Loki

[eldaec]

I'm pretty sure its another loki behind the TVA

Probably the most satisfying suggestion.

[Velorath]

A bit info-dumpy but overall good. As I figured, having a season 2 planned (and confirmed in place of a post-credits scene) gave them a bit of leeway into how they wrapped this season up. Spoiler tagging just because it's so early after the episode released that someone could conceivably click on here without thinking.

[eldaec]

I liked it.

But felt the characters were owed a little more resolution.

[luckton]

I liked it.

But felt the characters were owed a little more resolution.

They'll get it. In season 2 and all the content to come for the next decade.

[eldaec]

I'm not a fan of 'resolution happens in three years' as an argument.

Sure, you don't resolve everything in the setting, but you decide what this individual story is about and resolve that.

Show just felt like it was the end of a random episode.

[MediumHigh]

At first I was like  
Then I was like  
Then I was like  

[eldaec]

Kang is not just a loki villain. He's already announced for the ant man movie.

[MediumHigh]

Kang is not just a loki villain. He's already announced for the ant a. movie.

I stand corrected. Their actually crossing the streams.

[MahrinSkel]

And Loki season 2 apparently started production in November 2020, so it may already be in the can. They've put themselves in a box, this will either be a beautiful hat trick of plot, or a colossal trainwreck.

--Dave

[Threash]

Well I was completely wrong, they pulled it off well. Kinda sad this version of Kang is gone.

[eldaec]

I watched the last part of this again, and I think the reason I didn't think they quite stuck the landing was that 'you can't trust and I can' t be trusted' moment didn't feel like the profound tragic conclusion it was supposed to be. 

It still felt like they were deciding whether to trust Kang, not whether to trust each other.

I am hyped for more loki and for more Kang though. I wasn't excited when we were told he is the new Thanos - but I am now interested in how he plays the alternate versions of himself.

[Teleku]

Really enjoyed this whole thing.  Excellent setup for Phase 4, and if they have this much vision and planning for it, I'm actually a lot more stoked about this phase of Marvel than I was before.  Great way to introduce us to Kang, by giving us a more likable and actually somewhat good'ish version of him.

[Khaldun]

First off, don't assume this version of Kang is gone. He more or less tells you that. He's not Kang, he's Immortus, and Immortus is always a liar, on a scale that makes Loki look like an amateur.

Second off, where's the complaining about what bad writing etc etc this is? Some of you picked that hill to die on, after all.

I mean, for once I was right, at a point when I had started to assume I had to be wrong because the MCU people just didn't want to do the obvious when they did the obvious.

[HaemishM]

Kang is not just a loki villain. He's already announced for the ant a. movie.

I stand corrected. Their actually crossing the streams.

The only reason Feige wasn't down with the TV shows before is because Ike Perlmutter was in charge of the TV shows and he is a colossal dick that Feige hated. Now that Perlmutter is gone and Feige is in charge of the total Marvel product, AND has Disney+ for any non-movie stuff he wants, he will have no problem crossing those streams. Remember, every Disney+ sub is more money in Disney's pocket directly.


Kind of amazing that we've just seen a 6-episode origin story for someone who was not the titular character. 

[HaemishM]

Also, I called it.

[MahrinSkel]

First off, don't assume this version of Kang is gone. He more or less tells you that. He's not Kang, he's Immortus, and Immortus is always a liar, on a scale that makes Loki look like an amateur.

Second off, where's the complaining about what bad writing etc etc this is? Some of you picked that hill to die on, after all.

I mean, for once I was right, at a point when I had started to assume I had to be wrong because the MCU people just didn't want to do the obvious when they did the obvious.

They did the obvious and made it work by subverting every other expectation we had over and over for 5 hours of screentime. :slow_clap:.

--Dave

[Khaldun]

They mostly just seem to be sending the message that while they're not gonna cater to nerds by having Mephisto show up in the last act of one show, they are gonna cater to nerds by having Kang/Immortus show up in the last act of another show because the entire goddamn thing is built so that it's the only thing that makes sense. They're laughing I assume at people who said "Come on, they're not going to do that" and at the nerds who said "I guess you're right, I've been wrong so far".

Fuck, Immortus/Kang even made a one-off remark about how Alioth actually has its own motivation or whatever and he went ahead and turned it into a plot device.

Now, on the other hand, look: Immortus is a goddamn boring stiff, so being comics-faithful on adapting him is a terrible idea, but...I'm not entirely sure this version worked even as a "I'm the last survivor of a multiversal war and I'm a tired immortal who wants to die". Which may turn out to be the point--it may be that Immortus/Kang/Whatever actually wants the multiverse back or wants the multiversal war to start up again or has an ultimate agenda that his whole schtick was a deliberate misdirect from. That's the thing about comics Immortus--I can't think of a single appearance where everything he's told others with all sincerity has turned out to be completely true except maybe Avengers Forever. Maybe? But the way he was written just felt too light or underdeveloped.

[Velorath]

Second off, where's the complaining about what bad writing etc etc this is? Some of you picked that hill to die on, after all.

Well to start with I didn't want to come in here immediately after a series I generally enjoyed ended and start nitpicking stuff but here we go:

First, I already explained my stance here.  The previous two D+ series essentially functioned as long movies which meant they had to bring things to a resolution and they had to do it in a way that made them work as a narrative unto themselves even if they have things that lead into other shows/movies. Loki is an actual show and was planned with at least a second season in mind (and while season 2 wasn't "officially" confirmed prior to today, it has been public knowledge for a while with production info being in an industry trade newsletter). As such, season 1 doesn't have the burden of telling a complete story, in the same way I don't expect it from the Mandalorian to give the example of another D+ show, or any ongoing series.

Whenever Loki ends its run, whether it's after season 2 or it runs longer, I do expect it to be some sort of cohesive whole and not to say, start up Season 3 with a *"See Ant-Man: Quantumania for the resolution of the Kang story" annotation.

That said, because they did do the villain reveal in final episode it was very exposition heavy. A good Jonathan Majors performance is mainly what saves from being the least exciting episode of the series. In fact, most of series only works because of the performances. The actual story is a bit of a mess if you spend any time thinking about, even beyond the fact that all time travel stories fall apart if you think about them. On top of that though there's an issue here in that the payoff at the end is that timelines are now allowed to branch, but it wasn't until this series started where we were told that they couldn't and there was one sacred timeline. It's a little odd because of things like Dr. Strange looking into a bunch of different futures in IW or Cap staying in the past where even the people that wrote the movie I think suggested he would have had to be in an alternate timeline before returning to the main timeline when he was old. Considering how closely Loki follows on Endgame it makes these inconsistencies stand out more, assuming they aren't explained at some point.

[schild]

Perfect casting.
Perfect television.
Perfect segue into the next part of the MCU.

In 40 minutes they managed to make someone more compelling than Thanos.

[Surlyboi]

My headcanon here is that Atticus from Lovecraft Country found himself reborn in the 31st century and became Kang.

Fight me.

[Velorath]

My headcanon here is that Atticus from Lovecraft Country found himself reborn in the 31st century and became Kang.

Fight me.

I was just saying that since HBO isn't moving forward with another season of LC that I'd be more than happy to see Marvel bring in the entire cast. HBO/WB's deliberate loss should be someone else's gain. Misha Green has actually been posting some interesting tidbits on Twitter of what they had been kicking around had they gotten another season.


Edit: Also, I should note that most of my surprise with Kang/Immortus showing up here is that I had no idea Majors had been cast early enough for him to be in this. Word of his casting in Quantumania (a 2023 release) didn't get out until September of last year which was around the time Loki resumed filming (after Covid lockdowns). I had assumed there was no way the timing would have worked out.

[HaemishM]

Edit: Also, I should note that most of my surprise with Kang/Immortus showing up here is that I had no idea Majors had been cast early enough for him to be in this. Word of his casting in Quantumania (a 2023 release) didn't get out until September of last year which was around the time Loki resumed filming (after Covid lockdowns). I had assumed there was no way the timing would have worked out.

That alone makes me feel totally comfortable with wherever they go in Phase 4. Other than the Falcon and Winter Soldier (and even that I didn't think was terrible, just mediocre in comparison to most other MCU stuff), every choice they've made has been fucking gold. It's been clear they have a plan.

It kind of makes me even more in awe of Feige. Even if he's not involved in the nuts and bolts of stories in anything other than an approval role, the clarity of vision and strength of story in the MCU has been consistent. Like the worst MCU movie/TV shows (F&WS, Black Widow, Dark World) is still as good if not better than all of the DCEU movies. Some will disagree with me on specific projects (some don't like Captain Marvel which I thought was decent, etc.) but taken as a whole, the goddamn line is well done. There are entire movie studios that haven't been able to say that ever, even over such a slice of time as a decade. God forbid Feige ever decides he doesn't want to do this anymore.

I've not always been fond of how they've treated directors like Wright, but I can't argue with their results.

[Samwise]

Never having read any comics with Kang in them, when he explained his backstory, I immediately said "oh, he's Rick Sanchez.  Okay."   

[Khaldun]

My assumption re: branching timelines is two-fold:

a) Whatever produces branching timelines is hard-wired into the structure of time and the multiverse, which is why Strange could look at multiple timelines. The Loki series suggests it's free will, which is a pretty conventional answer found in most time-travel stories (and was usually the story-telling rule that Marvel's What If? comic followed except when it occasionally operated more like the old 'imaginary stories' in Silver Age DC Comics where you could do any old fool thing that didn't have to identify a branching point where someone chose differently than in an existing story). Hence the TVA pruning.

b) Immortus/Kang may have been at his Citadel at the End of Time for a long time from his subjective position, but for all we know the Multiversal War he's talking about essentially ended yesterday from everybody else's perspective. That's time travel for you--Doctor Who's Time War functioned roughly the same way (from the perspective of the Daleks and Gallifrey it went on and on for eons, but its effects were felt simultaneously across all time and space and in some sense it began and ended at almost the same moment.) Maybe the timelines were branching constantly in the Multiversal War (the Ancient One talks about timelines branching in Endgame) and then they stopped for a very brief moment in the history of the MCU as we've seen it so far and 'now' (whenever that is) it's starting up again.

This is kind of why I didn't really want them to fuck around with Kang: he's a colossal headache as a character and he's never really had a consistent personality or motivation and he inevitably makes universe-building harder and more confusing and more "*To see the conclusion of this story, please watch Ant-Man: Quantumania".

I quite like sudden introductions of hidden bad guys behind the scenes at the end of a story--nothing could be more comic-book than that. But Kang, even acted well, is gonna make shit confusing no matter what they do. He's only beatable generally because he allows himself to be beaten--in the absolute best Kang story ever by Busiek, Kang's son comes to spring him from jail after the end of the story (in which Kang has among other things conquered Earth, gotten the Avengers to surrender to him, and destroyed Washington DC and most of its people with a weapon of mass destruction) and says, "Hey, I've spent some time rebuilding all of your armies, we're ready to invade again and kill them all this time seconds after they defeated you before" and Kang just says "Not how I roll, we don't do it that way".

Timey-wimey.

[schild]

Never having read any comics with Kang in them, when he explained his backstory, I immediately said "oh, he's Rick Sanchez.  Okay."   

You're a terrorist.

[Teleku]

But now that he's said it, I can't get it out of my mind.   

[Khaldun]

Yeah.

[HaemishM]

It also totally fits with the exception that Rick Sanchez isn't really a conqueror so much as a destructive force. He's more Galactus if Galactus ate shrooms instead of planets, but it left the planet destroyed just the same.

Did anyone else notice that the timeline surrounding Kang/Immortus's fortune was a complete circle? I'm pretty sure that was an intentional hint at a possible resolution or explanation (i.e. the TVA timeline is a closed loop).

[Draegan]

Perfect casting.
Perfect television.
Perfect segue into the next part of the MCU.

In 40 minutes they managed to make someone more compelling than Thanos.

I echo this. Loki was near perfect for a Disney+ show. I almost kinda want to say it's better than Wandavision.

[Threash]

It also totally fits with the exception that Rick Sanchez isn't really a conqueror so much as a destructive force.

Also strongly against time travel.

[HaemishM]

And now we know why. 

[Teleku]

Waiting for The Council of Kangs in season 2 now.

[eldaec]

Perfect casting.
Perfect television.
Perfect segue into the next part of the MCU.

In 40 minutes they managed to make someone more compelling than Thanos.

I echo this. Loki was near perfect for a Disney+ show. I almost kinda want to say it's better than Wandavision.

I think wandavision was probably better in execution, but loki wins on degree of difficulty.

Making a time travel plot not shit is hard, and making the resolution one of the best bits is even harder.

[Teleku]

Yeah, I'll actually edge Loki over WandaVision for my tastes, but only because it was more direct where as WandaVision was a lot more experimental and out there (still amazing, mind you).

[MediumHigh]

I skipped 3 episodes of WandaVision and still don't have motivation to rewatch the ones I skipped. I was only slightly worried that Loki will take a turn for the generic in episode 4ish.