5 Years Ago, The MCU’s Worst Phase Spawned Its Best TV Show

When the MCU unleashes Doomsday on us in December, Robert Downey Jr. will be back to play the franchise’s latest villain after living and dying as Iron Man, while Chris Evans’ Captain America will be pulled out of a touching, hard-earned retirement to help stop him. Evans had previously said he would only return to the MCU “if there was a real reason” to do so, and he presumably found that reason on his front lawn after Marvel dumped a cement mixer full of cash on it.

The reusing and reinventing of actors and characters we thought we were done with may strike moviegoers as a desperate plea for continued relevance, but it’s par for the course of comic books, where the Punisher had a stint as an undead monster, and Spider-Man once accidentally slew Mary Jane with his own radioactive semen. Beloved superheroes have survived for decades because they’re malleable, able to be thrown into countless disparate scenarios while still being instantly recognizable (albeit sometimes as part of a desperate plea for continued relevance).

Whether Doomsday pulls off its creative choices remains to be seen, but it already has an MCU precedent in Loki, which debuted five years ago today after the Marvel braintrust crunched some numbers and determined that fans seem to quite like this Tom Hiddleston fellow. Despite that apparently cynical motivation, Loki turned out to be not only one of the MCU’s best streaming efforts, but also one of its most important.

Like Iron Man and Captain America, the villainous Loki got a proper sendoff in Phase Three of the MCU, enjoying the limelight as a reformed villain in Thor: Ragnarok before getting axed in the next Avengers movie to demonstrate Thanos’ might. But a cameo in Avengers: Endgame set the stage for more, and Loki sees a rogue variant of the character pressed into service by the mysterious Time Variance Authority rather than face annihilation at their hands.

“Loki becomes a Time Cop” would barely register as a comic book oddity, but it was a significant shakeup for an MCU that, nine years prior, had made him the main villain of Phase One. Hiddleston’s cocky, aristocratic performance was memorable enough that most other MCU villains failed to even approach the area code of the bar he’d set, but it also meant that Loki had significant work to do if it was going to make a second reformation of the character not only credible, but interesting.

Impressively, Loki pulled it off, using the TVA’s sinister cosmic setting, a winsome Owen Wilson performance, and the MCU’s own recent developments to sell the conceit that even a god might have regrets. After muddling through the mediocre Falcon and the Winter Soldier, “Glorious Purpose” got Marvel’s televised side back on track with an efficient if exposition-heavy hour that snapped Loki out of his sniveling self-importance long enough to drag him into a mystery involving another Loki variant with a murderous grudge.

Fittingly, Loki spends Season 1 searching for a purpose, as the deal he cut with Wilson’s Agent Mobius for the sheer sake of survival begins to morph into something resembling a calling. Hiddleston and Wilson’s unexpectedly strong buddy-cop chemistry helps sell the journey, as Wilson, like an experienced comic-book reader, is completely unfazed by all the weirdness that Loki and the rest of the MCU throw at him.

And there is a fair bit of weirdness in Loki, especially compared to the MCU’s other offerings. Presented as something like John le Carré’s Circus stretched out to infinity, the TVA is the ultimate civil institution. Alarmingly powerful yet transfixed by workaday mundanity, none of its many agents are sure how the TVA functions or how they wound up working there; all they know is that if they don’t get their paperwork filed, the boss won’t be happy. A year before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness didn’t get much madder than presenting a world where traffic lights worked differently, Loki concocting a Borgesian bureaucracy where even the long-fought-for Infinity Stones just represented more paperwork was a delightful change of pace.

Ironically, as one of the few MCU properties to embrace even a fraction of the multiverse’s creative potential, Loki was then tasked with quietly wrapping up that misbegotten saga. No writers’ room could have predicted Jonathan Majors, the MCU’s Kang, being charged with assault, and the show’s second and final season had to awkwardly and ironically juggle all possible timelines prior to Majors’ conviction. That Loki ultimately serves to wave away the would-be major villain it helped set up to begin with undercuts some of its drama, but Marvel’s multiverse always felt like a premise in search of a plot, and Loki at least made the journey an entertainingly odd one.

Where Loki really shines, though, is in its character work — rarely a hallmark for the MCU — as it manages to find real people amid its sprawling existential stakes. It’s not exactly Dostoyevsky, but it gets deeper than you’d have expected for a character who’d previously become memetic for getting slammed around like a ragdoll by the Hulk. Maybe Captain America’s return to the MCU will be the empty cash grab we fear, but let the record show that such moves can be done well. All you need to do is find their purpose.

Loki is streaming on Disney+.