Main cast: Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Owen Wilson (Mobius), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Ravonna Renslayer), Wunmi Mosaku (Hunter B-15), Eugene Cordero (Casey), and Tara Strong (Miss Minutes)
Director: Kate Herron
Yes, Loki is alive. At least, it’s an alternate-dimension Loki, that gained the Tesseract in the events of Avengers: Endgame and ended up in the clutches of the Time Variance Authority or TVA. These folks really don’t like it when people mess with timelines, and Loki now has to choose between being erased from existence or helping the TVC eliminate an even greater threat to the timeline… with the identity of this threat to be revealed in due course, naturally. This is only the first episode, after all, and they can’t show all their cards at once.
Loki is, if Glorious Purpose is anything to by, more like WandaVision than The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: it’s more of an action comedy with a mystery box gimmick. It wants to wow audience, to make them go, “Wow, I’ve never seen this shiny spinning thing before! What’s inside?” Let’s hope, for its sake, that the content inside this mystery box is far more fulfilling than that of WandaVision, which, in hindsight, is just a long advertisement for the upcoming Captain Marvel and Dr Strange movies.
As for this episode, I don’t really have much to say about it because it’s an episode teasing of things to come. I’d hopefully be better able to explain the overall story as the series continue. For now, I’m alright with what I’ve seen.
Owen Wilson is pretty alright as Mobius, the TVC big guy that will act as Loki’s mentor and wrangler. He strikes the right balance of comedy and gravity in this episode, and I hope I will see more of this character as the show progresses. There is the obligatory strong woman of color character in a Disney show, Ravonna Renslayer, that so far feels tad one-note. Hopefully she gets better developed over time.
Loki, on the other hand… sigh. I still mourn the cunning, devious Loki in Thor, even more than 10 years later, because that character is fantastic as the complex foil to Thor. Since then, the character has regressed to being a campy butt of everyone’s jokes, all layers of depths and threat stripped away as a result, and here, this Loki is a scenery-chewing, campy, melodramatic creature that sneers and utters bombastic lines that make him more like Ming the Conqueror than anything else. Just like every other character in the MCU, he is now a one-line crank machine. God, I hope this show redeems this character, but given how mediocre the TV shows in the MCU have been so far, I am not holding my breath.
Anyway, this one is alright. It piques my curiosity to a degree that has me interested to see what happens next, which already makes this one far better than the utter bore that is The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I just wish Tom Hiddleston’s butt-munching scenery chewing in Glorious Purpose hadn’t remind me so much of a crappy episode from Tales from the Crypt though.
