Loki Review

The Time Variance Authority is the reason it works. Somebody decided that the organisation policing all of reality should look like a nineteen seventies municipal tax office, with wood veneer, orange signage, laminated safety posters and a cartoon clock explaining the rules, and that single design choice gives the show a personality nothing else in the studio's television output has. Owen Wilson is perfectly cast as a tired middle manager, and Sophia Di Martino's Sylvie forces Hiddleston to stop performing and act.

Jonathan Majors arrives at the end of the first season for a single long scene of pure dialogue, and it is the best thing in it. The second season is more uneven, spending too many hours on a technical crisis about a machine that must be repaired, with characters running down corridors explaining physics to each other, though the ending, in which the hero accepts an eternity of loneliness to hold the whole thing together, is a genuinely moving place to leave him. Ravonna Renslayer never becomes the character the show needs her to be.