"When you mess with time, it tends to mess back," Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark warned in Avengers: Endgame.
How right he was – but no one would have guessed Earth's Mightiest Heroes traipsing around 2012-era New York would have spawned a Marvel classic and laid the groundwork for the MCU's best, most satisfying redemption arc.
Welcome to Road to Doomsday, GamesRadar+'s weekly MCU rewatch series. Over 15 weeks, we'll be revisiting each Marvel movie and TV show on Disney's list of essential movies to watch ahead of Avengers: Doomsday, sharing our thoughts upon rewatching and deciphering what we can learn about the next Marvel mega-event from each entry. Why not relive some MCU highlights and watch along with us?
Enter Loki, a two-season time-travelling adventure that plucked Tom Hiddleston's trickster god from a timeline involving his hasty escape in Endgame and into the pleasingly lo-fi, analog corridors of the Time Variance Authority (TVA), a group of suits and soldiers that oversee the multiverse and are ready to stomp out any branching timelines that cause temporal headaches at a moment's notice.
Marvel has deployed the multiverse liberally in the past half-decade. It's been used for fan service (Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine), expansive sequels (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), and puzzling post-credits scenes (The Marvels), but – in Loki's case – the original is the best.
Instead of using the multiverse as narrative crutch, Loki wields it as a tool to untangle the broken psyche of its most complex villain. Quickly, Thor's half-brother has his ego stripped away as he tiptoes towards the most selfless of goals: restoring balance to a tempestuous multiverse. But, first, Loki has one of the MCU's best villains standing in his way.
While much of its power has been robbed thanks to Jonathan Majors' arrest and subsequent firing, it's the scenes with He Who Remains that turns Loki from a brilliant slice of time-and-space action into something that would have lasting effect on the MCU as a whole – and really hammered home Loki's quality.
Where most of Marvel's output has concentrated on CGI-filled spectacle for its finales, Loki's first season settled on something paradoxically far more intimate and grander.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/marvel-tv-shows/5-years-on-its-clear-loki-used-the-multiverse-better-than-anything-else-in-the-mcu/
