Loki

Clever, bold and flat out fascinating, “Loki” sets a new bar for Disney+ shows.

There’s a lot of great stuff set up here: helter-skelter multiverse play, time travel shenanigans, an interdimensional bromance between Hiddleston and Wilson, both of whom are clearly having a blast. Right now, the rest of the supporting cast struggles to keep up with them, and there are a million ways its time-travel whodunit plot can go south. But based on what we’ve seen so far, Loki has the chance to be the best Marvel series yet.

Of all the surprises and twists introduced by this show, perhaps the most exciting is its deep investment in understanding its central character at his best and worst, asking some truly tough questions against the backdrop of a time travel lark. Loki was always one of the MCU's greatest villains. But he's just as compelling as the hero of his own story.

As Loki, the aptly-named god of mischief, Tom Hiddleston returns in the role he was born to play. He and Owen Wilson, a deadpan delight as Agent Mobius, are Marvel's new dream team in a series that has it all. In a word, wow!

What's good about "Loki'' is what was so good about the other Disney Plus "Endgame" spinoffs, "WandaVision'' and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier." You don't need to be a Marvel expert, or know that Frigga was his mother, or that he had (has?) mother issues. ... This Loki, and those worlds, those mothers, look intriguing indeed. Loki fans will be much pleased.

It’s not as groundbreakingly bonkers as WandaVision, but it’s also not as dourly macho as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Once the premise for the series is in place, things get very fun, as Loki channels his mischievous brilliance into splendid detective work and he and Mobius engage in some timey-wimey theory testing, all building to a tantalizing, two-pronged reveal — one capping each hour — that opens up all kinds of possibilities for the rest of the six-episode season.

If there are any minor quibbles – a slightly hand-wavey explanation of some time travel rules, a couple of dodgy accents, some slightly low-key action scenes – they’re easily outweighed by the performances, world-building and general confidence of this series. Right now, it’s the best Marvel Disney Plus series so far.

Marvel’s most purely entertaining show yet, this gives depth to its central character without losing his essential flightiness, and makes him sympathetic without forgetting that bad guys are more fun.

The series traffics in true comic-book storytelling. It’s an experimental, self-contained, and thoroughly welcome reprieve.

Hiddleston is effusive, while Wilson is wry and restrained. Yet they work, as inexplicably as the world they inhabit. Loki’s premise may not be as bold as Wandavision, nor as crowd-pleasing as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it’s proven to have the strongest opening of the three.

Loki is pretty fun, actually! What a nice surprise. ... Much of the credit for Loki’s fun side goes to Owen Wilson. ... It seems likely that Loki will eventually collapse back toward the Marvel narrative mean. Until that point, though, it’s nice to be able to enjoy Loki for the fun storytelling variant it is.

It’s incredibly promising from the first two episodes provided for press alone, especially as a series that doesn’t demand patience but instead straps you right into its heady and mischievous adventure.

Based on what I’ve seen of Loki so far, the show is off to a great start. I’d even say it’s more promising than WandaVision at the outset.

Loki zigs and zags without sacrificing coherence—a not-inconsiderable feat considering the wealth of explanatory time-travel exposition required by the plot. Suffice it to say, watching these six episodes will likely be necessary for anyone wanting to make heads or tails of where the MCU is headed. Still, the series never feels as if it’s drowning in educational mumbo-jumbo.

Creator and screenwriter Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron have a ball with the multiverse and competing-timeline angles. While the show’s overall narrative apparently feeds into the forthcoming 2022 “Doctor Strange” sequel, which Waldron worked on, these first two episodes work on their own.

Even though Loki delivers his usual subservience-is-freedom speeches and has bouts of self-analysis, the touch here is pretty light. Hiddleston is a wonderfully physical comic actor, all twitches and muttered asides, and Wilson offers a casual contrast to Loki’s royal airs.

So far, "Loki" is fun and zippy, reminiscent of the more casual and comedic Marvel films such as "Thor: Ragnarok" and "Ant-Man."

Breezy, funny, offbeat and potentially great spinoff.

The overall vibe of “Loki” is, like “WandaVision,” more off the beaten Marvel path. Both the MCU as a whole and this individual series are the better for it.

It's enjoyable enough and aesthetically potent, borrowing design influences from the late '60s and '70s – which may remind some people of another Marvel-rrelated TV property, "Legion." The similar visuals add breeziness to this show's tone as well, aided by Hiddleston and Wilson's combined appeal. However, that FX show was substantially weirder, immediately more perplexing but seductively so. "Loki" lacks this. If anything the plot is excessively plain.

A little lightness is welcome, and the 45-minute episodes of “Loki” fly by painlessly, though they may not deliver quite as much jokey satisfaction per minute as you’d like. If the writing has dull patches, there’s always the company of a stellar cast. ... A little less Marvel and a little more “Rick and Morty” would be something to look forward to.

Waldron finds just enough different ways to keep inserting more information, and director Kate Herron effectively makes Loki feel like more than a series of mythology dumps. ... Having set everything up to an exhausting degree, things could be lined up to get really entertaining. ... Or Loki might just be a lot of Hiddleston and Wilson talking, which might still be engaging for six episodes, but will surely require Marvel course correction, once the audience murmuring begins.

There’s little pretense to social satire here, so “Loki” is easier to get into the spirit of this than “WandaVision,” although I’m of the minority opinion that none of these Marvel small-screen spinoffs pack enough wit, action, pathos or what have you into them to justify “series length” treatment. But Loki and Hiddleston — in all their many colors — are fun enough to bring one back to the stream to catch each new episode to see what that “scamp” is up to now.

Hiddleston and Wilson are perfect screen partners. ... And yet Loki still felt limp. The introduction of variants and timeline laws managed to be both overly knotty and explained away, and the lack of either Marvel-esque combat or quirky subtlety rendered the episode a little unambitious.

The first two episodes of Loki (which were all that was made available for review – there are six in total), however, felt flat. The opener was a lengthy, exposition-heavy setup that felt very static, and the second spent its first half going over much the same ground. ... Still, things do perk up by the very end of the second episode.

The slow wind-up has characterized all three of Marvel's Disney+ series, but the pacing feels particularly sluggish — and the endgame, pardon the expression, elusive — watching the first two episodes of "Loki." Seeing Tom Hiddleston reprise his role as the suave Thor villain certainly has its charms, but thus far the god of mischief hasn't taken the shape of a wholly compelling concept.

Only two episodes of “Loki” were screened for critics, making it hard to know exactly how successful the 6-episode season might be in shaping its own identity within the onscreen Marvel universe. Of these first two episodes, however, the second was far more engaging. ... When Loki sighs in frustration about the TVA’s tedious overreach dictating his story when he could be doing something much more dangerous and strange, it’s hard not to agree.

At times, “Loki” feels like a Marvel clip show. ... The setting of the TVA is both interesting and purposefully bland. It’s essentially supposed to be the DMV of time and space; a hellish, boring time suck that makes one want to die, filled with annoying bureaucracy. But a much more superior, more drab, and much funnier version of this idea was already seen in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and “Loki” can’t match, update or expand of that absurdism.

Waldron and director Kate Herron throw in as many flourishes as they can to try to turn exposition into entertainment, but there’s only so much you can do after deciding to answer every single question about time travel.