Loki – The Variant Review

Things moved along at a brisk clip in this week’s installment of Loki, giving us all the remaining exposition we need to grasp just what is happening in the series, but continuing to make its delivery wholly engaging through the use of the MCU’s newest buddy team: Mobius and Loki (yeah, I never thought that would be the direction the series went in, but I can’t say I’m disappointed about it).

So, to sum up what we know (and what we’ll need to know moving forward) before getting into the episode analysis: Lady Loki* (Sophia Di Martino) is the Variant causing havoc throughout the timeline, hiding in natural disasters, and she has a plan that goes beyond what our Loki ever imagined. There were rumors that the series would introduce Lady Loki into the MCU – she’s from an alternative timeline to the Prime timeline of the MCU, and since the multi-verse is about to become a big thing it’s fitting that we get a Trickster as our first real interaction with it – but her initial appearance was worth the build-up throughout the episode. She’s got a plan to find the Time-Keepers. As for what she plans to do once she finds them, well, that’s still TBD. But I can’t imagine she wants to have a cup of tea and discuss the weather. And our boy Loki has decided it’s worth joining her for the ride. (Again, motivation is cloudy – does he want to stop her? Enact his own plan? Tag along?)

*While she’s technically just Loki, to avoid confusion I’m going to be referring to her with the name generally used in the comics when Loki is female. And yes, for those not aware, Lady Loki absolutely exists within the comics.

“The Variant” continued the delightful character interaction from “Glorious Purpose.” I would watch a series that was just Owen Wilson and Tom Hiddleston delivering rapid-fire dialogue with a comedic but biting edge for a whole 22 episodes if that’s what Disney wanted to give me. But I’m also happy to see Hiddleston provide layers to Loki that we haven’t seen before. Yes, this Loki didn’t have the chance to develop the self-sacrificing nature of the Loki we saw die in Infinity War, but we’ve already seen that his desire to cause chaos and his high level of self-preservation is starting to waver. When he was confronted with the knowledge that Asgard had been destroyed in Ragnarok, he was genuinely in pain (after all, there was no one to perform for in that moment – that was real emotion from the Trickster). He lost his home – even if he had a love-hate relationship with it – and he knows he lost his parents thanks to Mobius’s This Is Your Life montage in the pilot. He’s truly alone in the universe – at least until he meets Lady Loki, who proves herself to be more intelligent than he ever imagined her to be.

And this is where the series will make or break it: How will Loki deal with Lady Loki and her plan? The beauty of television, as I’ve often written in reviews, is that it allows writers the chance to tell character driven stories that would be truncated in film. Characters can grow in ways over the course of a season of television that they could never fathom in a movie or in a play. It’s the magic of the medium. Here, Hiddleston and the writing staff have been given a chance to craft a new, complex, and layered version of Loki that isn’t just ready to betray everyone out of his own needs. That’s not to say he won’t (I wouldn’t want Loki to become a pure good guy anymore than you would, trust me), but there’s a chance to dig deeper into why he does this (and the hurt little boy trope will only get them so far). This Loki can become more than his past interactions, can become smarter, can do more damage, but can also make choices that place him firmly in the realm of the morally gray. It’s an interesting situation to find an established character in, and the one thing I’m most intrigued with in the series is seeing how it all plays out.

Similarly, you don’t cast Owen Wilson if you aren’t planning on giving Mobius a heck of an arc. We don’t know all that much about him (and, as we’ve seen, Mobius doesn’t seem to know all that much about himself either – which could mean a reveal is coming down the line), and there’s plenty of interesting things to work through there as well. Is he a good guy? Will he be influenced by Loki? Is he really someone else entirely, stripped of his memory for some reason? His closest relationship is with Ravonna Renslayer (again, you don’t cast Gugu Mbatha-Raw if you aren’t planning on giving her something juicy to work on), yet he doesn’t seem to recall past missions that she was involved in. There’s something more there, but I’m choosing to be surprised should it pan out rather than dig for possible options online (I’ve learned my lesson after getting burned one too many times with WandaVision).

Finally, something fishy is going on with the Time-Keepers. Hunter C-20 revealed their location to Lady Loki, but Mobius claimed he’d never met them. So, why would a Hunter know their location but someone higher up the totem pole like Mobius be in the dark (the easiest explanation is that Mobius is one of them, but was stripped of his memory as a protective measure)? With the Sacred Timeline going haywire and spinning out of control, I suspect the Time-Keepers will be making an appearance shortly – or else we’ll learn just what happened to them before the launch of the series. Because something is rotten in the TVA.