SPOILERS AHEAD: Let’s start at the beginning (no pun intended).
With Loki dying the True Death in Avengers: Infinity War, a TV series about Loki (Tom Hiddleston) would either have to be set in the past, or a different version of Loki. And we got the latter. We got the Loki who picks up the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame and disappears. We find him out in a desert and quickly picked up by hunters from the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Loki is brought to TVA headquarters within a mysterious, futuristic city where he is explained to be a timeline variant by grabbing the Tesseract and escaping, instead of being returned to Asgard by Thor. Out of dire necessity, instead of being imprisoned Loki is recruited to assist the TVA in its mission.
Hold on to all variants of your butt for this: the TVA’s mission is to preserve the Sacred Timeline (a singular timeline where all divergent timelines are nipped in the bud by grabbing the offending being who “diverged” and then exploding that reality to an extradimensional location where it gets consumed by a giant amorphous creature called the Alioth.)
TVA Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) has a brief buddy cop relationship with Loki as they work on tracking down another variant of Loki, this one a female calling herself Sylvie (Sophia Di Martin). Loki and Sylvie meet up and team up, with romantic overtones. We get clues throughout the six-episode season that all is not as it seems with the TVA, and we enter the final episode anticipating a big confrontation that reveals the truth.
Instead of a big action-packed finale, the couple make their way inside an ominous castle and we get an exposition-heavy sequence where Loki and Sylvie sit down with…Kang (Jonathan Majors). Kang reveals he created the TVA to keep a single timeline, because in the distant past (but Earth’s future) he discovered a way to travel between universes, which started as a peaceful opportunity to exchange ideas and technology, but led to a Kang from another universe going power-hungry (think classic comic book Kang the Conqueror) and the different universes going to battle.
Whew.
Kang says he’s tired after living millions of years and he wants to turn over preserving the one peaceful Sacred Timeline to Loki and Sylvie. Or they can kill him, have the timeline diverge and everything go nuts, and his bad self come to power as he did before. Sylvie dispatches Loki back to TVA headquarters then kills Kang. The episode ends with visual representations of the timeline diverging and the implication that “bad” Kang is explicitly running the show, and the TVA’s hunters are mobilized for some current threat (probably the multiverse war “good” Kang mentioned would happen if he died).
Does it work as an entertaining TV show? Yes, if you are into sci-fi/fantasy. It has some great visuals and a bit of mystery to it. It definitely points to more Kang in the MCU in the future.
