Hello!
Today I’m writing about Loki episode 1, which dropped on Wednesday 9 June — the points worth flagging, the theories, and predictions for where all of this goes next.
In this article I’ll briefly write up what caught my eye on the first watch and the Easter eggs, and then get into the theories.
Spoilers ahead
The WandaVision episode reviews from earlier are here!
Click the image below for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode reviews!
Check the image below for the Loki episode reviews!
I’ve started photographing Hot Toys figures for fun recently. Camera is a ZV-1, shooting RAW and editing in Lightroom.
This time I shot in Shibuya and a few other places.
The opening of episode 1 plays footage from Endgame!
In the Japanese dub Tony Stark is still voiced by Keiji Fujiwara, and it got me a bit teary…
New piece of world-building starting here: it seems the MCU only has the one timeline, the Sacred Timeline.
And the Sacred Timeline is
Long ago, a great war broke out across the multiverse
Countless timelines clashed for supremacy
and everything was on the verge of being destroyed
But the all-knowing Time-Keepers
unified the multiverse into a single timeline
That is the “Sacred Timeline”
From Loki episode 1
That’s roughly it, apparently. This setup does get explained by the Ancient One in Endgame, incidentally. What Loki has made clear, though, is that branching seems to happen with no Infinity Stones involved at all.
Whether the Ancient One knew about the TVA or the Time-Keepers is unclear.
After S.W.O.R.D. in WandaVision, Loki brings in another new organisation! The TVA, no less.
Apparently there’s an organisation with the same role in the comics too.
On the staff: in the MCU the Time-Keepers created the TVA and its workers themselves, but in the comics it looks like clones suited to each post are mass-produced, as below
And time running differently inside the TVA feels like it’s going to be pretty key
The scene where Loki gets hit and goes into slow motion is pure Gold Experience from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
, or Mayuri Kurotsuchi’s superhuman drug from BLEACH, and it made me laugh
Branched worlds apparently get wiped out with an item called a “reset charge.” And it looks like the villain Loki is collecting them.
The production design on Loki is modern, retro-pop, and it’s the best! Reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, and of the show Legion.
That line feels like a meta comment on Loki telling Mobius “I’m walking a path I chose myself.”
Meaning Loki looks like he’s doing the choosing while all of it was already fixed — which is the robot metaphor exactly.
Episode 1 digs into Loki quite a lot! Nice work Mobius lol
The Loki in this show is the character from straight after the first Avengers, so his purpose in life was to become king of Earth first, then king of the Nine Realms, then king of the universe — from the outside, just ruling and nothing more.
But Loki himself hadn’t really settled on that purpose deep down, and making people suffer honestly isn’t fun for him either.
His answer for why he rules — to make things easier for people — was a surprise.
Loki had gone on believing that every choice up to now was his own rather than something decided for him, but then he sees the Infinity Stones reduced to paperweights at the TVA and his magic sealed away, and finally realises he was a frog in a well
And his face here, when he says
Is this the most powerful force in the universe?
— that face was the best
Really looking forward to how Loki redefines himself from here
The D.B. Cooper case is the American version of Japan’s 300 million yen robbery, and it’s stylish and mysterious enough that other overseas shows keep using it as material.
Loki saying “brother, Heimdall, brace yourselves” makes the whole thing feel like a game the gods play lol
Nice to get a glimpse of Loki and Heimdall’s history together lol
The futuristic item that turned up in this scene looked like the Faiz Blaster from Kamen Rider Faiz, below lol
Coming up there are films that obviously take the multiverse as a given, like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
But Loki has now established that the multiverse can exist, yet is being weeded out by the TVA.
So for the sake of those films, this show needs to bring the TVA down or reform it, and I think the one who does it will be Loki, the god of mischief and the trickster who moves the story along.
On top of that, I also think this show might be a story about identity. This Loki is a copied Loki who has come off the main branch, which makes him — to get philosophical about it — a Swampman sort of existence. So he’ll probably spend the show thinking about what he actually is.
The Swampman, for reference, goes like this
A man goes out hiking. On the way, unluckily for him, he is struck by lightning beside a swamp and dies. At that moment a second bolt of lightning strikes the swamp right next to him. By sheer coincidence, that strike sets off a chemical reaction in the swamp’s sludge and produces something entirely identical to the dead man in substance and shape. This new being created by the lightning is called the Swampman. The Swampman is identical at the atomic level to the man as he was just before he died, and looks exactly the same. Since the state of the brain (the state of the dead man’s brain while he was alive) is a perfect copy as well, his memories and knowledge appear to be identical too [3]. The Swampman leaves the swamp and walks briskly back into town in the form of the man who has just died. He opens the door of the flat where the dead man used to live, calls the dead man’s family, reads on from where the dead man left off in his book, and falls asleep. And the next morning he heads off to the workplace the dead man used to commute to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman
That’s the one. And a lot of the TVA staff look like frogs in wells as well — the one keeping a cat, the one who doesn’t know what a fish is. I suspect Loki’s role is to wake them all up. He did say early on that the point of ruling was to make everyone free, after all lol
My prediction, with nothing much to back it up, is that the Time-Keepers don’t exist at all and Miss Minutes is the one behind everything. Probably a runaway AI or something lol
Also, an item from the 31st century turns up in the episode. Setting aside time running differently inside the TVA, was it fetched by going into the future from where the TVA is, or is the era the TVA sits in the far future, the 100th century or something? Curious about that too.
If the TVA is in the far future, it might well be blocking changes to the past so that its own era comes out exactly as it is… I wonder
So the villain of this show turns out to be Loki. Well, that’s a shock lol
The questions that come bubbling up here are
Those. On number 3, the villain Loki is collecting the TVA’s reset charges, so he’s clearly trying to smash one entire timeline.
Now, the item below is a reset charge, and you can see there’s purple smoke. And several shots in the trailers out at the moment have purple light in them, so the villain Loki pulling something off with reset charges is a certainty
Speaking of purple light, it does look like the Power Stone, one of the Infinity Stones, is being used lol Honestly, branch the timeline and you can mass-produce as many as you like
People are also saying that all sorts of Lokis will turn up in the show. The comics have King Loki, Lady Loki, Kid Loki and loads more, so the odds look high.
Richard E. Grant and Sophia Di Martino in particular, the cast members announced so far, are rumoured to be playing different Lokis, so where this goes next is genuinely exciting
A worker handling the Tesseract with bare hands
Doesn’t look like an ordinary human. Or maybe it can be touched because it’s been neutralised…
The character rumoured to be the main villain of the second film in the series, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Something that looks like him was painted into the stained glass in the episode. Why he’d be painted into a church that’s supposed to be holy is one of several mysteries, and I’d love the show to clear it up.
I wrote about Wanda and Mephisto in the article below.
https://movie-paradise-blog.com/2021/03/%e3%80%90%e8%80%83%e5%af%9f%e3%83%bb%e3%83%ac%e3%83%93%e3%83%a5%e3%83%bc%e3%80%91%e3%80%8e%e3%83%af%e3%83%b3%e3%83%80%e3%83%b4%e3%82%a3%e3%82%b8%e3%83%a7%e3%83%b3%e7%ac%ac9%e8%a9%b1%e3%80%8fwandavisi/
Even though the Avengers moved up and down the timeline constantly, the TVA never corrected them, apparently because that was the pre-set course. Beyond that, I think Bruce Banner’s idea of returning the Infinity Stones to their original times once they’d finished using them, so no branches formed, must have been the right call.
On the post-Endgame timeline the Infinity Stones are physically lost, because Thanos destroyed them. But the TVA has stones by the pile, so maybe this show is what brings them back? lol
First, what Kang the Conqueror is.
Kang the Conqueror is, in the comics, a figure who comes from the future, and a famous villain who clashes with the Avengers again and again the way Thanos does.
His strength is summoning versions of himself from all sorts of times to fight alongside him lol
He’s also deeply involved in the birth of the X-Men. In the comics Kang time-travels to ancient Egypt and creates a monster there called Apocalypse. Apocalypse is in fact the progenitor of the mutants, which means Kang can be called the root cause of mutants existing at all. Endgame established that changing the past has no effect on the future, though, so who knows how that plays out… For more detail on Kang, see this Wikipedia page lol
Incidentally, the even-further-future version of Kang the Conqueror is apparently called Immortus.
And Kang the Conqueror is rumoured to be the main villain of Ant-Man 3! He’s a Thanos-tier villain, and yet it’s an Ant-Man film — how he gets handled there has me pretty excited.
Next, Ravonna. In the show she’s the TVA’s judge
And in the comics she’s Kang’s lover!!
Loki surely isn’t going to run the lover-of-Kang thread, but she might get involved as Kang’s lover somehow later on…?
There’s a Kree in that room!! And dressed like someone from Earth! This has to be proof that Secret Invasion is happening!!
Let me explain what Secret Invasion is, just in case.
Secret Invasion is
A major crossover from 2008. An important story that shaped the Marvel world for several years afterwards.
The Skrull Empire’s long-prepared invasion of Earth begins all at once, and war with the heroes breaks out.
The shape-shifting Skrulls had already replaced a great many heroes before the invasion started.
With nobody sure who to trust, the heroes are forced into a desperate fight.https://www33.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/421.html
Secret Invasion has also been officially announced as going into production.
There’s something that looks like setup for it in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode 6 as well, so give it a read if you like lol
https://movie-paradise-blog.com/2021/04/%e3%80%90%e8%80%83%e5%af%9f%e3%83%bb%e3%83%ac%e3%83%93%e3%83%a5%e3%83%bc%e3%80%91%e3%80%8e%e3%83%95%e3%82%a1%e3%83%ab%e3%82%b3%e3%83%b3%e3%82%a6%e3%82%a3%e3%83%b3%e3%82%bf%e3%83%bc%e3%83%bb%e3%82%bd-6/#i-14
People are talking about the scene in Ant-Man and the Wasp where the doctors come back, where somewhere that looks like the TVA is visible. Comparison below
They really do look alike!! And if it’s in the Quantum Realm, time running differently makes complete sense!
The MCU explains that its timeline became a single one out of a fight between different timelines over supremacy. That war between multiverses is said to be based on the comic Secret Wars.
Come to think of it, the sunken warship behind the scene below from Loki — that is obviously Titan, Thanos’s home planet.
NEXUS turns up in Loki as well!
Anyone remember it? It’s the term that ran in the commercial in WandaVision episode 7.
The WandaVision commercials were always loaded with meaning, but I think this NEXUS one is especially important. The word NEXUS appears both in the live-action MCU and in Marvel Comics.
In the MCU first, NEXUS is the term from Age of Ultron. As for what it means,
The Nexus is the global relay hub of the internet, located in Oslo, Norway. Get access to the Nexus and you can obtain nuclear launch codes as well. Tony looks into why Ultron was unable to get hold of the launch codes, and it emerges that J.A.R.V.I.S. protected them.
https://www.eiga-square.jp/title/avengers_age_of_ultron/keyword/13
And NEXUS in the comics is
The Nexus is an interdimensional gateway that provides passage to every possible reality, including the realities that lie between realities. Whether it was created by someone, or is simply the one place in the entire multiverse where all realities naturally intersect, is unknown
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Nexus_of_All_Realities
That’s what it is. The WandaVision commercial advertises “choose whichever reality you like,” so it works both as NEXUS standing for Vision (originally Jarvis), and as saying that Wanda rewriting reality to suit herself is just like using the comics version of the Nexus.
It’d be fun if Wanda and Loki were connected at least a little
The gods look about ready to properly enter the MCU, so let me introduce a couple of them briefly
History
The Living Tribunal has been granted omnipotent power by the omnipotent being the One-Above-All, in order to protect and maintain the harmony of the main reality (Earth-616), branch universes (such as What If) and pocket universes (such as Earth X), the whole of the multiverse, and the past, the future, reality and parallel worlds.
The Living Tribunal appears on Earth as required, monitoring the actions of other cosmic beings and passing judgement on whether they affect the universe as a whole.
Appearance
For convenience, the Living Tribunal manifests in a humanlike form with three faces. Only one of the faces can be seen in full, the second only partly, and the last is completely hidden by cloth. The three faces represent equity, necessity and vengeance respectively.
Powers and abilities
The Living Tribunal holds infinite cosmic power, is omniscient and omnipotent, and has absolute authority over the Marvel Universe second only to the One-Above-All. Should it choose to, it has the power to wipe out the entire multiverse in an instant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Tribunal
So the Living Tribunal is a three-faced being, something like the arbiter of the universe.
Loki is digging into time, so maybe the Living Tribunal shows up?
Just to be clear, he’s a different character from the Time-Keepers
And when it comes to the strongest god in Marvel, it’s TOAA!
The-One-Above-All, TOAA for short, is the highest being there is. No being can defeat him unless they use an item called the HOTU. The Living Tribunal receives its power from him too, so there’s a hierarchy in place.
The one true god, essentially.
He’s also said to be the writers who draw the comics themselves, the creators. Meaning he can change the stories in the comics however he likes.
On July 24, 202…
The most violent, the most seductive lie of all is “the song of freedom”
For almost everyone, making a decision brings shame and anxiety
and then regret
Whenever a choice has to be made, the wrong road is the one taken