In some respects, the return of Tom Hiddleston to the Marvel Cinematic Universe character of Loki was more anticipated than the last two Disney+ Marvel series, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Except this is and isn’t Loki from the movies. As a recurring foil in the Thor movies, Loki actually experienced a certain amount of character growth, if only because he realized Thor was starting to see through his schemes, so by the end of Thor:Ragnarok he was there to support him in finding a new home for the Asgardians. But then their ship got attacked by Thanos and Loki ended up dying trying to protect Thor. Then in Endgame the heroes had their “time heist” which required the Avengers to go back to just after they’d defeated the Chitauri invasion and captured Loki, but in a moment of confusion, that Loki escaped. So Loki has effectively been “reset” to just after where he was character-wise at the end of Avengers.
Specifically, Loki stole a Tesseract, which I guess is not THE Tesseract the Avengers needed to build their own Infinity Gauntlet, and wound up in Mongolia, where he was immediately arrested by the “Time Variance Authority” and drafted to help hunt other rogue variables under the supervision of Agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, which brings to mind the question of what a Marvel movie would look like if it was directed by Wes Anderson.
Loki does have something like that droll sense of humor, but to judge from only the first episode, it’s just setting up the basic premise. Apparently some triad of cosmic beings set up “the sacred timeline” in order to prevent the sort of chaos that happens with a multiverse (for examples of such, try to map the continuity of Star Trek and Doctor Who. Or lack thereof). However Loki‘s main writer, Michael Waldron, is also writing Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, so that title already tells you where things are going. In fact based on the rumors about the crossovers in the next Spider-Man movie, it seems as though this narrative and the end-credits scene of the last WandaVision are moving towards a storyline that will string together the various Marvel projects in Phase 4 the way the Infinity Gauntlet arc did with the prior movies, not to mention using the “multiverse” to justify Marvel finally getting to use all those intellectual properties that they sold to other movie studios and that Disney bought back.
Loki the “variant” plays into this once Agent Mobius puts him face to face with his own evil and causes him to realize that his own desire for control over others stems from a lack of control over life. In his attempts to escape, he ends up playing the reel of his life in the “sacred timeline”, and, realizing he can’t go back and that the TVA basically collects Infinity Stones in their desks, sees that there is no point in continuing as he was. This works mainly because Mr. Shakespearean Actor Hiddleston sells it so well, but also because Owen Wilson is a serious grounding influence, or as serious as Owen Wilson ever gets.
This relationship is clearly going to be the core of the series, and that alone is worth the price of admission, although with Loki, even more than the first two Marvel Disney Plus series, it’s hard to tell how it will play out from just the first episode.