Loki is a wildly ambitious, visually impressive and deliciously gleeful Marvel TV series

Fans have been eagerly awaiting this expensive and ambitious blockbuster series since it was first announced years ago.

Taking the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most compelling villain and giving him his own six-part Disney streaming seems like an absolute no-brainer.

Who doesn’t want to follow the adventures of renowned trickster Loki, the God of Mischief? Especially as embodied with delicious glee by Tom Hiddleston, whose six-foot-two-frame pours into that Asgardian leather costume so perfectly.

So, it shouldn’t surprise that for many Marvel Cinematic Universe fans, Loki is the Disney+ series they are most excited to devour. And devour it they will – week-by-week, though no less voraciously.

With glorious purpose, not to mention eye-popping production design and a playful chemistry between Hiddleston and Owen Wilson, Loki is an ambitious, stylish and engaging series that expands the narrative universe to the next-next-next level.

But it may be those lofty aspirations that could prove its undoing, having introduced some weighty concepts that will be challenging to pay off in its relatively short six-episode run.

Tom Hiddleston reprises the villain in Marvel’s Loki on Disney+ streaming.

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Despite Thanos’ proclamation that Loki’s death in Avengers: Infinity War was final, a loophole presented itself pretty quickly in Endgame, with a 2012 version of Loki grabbing the Tesseract and fleeing, creating a separate timeline.

Loki doesn’t get very far – he’s nabbed almost immediately by hunters from the Time Variance Authority (TVA), who we are told are the powers-that-be that make sure everything adheres to a “sacred timeline” with any variants, such as our miscreant Loki, erased.

The TVA was created by the unseen timekeepers who maintain the proper flow of time, having wrestled previously warring multiverses, and variants which threaten that order.

How it works is confusing enough that over the first two episodes of Loki made available to media for review, multiple characters repeat and nutshell everything in an attempt to explain the high-concept premise.

This includes a Hanna-Barbera-style animated instruction video which uses the words “multiverse” and “madness” in the same sentence, hinting at the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness movie whose co-screenwriter Michael Waldron happens to be the head writer on Loki.

Wunmi Mosaku and Owen Wilson in Loki.

The series also reminds us that the version of Loki it’s playing with is that 2012 version, the one who was just captured after setting loose aliens on New York City and tried to subjugate Earth and “ascend as God-King”.

This character hasn’t undergone the reformation which the main timeline Loki has been through, and while he is every much the smugly arrogant – albeit laced with vulnerability – person we remember, there remains something of an inconsistency in that he resembles more the character he became than the one from 2012.

But that wiliness, that question over whether you can ever trust Loki in any moment – and remember, he betrayed Thor a few times in Ragnarok – is why this character and Hiddleston’s performance are so distinctly appealing.

Which also makes it very risky for TVA agent Mobius (Wilson) to recruit Loki in tracking down a dangerous variant that’s been attacking TVA hunters.

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The MCU has tried on some pretty out-there things in terms of world-building from the sitcom environments of WandaVision to the hyper-colourful Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

And Loki is doing something different yet again with the TVA a Kafka-esque bureaucracy infused with retro sci-fi aesthetics that evokes the likes of Terry Gillam’s Brazil, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and even Ben Wheatley’s High Rise, the latter because it also starred Hiddleston. It looks amazing and each scene is layered with great little visual details.

All of Loki’s timey-wimey stuff won’t be the thing that makes or breaks the series, but it is the one area where it could falter, having introduced the notions of free will versus determinism, mind-bending concepts that the series will have to try and resolve in a story that is also packed with other narrative demands.

Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson are an unlikely duo in Loki.

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Especially when those demands include giving the audience as much as it can of the revelatory pairing that is Hiddleston and Wilson. Who knew the two would spark such amazing on-screen chemistry, an alchemy of petty squabbling and genuine curiosity.

Sure, they had those few scenes together in Midnight in Paris, but this is something else.

Of course, what everyone came to see is Hiddleston’s Loki, a playful, grandstanding and manipulative character whose adventures we will always go along with. And considering the trailers have hinted at multiple Lokis to come, that’s multiple the fun.

Because it is wickedly fun and imaginative, a wildly entertaining trip across time and place with someone who you can never accuse of being boring.

Loki starts streaming on Disney+ on Wednesday, June 9 at 5pm AEST

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