Several weeks back, I had some time to kill in the evening, and put on Loki because I like Owen Wilson generally, and enjoyed Tom Hiddleston’s performance as Loki in the MCU movies I’ve seen him in. The Pip was watching videos on his tablet when I put it on, but got drawn in, and asked about the next episode. At some point, SteelyKid also joined in, and got a little obsessed, leading to a big MCU kick and me watching some movies I wasn’t wild about just to be a good sport.
Anyway, this has led to the somewhat unusual situation where I was more or less in synch with a part of the pop-culture #discourse, and actually watched the show that everybody is talking about (for small values of “everybody”) at the same time as everybody who’s talking about it. All three of us sat down for the Loki finale after I picked the kids up from camp on Wednesday (SteelyKid’s second viewing, having streamed it on a phone during camp).
As I seem to often find myself saying about big pop-culture events, it was… fine. There were some good bits, and some bits that made me roll my eyes at the MCU of it all. It’s probably a little on the bad side of “…fine” because the thing that I most liked about the show was the interplay between Wilson and Hiddleston, and the show completely abandoned that for the final episode, relegating them each to parallel plotlines where they interacted only with people I cared less about.
What was slightly more interesting to me than just reacting to this show, though, was seeing how it fit a pattern with their other giant IP spin-off, and comparing how well each of them carry it off. This will necessarily involve spoilers for both Loki and The Mandalorian, so if you’re the sort of person who reacts badly to that sort of thing, don’t read below this line:
And definitely don’t read past this one:
OK, with that warning out of the way, what’s the pattern here?
In both cases, we start off with stories that are off at the fringes of the pre-existing universe. Loki whisks its eponymous protagonist off into the drably bureaucratic landscape of the Time Variance Authority, which is sort of a theme-park version of Brazil. The Mandalorian on the other hand, is on a backwater planet at the edge of the galaxy, chasing down minor criminals for money that he tithes to his weird religious order.
Both stories seem to be removed from the main action in their universes— The Mandalorian doing a space Western far away from the Empire and the Rebel Alliance, Loki off in some sort of limbo as imagined by hotel chain designers— but by the end of their arcs are drawn back in by the inexorable logic of modern IP storytelling. The arrival of the awkwardly CGI Luke Skywalker and the appearance of He Who Remains tie their respective spinoffs back to the main stories in those universes. In the case of Loki, this also seems to be setting up the Big Bad for the next round of increasingly cosmic Marvel properties, at least judging from the giant statue in TVA headquarters at the very end of the episode, and a glance at the next titles on the docket.
Of course, by virtue of being two seasons rather than just one, The Mandalorian has actually had multiple cracks at this. The season-one finale brought in Giancarlo Esposito as Moff Gideon, who is evidently Significant to the extended Star Wars universe in some manner that was unclear to me because I haven’t read or watched any of it. They did it again in the middle of the second season, with the alien Jedi whose name I can’t be bothered to look up, who I gather is central to the long-running animated series. Both of those appearances seem to have been deeply meaningful to people who are more deeply immersed in the Star Wars universe than I am, in more or less the same way that the He Who Remains reveal was for Marvel fans.
As someone who isn’t plugged into either of these, and honestly finds both of them more than a little exhausting, what I mostly notice is the obvious planning that’s gone into these. They introduce some engaging new characters, create an independent plot with them, and then make a big reveal at a crucial moment that brings it back together with the main product. It’s manipulative in a fairly transparent way, which will help get people who enjoyed the character dynamic of the early episode to both go back and search out the deep lore behind the evidently-important characters brought in from previous properties and to get hyped for whatever the next installment will be.
What was interesting to me is that The Mandalorian did a much better job of landing this, in both cases. It seems like you’re supposed to recognize Moff Gideon when he shows up, and in particular know what the Darksaber is, but he also gets a great bad-guy entrance, gunning down a whole bunch of his own people to establish that he’s not someone to trifle with. Similarly, the alien Jedi gets an extended sequence where she mows down bad guys who have been sent after her, which again establishes her badass cred even if the character design didn’t remind you of umpteen animated stories.
With Loki, though, He Who Remains gets… basically nothing. He eats an apple ominously, dodges some attempts to stab him, and then monologues like a James Bond villain. He’s got charisma— some nice work by Jonathan Majors, there— but if you don’t recognize the character design and thus tap into the vast backstory from comics history, he just has no weight. Worse, his speechifying not only invites you to think about the logic of the TVA, it practically demands it, and let’s just say that this is not a portion of comic-book cosmology that rewards close examination. The TVA never makes a lick of sense as a setting, but the first episodes skate by thanks to the charming banter from Wilson and Hiddleston. There just isn’t the same chemistry between Hiddleston and Majors and Sophia Di Martino as Sylvie, so it’s harder to accept the giant pile of gibberish at the center of the villain plot.
I’m not quite sure what accounts for the difference in execution. Some of it might be just that I’m generally more kindly disposed toward Star Wars properties, that being the fandom of my youth. I do think this is handled better in a more objective sense in The Mandalorian, though, in terms of the on-screen story beats and the like. It almost feels like the Marvel folks got cocky, coming off their long string of successes, where the Star Wars team had more to prove after the hot mess that was the sequel trilogy.
At any rate, I found it noteworthy that they’re both doing essentially the same thing. Which I think reflects their shared corporate parent to a large degree, and the demands of IP-based storytelling. And, as I seem to say very often these days, I can recognize that they’re doing it well, even though the thing that they’re doing isn’t really a thing that I particularly want.
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