Loki Episode 1: Glorious Purpose

[kerravonsen]

WOW. I really was not expecting it to be this good. I don't mean the setup, though that has its own farcical nightmarishness. What was unexpected was Loki's character development.

Of course, straight from New York, Loki is all anger and threats and arrogance. And then, when they incinerate the guy for not having a ticket, ulp. Loki is capable of fawning when he needs to.

Loki was perfectly correct, it wasn't him who altered the timeline, it was the Avengers. But when the judge said "that was meant to happen", well... it's all very arbitrary, isn't it?(+)

I had gathered from the spoilers which I was unable to avoid, that Loki ends up working as an agent for the TVA, I knew that already. But I was expecting... I'm not sure what I was expecting.

The "you caused the death of your mother" was one thing; Mobius was being manipulative, at least to a degree. But I think Mobius was being genuine when he said he wanted Loki's honest answer to the question "Do you enjoy hurting people?" It's a pretty fundamental question, that.

The critical point, the metaphorical wall that Loki crashes into is this: the utter futility of it all. Not just that the most powerful items in the universe are used as paperweights in the TVA, but that, when he skips on ahead in the file of his life, and sees the way that he dies, he can no longer delude himself: there is no glorious purpose. So of course he laughs. He is very much the kind of person who would laugh at the irony of it.

And then when Mobius asks him again, Loki is honest. No more masks. And very pointed, that echo of what he'd said to Mobius earlier.

Loki: I don't enjoy hurting people. I... I don't enjoy it. I do it because I have to, because I've had to.
Mobius: Okay, explain that to me.
Loki: Because it's part of the illusion. It's the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear.
Mobius: A desperate play for control. You do know yourself.
Loki: A villain.
Mobius: That's not how I see it.

No, indeed. Because "villain" is just another mask, just another role.

Is it just me, or does Mobius look like Howard Stark?

"I can't offer you salvation. But perhaps I can offer you something better."

What? I'm not sure what would be better than salvation, myself.

"The variant we are hunting is... you."

Oh boy. Oh boy, I did not see that coming.

But it fits beautifully. Because if there was another variant of Loki, who had been caught by the TVA, who had not let go of his rage, who had managed to escape the TVA... yeah, he would want to burn the whole place to the ground, and he would want to make them suffer. Can other!Loki destroy the TVA?(++) I don't think so. Not the way he's going about it, at least. This is rage, this is vengeance, this is tactics, not strategy.

But oh boy, this certainly raises the stakes.

(+) The whole TVA and the "sacred timeline" completely messes up my timeline theories about Endgame. Well, sort of. Because it does confirm the "every change creates a new branch of the multiverse" part of my theorising, but if the TVA are eliminating branches as soon as they happen, then it also messes up the "2014!Nova and 2014!Thanos were from a different timeline, except that they were, and also, that if the "time heist" was decreed to have to happen, that's very messy, and, as I said, very arbitrary. Though it possibly explains why Doctor Strange could only find one future in which they won. Except, of course, Doctor Strange doesn't know about the TVA either, even though he is the master of the Time Stone.

(++) I'm not sure the TVA can be destroyed.

What we've seen of the TVA so far... is disturbing.

• Do they mean well? Yes, for their definition of "well".
  • I'm not entirely sure that their mission is even needed. Yes, there was apparently a war, but that could easily be propaganda.
    • Indeed, the cheery infodumps have all the taste and smell of propaganda. Or marketing. Same diff.
    • And history is, after all, written by the winners.
    • When you think about it, the Timekeepers probably started the war in the first place. After all, if it was a war over what should be the dominant timeline... the Timekeepers won, by making sure that there was only one dominant timeline. I mean, who wouldn't fight to prevent themselves from being wiped out of existence?
• The TVA is a monolithic, huge, faceless, bureaucracy.
  • You cannot reason with a bureaucracy, you cannot persuade it, you cannot even argue with it. It will keep on rolling and crush you in its wake. "An ant has no quarrel with a boot", but this isn't a boot, it's a concrete mixer, pouring its own version of reality over everything.
• They have no respect for life; not the life of Variants, at any rate. Variants, to them, are like rats that chew at the wiring of the universe; no, even rats would engender more respect than Variants are given.

And it took me longer to write my episode reaction than it did to watch the episode. Oops.
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