal?) is intended to set things up for Cap 4 or other films/tv series. The difference between the D+ shows and normal tv shows is that they don't exist in a vacuum so you can fudge the typical rules a little. Especially since most people are trained now that teasers like that will typically pay off later on in the MCU.
This is totally accurate according to the leaks I found. I really enjoyed that finale in spite of the Power Broker stuff because I think it kind of came pre-advertised that it’d be carrying over into a future film, the Armor Wars series, etc. It was not my favorite part though, that’s for sure.
