Loki: A Complicated Antihero Finding His Way
In “Loki,” he’s on a journey to who he was meant to be
Marvel movies, and now TV shows, aren’t about action, superpowers, magical abilities, or world-threatening events. They have those things, but they aren’t about them. They’re about characters being human and sometimes being heroic. That’s why we’re still watching more than 10 years after Iron Man. We love these characters.
Loki is one of the most mercurial, many-shaded characters in the Marvel universe. He’s fascinating because he dwells in the gray area between good and evil. In Loki, he tells Mobius that he knows something children don’t: that no one is ever truly good or bad. I wonder if he’s really talking about himself there.
From Loki’s first appearance in an MCU movie, in Thor (2011), Loki had a legitimate grievance. He was tired of being overshadowed by Odin’s favored son Thor. He felt betrayed when he learned that he was adopted and that Odin did so partly to broker a peace between the frost giants and Asgard. The film is about his misguided actions out of jealousy of Thor and the desire to prove himself to Odin. Loki is a villain of the film, but never a two-dimensional one.
In Avengers, Loki sets out to make himself the ruler on Earth that he felt he deserved to be on Asgard. This movie has him at his most villainous. As a ruler, he wants to relieve humans of the responsibility — and burden, in his mind — of making choices. In the show Loki, he doesn’t like the idea of the Timekeepers removing his freedom to make his own life choices. He wants to have free will to shape his path. I wonder if he’ll see that his goals on Earth and the Timekeepers’ goals to remove free will are similarly wrong.
Loki often seems to be on outskirts of events in the MCU, but he affects the overall storyline. In Avengers, Loki spurs the Avengers to united as a team. His actions in Avengers bring the Chitauri to Earth, which will haunt Iron Man for the rest of his life. Iron Man’s fear of another invasion of Earth lead him down a road to creating Ultron. Loki also gets the Tesseract off of Asgard before the planet explodes in Thor: Ragnarok, which meant that the Tesseract was available for Thanos to take (despite Loki’s efforts).
Now it seems — after episode 4 of Loki — that Loki is going to spark the creation of the multiverse, which will lead into the next films in the MCU, including Spiderman: No Way Home and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Loki the show has been about Loki moving toward who he’s supposed to be. Not a ruler of Earth, but an agent of chaos. Since he sees the highlight reel of main timeline Loki, he knows that he’ll reconcile with Thor and eventually die. Tom Hiddleston does a wonderful job of wordlessly showing Loki’s horror at seeing his own death at the hands of Thanos.
Loki tells Sylvie that Lokis may lose, but they don’t die. But he has seen himself die. I wonder if he feels he is connected to main timeline Loki, instead of a different person altogether.
It’s interesting that Loki views humans with contempt in Avengers, but in Loki he seems to have some empathy for them. He truly thinks of Mobius as a friend and is saddened by Mobius’s pruning.
Loki is an outsider, and it’s not surprising he’d develop some kind of feelings for Sylvie, another outsider. In episode 4, Sif tells Loki that he will always be alone. But at least for a moment on Lamentis, Loki experienced not feeling alone.
I don’t know whether this Loki will live past the show’s run, but I hope so. It would be a waste to develop Loki this far and then abandon the character. This multidimensional Loki has more to do in the MCU.
