Loki - Episode 6 - Review

For a decade now Marvel have had with them, an excellent character in Loki and while he's abrupt ending from the movie-verse may not have pleased everyone, him getting his own TV series did make a lot of people happy. Now that the final is here, was Loki as compelling on the small screen as he was the big or is this ending as unsatisfying as his movie departure.

This episode picks up pretty much straight away from the end of episode 5 with Loki and Sylvie wandering towards the massive citadel that they spotted, it itself adrift on a giant rock in space. We know this because the opening moments of the show start during the Marvel logo with snippets of audio from all the different movies and TV shows, as the camera pulls back from Earth and then our Galaxy and eventually discovers a new one, which is where we find the dynamic duo. Once they make it to the front doors, Sylvie has a brief moment of self-doubt, as she worked her entire life to get to this point, but before she can amp herself up to kick down the door, they mysteriously open, inviting the two of them in. While the room is large and dark, they're not left alone very long as Miss Minutes pops up, trying to give them a bit more have an idea about what is waiting for them further in, but offering them up a change in their destinies, if they want to abandon their quest, unconvinced that the offer that they've been presented is legitimate, they push on.

While this is happening Judge Renslayer is attempting to find more information about who is behind everything when Miss Minutes pops up there to provide something else, with an eerie little warning before again disappearing. We then get taken back to the citadel, where we finally meet the man at the end of it all and while he comes across as a little aloof, maybe a little crazy, they have no idea who he really is and are as such understandably cautious. Back at the TVA we also discover Mobius has returned and that he has a plan for Renslayer, Hunter B-15 has returned to Earth and shows another member of the Minutemen the non-variant version of the Judge, which is clever and is one way on how to get around convincing people without mind magic. While Mobius and Renslayer have a bit of a conversation in the office, it eventually ends with her saying she's going to get answers and leaves, where she went nobody knows, but it was a theme that we got for the entire episode.

The big thing with television is that each season needs to tell a self-containing story, that has a beginning, a middle and then an end, it is literally the entire concept of what a TV season does. We know the start of this story, Loki grabbing the tesseract after the battle of New York, we know the middle Loki teaming up with Sylvie to depose those leading the TVA, the problem is we didn't get an ending, instead what we got was an unsatisfying, self-serving tease for another season and that isn't even going into the concept of the big stamp confirming a second one. This of course being with the Marvel Cinematic Universe also means it will have ramifications to the events in the movies, but if you don’t watch them, or have no interest in the Disney+ shows, there is no connecting events here that would make sense. Having Loki and Sylvie meet the man behind the curtain was always going to be the end goal, whether it be three men or one, that was always going to be how the season moved to its end, the problem is nothing is confirmed here, and yes there will be Marvel fans that will scream that this is that character, but it's never confirmed.

This is my problem with this episode, there is no confirmation on anything, the reason no outcome for the events that Loki went through, he found himself in the TVA, got thrown into the work, found a half dozen versions of himself and then was dumped back in the TVA with no progress having been made, yes, he found love or something akin to it, but he was betrayed at the end. Now I can understand they want to set up a second season, but they didn't put a proper ending to this first one and this isn't one of those TV shows will they ‘renew it for another season’ sort of endings, where they have a few teasing questions about what might be, those shows always have at least an ending that provides some closure, this does not. This doesn't even begin to question some of the plot holes that the episode encountered, like if Sylvie sent Loki back to the TVA, prior to her ending the man who remains, how is he in a different timeline, or maybe more importantly why does nobody else remember him if it's the same one.

How is it that the trip to Earth to prove Renslayer was a variant, didn't come to any level of fruition, what was the entire point in showing that sequence of events if it means nothing. My other question is how does Loki believe a man who claims all this without any way of proving it, is more terrifying then Thanos, whom we know he has a fear of; it just doesn't make any sense. Now we know the actor playing the man who remains, is the same actor that will play Kang the Conqueror in the next Ant-Man movie, but again they don't say this is who he is, yes there is a throwaway line about he might be a conqueror to some, but that's not confirmation. Something else that really confuses me about this episode is the constant slow-motion push-ins on the actors, if something would happen from that sure understand building tension, but one push in just went in and then came back out as if the camera were on some giant lung, it just made no sense.

While the issues with the story and the various lack of a proper ending annoying, strike that, infuriating is a better word, there is a lot to enjoy from the performances that all the actors provide. While Owen Wilson’s Mobius here doesn't really do much, the performance is still top notch and the same can be said for Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who manages to show confusion and betrayal at what the TVA might be doing and again also to the betrayal of Mobius. But Tom Hiddleston and Sophie Di Martino are again standouts, the scenes towards the end, is touching if slightly predictable, and while they didn't really have a lot of interaction character-wise with Jonathan Majors, the actor who plays the one who remains, the three still somehow managed to have a nice dynamic there, most of those scenes are carried by Majors.

Marvel Studios can make a great movie but that same prowess hasn't translated to the small screen, WandaVision ended without consequence, the Falcon in The Winter Soldier took six episodes to get exactly where it should have been at the start and now Loki hasn't delivered any sort of conclusive ending that satisfies the build-up. The entire season could have been four episodes instead of six and we would have been in the same place by the end and more than that it may not have annoyed anyone, or just me, as much, if we didn't spend so long building up only to be utterly let down, but hey Loki is a trickster so maybe the trick is on us the viewer.

The Score

4.0

The Pros

+The visuals of the citadel and the space around it are real impressive

+Hiddleston and Di Martino manage to have a true heart felt moment towards the end

The Cons

-There is no ending here, it just leaves everything hanging for the second season

-Why bother building up tension, if the end result is more comical than anything