Ragnarok All Through Time (Once, Upon Time)
It’s November 14th, 2021. Adele ain’t going anywhere on the charts. Neither is Ed Sheeran, but there’s also CKay, Glass Animals, and Arrdee. In news, Britney Spears is released from her conservatorship, a man detonates an IED outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for defamation around Donald Trump’s attempted coup.
On television, meanwhile, we have “Once, Upon Time,” an episode Chibnall’s co-executive producer Matt Strevens hyped to Doctor Who Magazine as “very ambitious” saying that “it credits the audience with sophistication and intelligence” whilst comparing it to the output of noted indie film studio A24. No, sorry, I’m kidding, he compares it to Marvel. That’s his actual example of ambitious storytelling—not even the competently upper middle brow stylings of A24, but the fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s intelligence and sophistication now—cynical IP farms that operate on the premise that everyone is basically just a fifteen year old boy.
Strevens was likely talking about WandaVision, the first show in this particular iteration of the “MCU on television” concept following Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on generic broadcast television and the Defenders suite on Netflix, both of which were memory-holed in favor of creating headliner content for Disney+, a streaming service we’ll have plenty of time to discuss later in life. That show opened with a trio of episodes dropped over two weeks that presented events in the form of cracked mirror historical sitcoms, starting with a 1950s I Love Lucy pastiche (complete with live studio audience) and moving up through the 1970s before finally revealing its proper conceit. This isn’t that far from “Once, Upon Time,” which sees Whittaker, Gill, and Bishop playing out an adventure that is eventually revealed to have really happened to the Jo Martin Doctor. That flutter of formalist play is neither especially ambitious nor anything like the norm for Marvel, but that’s neither here nor there, and while mocking Strevens for this is both easy and fun, it’s not especially revealing.
The more obvious point of comparison between Doctor Who and Marvel is Loki, which aired its first season just a few months prior to Flux. It’s not entirely fair to say that Loki is “Marvel tries to do Doctor Who,” but the inaccuracy is a matter of degree as opposed to a critique of the underlying association. Certainly Loki is Marvel doing a story about time travel with a mercurial lead who’s played by a British guy who can accurately be described as both “hot” and “a weird little guy.” Which, obviously, Doctor Who isn’t doing that last one in this period, but the point stands. Production on the first season was even disrupted by the pandemic, though Loki was filming in Atlanta under appreciably looser restrictions than a BBC production.
It will of course surprise nobody that Loki is appreciably better than Chibnall-era Doctor Who. It is made by people who can broadly be described as “knowing what they’re doing,” and so possesses things like character arcs and storylines that can accurately be described as being “about” things. It’s not a show you look at and express surprise that its director, Kate Herron, was hired for Ncuti Gatwa’s first season, except inasmuch as she was hired as a writer. It’s perfectly competent television. What it’s not, however, is remotely interesting.
Let’s back up. We haven’t actually checked in with the Marvel Cinematic Universe experiment since the dawn of the Capaldi era, some seven years back . There we looked at Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one of the films that filled the space between the two Joss Whedon Avengers films, and found a swaggering genre mashup that demanded Doctor Who up its game for an era where this could be a piece of popular mass media. From there, the franchise rumbled along through to 2019, when the bulk of its storylines up to that point were resolved in Avengers: Endgame, a three hour monstrosity of a film that killed off a large swath of the core cast and saw the defeat of Thanos, the villain who had been openly hanging over the franchise since 2012.
The title, however, proved misleading in key ways. Far from being the triumphant end of a twenty-two film franchise—three shy of James Bond in less than a quarter of the time—it was simply the pivot point into “Phase Four” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which classic films like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness were joined by the launch of the MCU as a television franchise. This had dubious benefits, with the first outright flops of the Marvel Cinematic Universe accompanying steadily diminishing returns on the television angle. There’s no real challenge to figuring out why this was a breaking point. Not only did Avengers: Endgame all but declare itself a great jumping off point, where Phase Three ran for four years and twenty-five hours, Phase Four ran for just two years while racking up nearly fifty-seven hours of screen time. It required what averaged out to a five minute daily time commitment, and that’s before you factor in the cognitive load of remembering an increasingly sprawling continuity or the $240 that a two year Disney+ subscription and seven movie tickets ran you. These are, of course, largely the same set of errors that render superhero comics chronically incapable of pulling in new readers, but what good is a mistake if you can’t make it twice?
Loki, in many ways, serves as a microcosm of all these problems. Its title character, after all, was killed off in 2018 in the first scene of Avengers: Infinity War—the series instead stars an alternate universe variant of Loki created by time travel shenanigans in Avengers: Endgame. More specifically, it pairs him with the Time Variance Authority, which in the comics is a literally faceless bureaucracy overseeing all of time. This leads to the perversity of a show about the god of mischief and trickery that mostly takes place in brown hallways of brutalist office buildings, with characters whose primary goal is maintaining the absolute and pristine consistency of the “sacred timeline.” It’s not that the faceless bureaucracy insisting that nothing can ever be allowed to change isn’t compelling. But there’s something genuinely off-putting about them being treated as the good guys.
Similarly, the ending seems almost designed to frustrate. Loki and an alternate Loki (who, by all appearances, is the only girl one) make their way past the void at the end of time or whatever to confront He Who Remains, the secretive mastermind behind the Time Variance Authority. Which turns out to be Jonathan Majors, setting up the supervillain Kang, who at the time was set to be the lead villain of the next Avengers movie, then called The Kang Dynasty, and not expected until 2026, a full five years off from this. Even before you get into Majors’s conviction for assault and subsequent sacking, this was desperately unimpressive. It’s not just that “magical black man at the end of time” is a crap pitch. It’s that it turns the entire show into six hours of television that do nothing save resolve into a tease for more Marvel product. Yes, long serialization requires the eternal cliffhanger—to some extent the failure to meaningfully give one with Endgame is likely at least somewhat to blame for Marvel’s precipitous dip in popularity. But there’s a difference between always ending with a look forward and that becoming the telos of the entire project.
In one sense this is simply a repetition of the complaints I made about The Haunting of Villa Diodati—yet another iteration of my increasingly stark rejection of “fandom” as a phenomenon. And it’s true that I find myself settling into an increasingly Moorean view that reacts with utter horror to the dominance of pre-existing franchises within popular culture and the dearth of new ideas. Honestly that’s part of what I find so horrifying about the Time Variance Authority being treated as the good guys. There’s a glorification of stagnation throughout this—a tacit value that all the worthwhile things have already been created, and all that there is to do in the modern age is imitate and iterate.
In one sense this absolves the Chibnall era of many of its sins. Yes, it’s appallingly badly made, but it shares that with plenty of Doctor Who. Its real problem lies deeper. Loki shows us what a well-made Chibnall era would look like, and the answer is still banal crap that isn’t so much unworthy of serious thought as it is incapable of sustaining it. Whereas if Doctor Who had tried, above all, to simply not be like Loki but was still made with all the hair-raising incompetences of the Chibnall era the result would have been a loveable fuckup of a show.
But then, that could be said of Loki too. It’s worth considering the actual myths, especially the Lokasenna, in which Loki lashes out at all of the other gods, viciously insulting them. Readings of this vary—some lay the groundwork for Loki’s repeated assertions that Loki cannot be trusted, and will undermine his on success at every turn. But there is also simply the reading that Loki speaks truth to power and calls out hypocrisy—that the thing he can be relied upon to do is not, as the show would have it, “survive” or “betray people” but that he will be defiant. Certainly that’s the Loki I’ve always known.
Of course, it’s also worth looking at what happened after that defiance, which was Loki’s binding, and by extension Ragnarok. (We’ll leave aside the whole Baldr thing, not least because it’s not actually mentioned in the Lokasenna) Which is largely what Loki feels like—an attempt to bind the character into some entirely unthreatening package, thoroughly defanged and rendered impotent. In some sense Marvel’s take on the character has always trended towards this due to its firm positioning of Loki as a villain (a position shared by a large swath of modern heathenry, and near universally among neo-nazi heathens). In this regard it’s not a surprise, per se, to see Loki become a fucking cop.
At the end of the day, the Doctor Who that exists in a fantasy world in which it really is a pure vehicle for radicalism has never been of much use or interest. Sure, it could have been defiant and furious. But the reality is that Doctor Who is and has always been a mirror of its times, and here it is mirroring times where Loki is bound and the world sinks helplessly into Newtons Sleep. If the result feels apocalyptically bad, well, perhaps that’s a perfectly reasonable description of a world in which nominally serious people can point to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and speak longingly of its ambition.
September 30, 2024 @ 7:07 am
Not having piped up about It’s A Sin last week as I had little to say about it that you hadn’t already covered beautifully, I suppose I’ll stick my neck out to defend Loki here as a bit more interesting than the entry suggests: I think it’s not just better made than the Chibnall era, but also less shallow and less fucked in terms of its ethics.
Certainly I don’t think the show straightforwardly treats the Time Variance Authority as the good guys. There are good people working for it, but for the most part they’ve been brainwashed or memory wiped and don’t actually know the truth of what it’s doing. The show is liberal reformist about it rather than properly leftist, but it knows that the TVA has fascism baked into it, & it’s then optimistic about whether out of its ashes a good version of the same institution can arise instead. Which one can argue is of a piece with Chibnall era optimism, but I don’t think it’s quite as naive.
The Jonathan Majors stuff at the end of S1 is pretty crap, yes, and I don’t much care for his slightly different performance in S2 either, but S2 finds a much better place for the show to end on – with Loki far less Just Another Cop so much as a figure who is learning to care about others and whose final act is a self sacrificial ascension to the role of God of Stories such that all different timelines can be rescued and preserved, in the name of a far less fashy TVA. Which one can certainly criticise as not especially developing out of the Loki of the Eddas, but it’s a pretty compelling development away from the anarchic-disruptor-of-status-quo villain the MCU Loki has otherwise been (however charming).
September 30, 2024 @ 11:32 am
To clarify, because I’m a bit dissatisfied with how I’ve left the wording of that last part: I do of course mean “anarchic-disruptor-of-the-status-quo-and-it’s-a-bad-thing” wrt Loki as MCU villain in his pre 2021 appearances. Whereas the Loki who is disrupting the TVA in the show discussed here is broadly channelling his disruptive energy in a way we are meant to approve of, even if he’s a bit “cog in the machine of the inside” while doing so.
September 30, 2024 @ 1:20 pm
So, having seen where the arc of the remaining run of Chibnall coverage is going, I’m generally on board with the conceit of these essays. An overall point is being made and the difficulty of getting blood from the era in terms of El’s critical methodology is abated in an amusingly sly way. Nonetheless some episodes more than others feel as though they have things worth getting into that are lost – there’s a discussion to be had of Chibnall’s phases as S11: Imitating The Classic Series (loosely), S12: Imitating Davies (lazily), wherein Flux is the perverse phenomenon of Chibnall imitating Moffat (badly), and this episode with its ‘planet called Time’ (and The Doctor’s hilariously nonsensical bafflement thereupon) as the peak of this.
Instead, then, a slightly high-handed critique of Loki as a metonym for the MCU.
This isn’t incredibly unfair, any part of the MCU is designed to serve as a functional synecdoche for the whole, and therein a good deal of its flaws, with the remainder coming from a mix of the obstinacies of adaptation from one franchise medium to another, and the fundamental directive (which has a Disneyish flavour, although the sense in distinguishing between the production philosophy of Disney and Marvel Studios is long since lost) to design each product, be it film, series, or other, as something which can maximally appeal to both the left and right of the political and cultural spectrum in modern America, which given the state of the nation as practically verging a civil war (no pun intended) between a stagnant centre left, and a right wing which is collapsing into more and more overt resurgent fascism, creates an artistic challenge the demented nature of which is in some ways a poison to all possible coherent meaning, and in other ways one of the few things that can be called remotely conceptually interesting throughout; how will a given work split the difference? More often than not, of course, the simple answer is some superficial diversity wrapped around a deeply conservative central message when the motivation and nature of the antagonist is fully considered, which nets out to standard liberalism really, but often there are bizarre malfunctions created in the further compensations to this (certainly Falcon & The Winter Soldier, one of the most unwatchable of the TV fare, is a schizoid screaming panic attack staring into the void of the implicit fascism at the heart of the superhero concept and Captain America specifically – which arguably makes it sound more interesting than it is, although there is perhaps some value in looking at it as a high budget work of naïve art).
Where in all of this does Loki sit? Well, notably it’s options for superficial diversity are somewhat hampered by being a solo series about a white male protagonist, there is of course the queer angle, since Loki’s bisexuality has been explored somewhat in comics, but this is by far the area in which Disney-Marvel have been most skittish in their concession to liberal progressivism (or rather least willing to cost themselves MAGA dollar – Democrats will go see films with women and racial minorities and grouse that there could have been more gays, Republicans can just go and watch an FF film or a DC flick if the MCU starts endorsing the homosexual agenda), we get some passing line about laying with princes and that’s all, which Davies memorably sneered at back when he was allowed to have opinions in public (where now, of course, he rebels more tacitly by poaching the best talent from Loki and having them write dandy-for-dandy love stories to air on D+).
Instead we get a series which is philosophically a neat little parable about the fundamental logic of control. There are many ways, of course, to come at the question of fascism through allegory, it’s a complex and contradictory thing, and one can depict its image and skimp in the details (as with, say Hydra, for a relevant example), or perhaps pick out some of the specific atrocities and construct an alternate instigator which needn’t bear acute aesthetic resemblance, or perhaps just establish a totemic force of authoritarian evil and let people make the comparisons to real world politics for themselves. Here, instead, we start with an allegory which nominally literalizes the central logical conceit of authoritarianism – that there is a strict binary between two opposing options, anarchy (framed as destructive chaos), and order (variously lauded as purely utopian or needled as a compromise solution, but seldom if ever held to not be intrinsically and self evidently better than the alternative). So it is with the multiversal antics of Disney’s Marvel’s Loki S1; existence, it is eventually revealed, once contained multitudes, but the nature of infinity is such that inevitably this trended towards a scenario where some universe began a chain reaction which threatened all realities, and now it is the weary duty of the forces of Order to prevent complexity as Man Cannot Be Trusted.
Certainly this has little if anything to do with the Lokasenna, not a source material that the text is really remotely engaging with, and thus largely an awkwardly fitting standard to hold it up to – not an intrinsically unfair one, it could hypothetically have opted to root itself in the ultimate available source material, and certainly the appeal of that to heathens, and Norse lore nerds in general, is obvious and the decision not to will always and fairly be most frustrating to them… but nor is it an obvious thing to do from any other perspective, artistic or commercial, compared to drawing on the comics history of the character and mediating a path between riffing on that and the structural requirements of the machinery of a monstrosity like the MCU, which as noted requires each of its organs to live in service of the whole in a manner that means the ideal mode of engagement is less in the viewing of any one film, show, etc. than in a Reddit-dazed midground focus on what the metanarrative is at any given time, which is to say the adult equivalent of being sat with a box of action figures and smashing them together after an hour of eating sugar cereals and watching your favourite cartoons.
Given this the path that is taken does not strike me as a particularly barren one – Loki has been established so far not as an agent of chaos or indeed stories, not even really of lies or mischief as he’s often called, but as a bully, a weak petty authoritarian and fascist allegory in his own right. This is, of course, an odd thing to do with the figure, but also rooted ultimately in the Silver Age comics take on the character, which had little to no interest in mythology beyond at most an occasional source of names and loose imagery, and thus treated Loki as another cackling supervillain intent on power and domination, from which subsequent writers have variously played push and pull with the opposing tension of doing something rooted in more accurate and even sympathetic depiction of him. Given the admittedly very weird move to have the show’s primary Loki extend out from the least developed or redeemed version of the character (a decision ofc rooted in fanbrain logic that Loki’s redemptive death in Infinity War would be in some way ruined by having been a trick or being otherwise undone, thus must be Real for there to be Stakes – where, in fairness, an amount to which the franchise at large had been reticent to kill off anyone of any notability [for obvious and crassly financial reasons] prior to Endgame, to the extent that this had affected wider fan discourse and become a problem needing addressed, is at play), much of the thrust of the series is in wrangling with this arc, the push and pull between Silver Age Bastard Loki, his self image/mythic root as a trickster rather than an authoritarian, and the obvious pull toward making him a Byronic antihero, where the latter two are mostly allied in pulling away from the former, but have an innate tension as well.
Mostly, in practice this is accomplished by putting him through the wringer, first with literal torture at the hands of the TVA who break him variously while pointing out how little his actions relate to his self image (and implicitly thus commenting on the disparity between the early comics/cinematic version of the character and the mythic version such as we know from surviving sources), this humiliated version is then further humbled by experiencing a close view of the administrative tedium of actual power, working for a force whose grasp casually renders the stakes of the entire MCU, so far, a footnote – but are in every way the antithesis of Loki’s glory-focussed, all-image sense of entitlement to authority. And, from there, falling into the company of ‘Girl Loki’ an anarchistic force that rejects the TVA’s perspective and offers a path to redemption in the form of ‘kill god’ rather than ‘become cop’.
This is, by and large, allowed to be quite a sympathetic position, Loki is seduced by it and forms a sincere attachment bond and investment in the cause, ennobling himself, while the initial cosiness of the TVA brass (as represented by Owen Wilson with a pushbroom moustache) gives way to seediness and conspiracy, thus reframing their already harshly coded brutality of method (riot gear, vaporizing truncheons) as less necessary evil than the folly of dictatorship. Wilson’s still sympathetic TVA character is allowed to have the scales fall from his eyes only to be mindwiped back to status quo at season’s end. And ultimately, in all this, the killing god mission culminates in a final conflict with, as noted, Majors’ debut performance as the intended arc villain of the upcoming Phase. However, personally, I found neither the character concept/performance to be underwhelming, nor the fact that the season cliffhanger established that the character would be (or was intended to be) returning for a later villain reprise to make the entire point of the series merely a trailer for an unannounced Kang film. Certainly it doubles as that, but again to me the point is the commentary on the logic of power, which has been seeded throughout by the self justifications of the TVA, and culminates in Majors’ He Who Remains (a both-ur-and-ultra form of Kang The Conqueror) detailing the causal history the the institution, which he is ultimately behind and can thus most poetically and informedly extoll on the wisdom and necessity of. Yes, this is a bunch of Kang lore, and thus works to set him up well for future returns but it is also a fairly elegant and interioristic depiction of the basic conceit; chaos or order, if you truly deeply passionately believe (due, in this case, to having seen strong evidence, such as a multiversal war caused by your own actions) that freedom will lead to an end to all things then are you not obliged to oppose it for the sake of life itself? Well, no, better to die free and all that – but it is at least a window into the mind of those who believe that it’s better the many live in chains they don’t notice than be free of them only to die from the unfettered actions of a relative few. Which is of course the point, after a whole redemptive arc Boy Loki is re-confronted with a case for authoritarianism mature enough to give him pause, where Girl Loki is an all-out anarchist he has, at times, and indeed quite recently, been a would-be dictator, and is thus tempted to consider the case before making a choice. For my money this is a genuinely interesting use of the series and the character as constructed (again, a far cry from the figure of legend but so it goes) to look at a real question germane to the sort of things that come up in comics; power hungry madmen and redemptive arcs, but pressingly relevant to real world issues like far right radicalization. It’s not an utterly breath-taking one of those. I could do better, as could many talented creative types not working under the constraints of the Disney-Marvel model, which largely prevents anything which might endorse such a commercially disruptive sentiment as ‘fascism bad’ from being made without heavy mitigation (as with, say, Captain America where it’s countered by the fairly blunt ‘American Exceptionalism Good’ literalized hilariously through a blonde uberminsch in a peak moment of flat-out conceptual cognitive dissonance).
So what’s the mitigation here? Is this just an unalloyed moment if mid-leftism for the MCU, not a great work of art but an ok bit of scifi schlock with a passable social message? Well, yes and no. The thing is while I’ve been banding around ‘fascism’ as a fairly politically specific and literal piece of terminology it’s just as true that there are any number of things that people are wiling to call fascism as there are ways to create allegories for historic and resurgent authoritarian extremism. Nobody likes being told what to do. And it’s not even as if the word is used at any point in the series – rather we have an allegory about control, which if you are left-leaning you can reason from the evident soft lefty trappings (modest diversity, a passing queer reference, tacit debts to Doctor Who, etc.) is evidently about the evils of state control over people, however if you are right-leaning and willing to look past these trappings (which is decreasingly common, one suspects on average the series comes out as one of the less popular with Republican MCU fandom) then there’s just as much of a reading here about the ills of state control of things you think should be free thereof, such as banks, markets, and gun ownership. Certainly my partner, with whom I watched the show, works in financial regulation and both saw the sympathetic political reading and joked throughout about how he kinda works for the TVA and that the whole thing works just as well as a parable about the evils of restricting free market capitalism.
So, yeah, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is by and large aesthetically and morally bankrupt, as is the Chibnallian Epoch of Doctor Who, and I don’t blame El, or anyone really, for reneging from the task of finding anything positive or detailed to say about the either, but I would largely say that in the case of Loki, and Once, Upon Time, there’s respectively more of each than the essay entirely credits.
September 30, 2024 @ 8:14 am
I remember “Once, Upon Time” as just being bewildering and baffling. Viewed in the most generous light, the argument could be made that it was intentionally bewildering in the same perspective-shuffling vein as the “Illuminatus!” trilogy. But I think it’s more likely that the bizarre scrambled casting was more of a COVID-19 artifact than a sign of artistic finesse. More muddled than mind-expanding. And coupled with the absurd stakes (half the Universe destroyed and humanity nearly extinct) that obviously would necessitate a big reset ending, there was a feeling that the show had overplayed its hand and deflated any real narrative tension.
September 30, 2024 @ 5:24 pm
Was this the episode that opened with a caption “Bel’s Story” even though no other character had one? (I wonder if they did that because they genuinely forgot to name Bel within the episode!)
September 30, 2024 @ 8:59 am
It was incredibly surreal to be a Doctor Who fan as Loki was coming out, seeing thousands of people on social media joyously chanting “it’s so timey-wimey and fun, it’s just like [Moffat] Doctor Who!” and easily convincing each other to watch it with the proposition of new Doctor Who… at the exact same time new Doctor Who was airing in Flux, to an audience consisting of a handful of miserable superfans watching it out of obligation and crossing their fingers that Russell would retcon half of it.
Chibnall’s version of the show launched with online fandom’s polemic against Moffat as incompetent and the BBC throwing the Capaldi era under the bus in marketing materials, and it ended with the most popular media franchise ever doing a vague imitation of Matt Smith stories to global acclaim and success, with not a single average person aware that Doctor Who was airing its own stillborn attempt at event television. Ho hum.
September 30, 2024 @ 9:25 am
At this point, one almost wonders whether Chibnall’s odd strategy of keeping the release dates of his Doctor Who a secret and spoilerphobia that extended even to releasing any sort of promotional material that might hit at the content was not, in fact, a misguided attempt to create mystery and suspense, but a genuine hope that he could dump some Doctor Who on the world without anyone noticing or actually seeing the mess he’d made.
September 30, 2024 @ 10:48 am
The TVA being the “good guys” is a misreading. Loki Season One clearly shows the TVA as being the secret bad guys that Sylvie is correct in wanting to overthrow.
Season Two is actually a bit more problematic since the ending implies that now that the Good Guys are in charge, the TVA is Good, Actually.
September 30, 2024 @ 7:31 pm
Agreed. At least for the first Loki season. It was … OK I guess. The TVA are not the good guys because they’re going to get rid of good old Loki, basically. I guess I’m not invested in the MCU. I haven’t bothered to rewmatch since and didn’t bother with the second season.
What Loki 1 shares with Flux in my memory? They are just lists of things where stuff happened. Cinematic custard. Maybe I’m just getting old.
Wandavision had a great deal more Aboutness.
October 3, 2024 @ 12:48 am
“Season Two is actually a bit more problematic since the ending implies that now that the Good Guys are in charge, the TVA is Good, Actually.”
This is the perpetual political problem with the MCU. Loki at least had the much more ambiguous first season, which taken on its own wasn’t bad; much worse was The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, whose whole point was “let’s get the RIGHT superheroes in charge.” (A lot of non-MCU superheroics had this problem too. For all that the HBO version of Watchmen was far better than most recent superhero TV and movies, both aesthetically and politically, the message of the final episodes was, again, that we might finally be about to have superheroes-done-right.)
October 1, 2024 @ 7:37 am
I remember seeing someone suggest that if Loki was really committed to its ending, episode six should have been the epilogue to the whole franchise and followed by the release of Marvel’s properties into the public domain. It vergs on an intriguing exploration into how narratives are used to control possibilities, but one entirely at odds with Loki’s actual purpose as a television series/advertisement. It seems as if Disney is supposed to be represented by the TVA – preserving one official narrative – but it’s then replaced by Kang, the inevitable villain of any alternate possibility, leading to a rapid loss of coherence… Might almost have worked better if Loki the character really had become a shallow employee of the infinity cops and the sympathetic one was an antagonist trying to end all this nonsense.
October 1, 2024 @ 6:32 pm
Series 14 also, in large part, seems like “a well-made Chibnall era”, or a Marvel-ification of Doctor Who several years too late for that to be viable. “73 Yards” has the same incoherent nothing-matters-ness as “Once, Upon Time”, and what is “Empire of Death” but an upmarket “Battle of Whatever”? We’re even still getting dumb lore about the show’s prehistory (Susan’s parents don’t exist yet?).
October 2, 2024 @ 1:07 pm
I find it literally impossible to believe that you watched S1 of Loki in its entirety, let alone S2, if you came away with the idea that the TVA are the good guys. It is a misreading of the plot on par with Rex Reed’s infamous bad review of Cabin in the Woods which he completely misunderstands the plot and fabricates a non-existent scene in which “vampires circle the moon and suck the hot stud’s blood.” Loki only works with the fascist-and-arguably-genocidal TVA initially because they will kill him otherwise. He spends the first two episodes plotting to overthrew the Time Keepers before escaping to join up with Sylvie at the end of episode 2. The rest of the season is him exposing the sham origin of the Time Keepers and turning other TVA agents against the organization. S2 ends with Loki ascending to become the God of Stories (the perfect end to his arc, IMO) and the TVA retooling itself into a benevolent organization whose mission is to protect and preserve the Multiverse against hostile Kang variants.
Yes, the last episode of S1 is a bit of a let-down because it focuses too much on setting up Kang as a meta-arc antagonist. That has, to be fair, been my biggest complaint about the MCU–the extent to which every new movie and show exists in part to set up the NEXT new movie and show. And admittedly, the hiring and then firing of Jonathan Majors was a horrible mess (I won’t speculate on whether it was a failure of Disney’s background check system or if Majors’ self-destruction was completely out-of-the-blue). But the dismissal of Majors’ hiring in the first place as “magical black man at the end of time” is at best reductive and at worst offensive. The character of Kang in every prior comics depiction I can recall was a white man, to the point that in his Rama Tut identity, he was a pasty white Egyptian pharaoh. But Marvel decided to cast someone who was (a) non-white and (b) at the time critically acclaimed as an actor, and you dismiss the character as a “Magical Negro”?!? Meanwhile, every alt-right critic of the casting complained that he was only hired out of “wokeness,” which I guess proves that the Horseshoe Theory is true.
Seriously, is this what we can expect for the rest of the Chibnall era? No real attempt to engage with the DW episode that actually aired in favor of using the episode as a spring board to shit on some other piece of fandom you don’t like after a passing review?
October 2, 2024 @ 2:04 pm
First of all, fuck off. You’re being a massive asshole with this comment. Seriously, you’re accusing me of the serious intellectual malpractice of writing about something without watching it? Go fuck yourself.
Now, to address this “the TVA are good guys” point, you being the second person to balk at it… well, first of all, let’s entertain an opposite position. Does anyone seriously think the show treats Loki as the villain? After all, it repeatedly stresses how he betrays everyone and cannot ever be trusted. But nobody seriously thinks this means he’s the villain any more than they think the Doctor is the villain because of all those Davies speeches about his darkness. We understand the idea that the hero of a story is subjected to critiques that don’t fundamentally alter our treatment of them as the hero.
So lets look at the TVA, the main character of which is played charmingly by Owen Wilson, who is blatantly used as a secondary protagonist. And the season ends by stressing their ultimate necessity—Loki ultimately comes around to trying to keep them in power, and his failure to do so is shown to unleash a violently destabilizing cataclysm. Yes, the TVA is subjected to any critique, but at the end of the day the show’s position is roughly “the cops might be bad sometimes but we still need them.”
As for Kang… first of all, I want to point out the rankness of ascribing a slur to me that I did not use. Again, fuck you. But more to the point, I don’t think “well the original character’s dodgy in a different way” is an especially moving defense. Sure, casting a prominent Black actor is a plausibly interesting idea, but that doesn’t mean that the end result isn’t a winsomely humorous Black man dispensing wisdom to the white protagonist. The fact that this is yet another fucked up iteration of a character who’s always been a problem is not a defense.
Finally, regarding expectations for the rest of the Chibnall era, to state what I think should have been pretty obvious, I’m doing a bit for Flux. I decided I didn’t have 12,000 words of stuff to say on it, and that traditional essays on each episode weren’t going to work. I considered a single post—justifiable given that it is a nominal six-parter—but didn’t love that either. So instead I cleared out the Pop Between Realities entries for the era—note that there hasn’t been one since Star Trek: Discovery—and ran what are basically a series of them as Flux essays, with the humorous gloss of blatantly skipping out on talking about episodes I hate and don’t want to write about. You can call Pop Between Realities entries in general as “shitting on some other piece of fandom I don’t like after a passing review” if you like, but you can’t exactly pretend that this hasn’t been a component of the blog since the beginning. Nor are they all negative—I don’t think I said a single bad word about It’s a Sin, did I? Next week’s isn’t negative either. Week after… has some criticism, certainly, but calls its subject “a delight.” And then The Vanquishers swaps out the covert Pop Between Realities conceit for a different thing entirely. After that, Flux is done and I go back to normal. In any case, this is the only outright negative one, and if your problem is seriously that I’m shitting on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and this constitutes some grave aesthetic injustice, that’s honestly a you problem. Hopefully the fact that your shitty taste has maintained near total cultural hegemony over the film industry for over a decade softens the blow a little.