If you want to go into Loki with no knowledge and no expectations, you may not want to watch this trailer. It spells out what happened when Loki grabbed the Tesseract, what’s needed from him now, and, well, how little he cares about what the puny clowns at the Time Variance Authority want from him.
But if you want to enjoy Loki’s reaction to a very suspicious cat; a rather optimistic Owen Wilson; and Gugu Mbatha-Raw looking as if she’s absolutely not going to take any of Loki’s blathering and ego seriously, this is the trailer for you.
So that’s what happened when Loki nabbed the Tesseract—he didn’t just create another timeline. He broke reality. Owen Wilson would like him to help fix it. And for about half the trailer, it seems like Loki might play along, though Gugu Mbatha-Raw is very skeptical.
And rightly so; given a chance, it seems like Loki makes an escape, visits some exciting new locales and maybe dimensions, and generally doesn’t care about fixing anything, especially if a broken timeline means a new and exciting playground in which he can wreak some lovely havoc.
The structure of this trailer is excellent: The narrative that describes the whole setup absolutely collapses once Loki somehow gets free of his prison jumpsuit and creepy collar and the jacket that says Variant. (They call him a Loki variant, which suggests all kinds of additional time-wimey weirdness is going on.) There’s a level of absurdity to the TVA—that stack of papers isn’t nearly large enough to encompass everything Loki’s ever said—that calls to mind all kinds of other SFF bureaucracies. And bureaucracy and tricksters are two great tastes that definitely don’t play well together.
This is going to be fun. Loki premieres on Disney+ on June 11th.
Buy the Book
Fugitive Telemetry
