My thoughts on Loki Season 2 and The Marvels

I finished Loki, season 2 a few weeks ago. It appears that this is the end of that character. I can't really see Tom Hiddleston reprising Loki in any other way than in the way they sent him off at the end of this season (this version of Loki). Before I go into more detail, here is your obligatory "Spoiler Warning."

So, the finale was pretty good. If you managed to watch it, you know that Loki took his place kind of at the center of the new multiverse and that they made it look similar to Yggdrasil: the World Tree. Loki also repeats what he told Odin in the first Thor movie: "For you, for all of us." If we do get more Loki, it will be through the use of variants. One thought is that a version of kid Loki might show up and hang with the Young Avengers.

Hiddleston did mange to play his version of Loki gloriously well. I don't know who was a more important character at this point: Thor or his brother Loki. Both of them got large amounts of screen time, and Loki by and large due to the series exceeded the amount of time that Thor got in the MCU. So maybe Loki was the most important Asgardian? I wouldn't have said this at the end of the first Thor film, but the dynamic between those two characters is super important for the stories in these comic books movies.

As far as the show goes, I liked the great characters and acting. Owen Wilson once again confirmed that he's one of the most solid supporting actors out there (I don't really see him as a main actor kind of guy). In a supporting role, he really goes a long way to make the drama of anything he's in be that much better. I also liked the truly wonderful retro art direction and the design of Miss Minutes and the TVA and so on, but you can't keep a thing fresh and surprising forever. So, maybe it was a good time to just move on. Loki was probably too cosmic by the end of this series too that it would be difficult to have him interact with mortals. He's kind of on the level of those gods that are above the Celestials in the MCU hierarchy of powers.

I also didn't understand how Loki acquired his time powers or how the whole time-slipping thing happened in the first place. My theory is that He Who Remains held Loki frozen in time when Sylvie pushed him through the portal at the end of season one. We know he can freeze and control individuals. So, Loki got frozen in-between dimensions until Kang died, at which point he was unfrozen and dropped back into the TVA. But because he was not present when the loom went into failsafe mode, it doesn't know where to put him so it tries based on the user input. And that's what causes all of the time slipping. Eh...it's kind of a mess. But so is the entirety of phase five, which saw their biggest box office bomb in "The Marvels" and the dismissal of Jonathan Majors for being an abuser of women. It seems kinda rudderless at the moment.

All of this reminds me of a comment I received on this very blog years ago when I was wondering what could possibly follow-up Avengers: End Game and someone replied, "We're at peak Marvel. It will just be downhill from here." Ouch...years later, that dude was right.

So yeah...switching gears a bit...I did go and see The Marvels in theaters. I think I was just really underwhelmed by the villain. But then someone pointed out to me that I might be too harsh with my criticism, because it was still on the level of Ant Man: Quantumania. Once I started talking about that film, I realized that they were 100% correct. The Quantumania movie and The Marvels are not better than each other at all, yet The Marvels is the worst bomb. I wonder if a lot of that just has to do with Brie Larsen, who (for some reason) people love to hate. I predict that Captain Marvel will be recast soon just to get rid of that baggage and see if the online trolls can be somewhat appeased. Who knows what will happen though with any of that. I want to believe that Marvel movies can rekindle the magic of the Thanos cycle, but I keep getting disappointed.

As far as my feelings toward The Marvels goes...while I was watching it, I thought it was light, fast, and fun. The action flowed nicely and we got really cool dynamics between the three Marvels. I loved Monica confronting Carol about her abandonment, and it was refreshing that they didn't let their issues distract them from the fight. I liked how Monica was the responsible adult and became the voice of reason.

Things I didn't like were small. The villain (obviously) was weak sauce. She just wanted to restore her planet that was ecologically devastated due to a dying sun. However, the entire movie, Carol Danvers had the power to just recharge the sun and she does that at the end. Why didn't she just do it at the beginning? Because then we wouldn't have had a movie. Also, the Kamala Khan powers are neat but the way they look on screen really strike me as "video game" and always jerk me out of the moment for some reason. It's probably just me. Also, I kind of liked seeing Carol demonstrate that she had the power to affect a star, reinvigorating it with her light blasts. The reason? The Dark Phoenix saga in the comic books. I collected these back in the eighties, and one of the things that the Dark Phoenix does in those comic books is absorb entire suns to fuel her power. I was wondering how that was going to look, and now I have an idea of how it will look because of seeing Captain Marvel reinvigorating the alien sun. Honestly, I think that Dark Phoenix would make an incredible cosmic villain for an Avengers type team up, requiring everyone to fight her. That would be awesome, and I think it would be a lot more compelling than what I'm getting from watching them lurch toward Avengers: The Kang Dynasty that's supposed to happen in a few years.

On Monday, I'm going to talk about Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. On Wednesday, I'm going to talk about the Apple+ show Invasion. I recently finished season 1, and I have thoughts about it I want to share.