TV Review: ‘Loki’ Season 1, Episode 3 — A Fun Mess
by Frank Martin
If fans were hoping to get any clarification in Loki‘s plot from the third episode, they are going to be gravely disappointed. If anything, the show’s muddled plot has become even more convoluted and confusing. Character motivations are all over the place and make little sense in the grand scheme of the episode. Still, it had a lot of great moments and the actors have a lot of charisma and chemistry on screen. It can still be a fun show with plenty of time travel hijinks. Viewers are just going to have to turn off their brain and not think too hard about the logistics of what’s happening or even the goals of the various characters.
Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) heads to the late 1800s to enact a plan with Miss Minutes (Tara Strong). They want to affect He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) when he was still a boy. The result: Victor Timely, a variant who grows up to display his work at the Chicago World’s Fair. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius (Owen Wilson) head there to find her, but they end up trying to get Timely instead. That’s when Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) arrives to kill him. Chaos ensues, and everybody scatters. The episode roughly ends as Loki and Mobius manage to take the variant back with them. Meanwhile, Renslayer and Miss Minutes start scheming on their own.
Time travel stories are usually very difficult to pull off. Time itself is a nuisance, so traveling back and forth is bound to create potholes and inconsistencies. But Loki is on a whole other level. It involves wacky bureaucracy and a multiverse in addition to time travel. Because of this, it’s very easy for the plot to veer off course. The first season more or less managed to keep things focused. This season has not. Almost every single character has a different motivation, and their actions don’t always align with those motivations, which may confuse audiences in the long run. Again, it’s very entertaining to see these actors in different settings, but it can definitely give someone a headache to try and find order within this muddled mess of a story.
Loki streams Thursdays on Disney+.
