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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
38
Mixed:
17
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Loki is a surrealist, kafkaesque mashup of True Detective and The Office—and it is a sight to behold. ... The show should not work, but it does. Loki (the series) was burdened with glorious purpose from the start and, unlike Loki (the character), you can consider that purpose fulfilled.
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Jul 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
There’s a lot of great stuff set up here: helter-skelter multiverse play, time travel shenanigans, an interdimensional bromance between Hiddleston and Wilson, both of whom are clearly having a blast. Right now, the rest of the supporting cast struggles to keep up with them, and there are a million ways its time-travel whodunit plot can go south. But based on what we’ve seen so far, Loki has the chance to be the best Marvel series yet.
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ColliderJun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Of all the surprises and twists introduced by this show, perhaps the most exciting is its deep investment in understanding its central character at his best and worst, asking some truly tough questions against the backdrop of a time travel lark. Loki was always one of the MCU's greatest villains. But he's just as compelling as the hero of his own story.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
What's good about "Loki'' is what was so good about the other Disney Plus "Endgame" spinoffs, "WandaVision'' and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier." You don't need to be a Marvel expert, or know that Frigga was his mother, or that he had (has?) mother issues. ... This Loki, and those worlds, those mothers, look intriguing indeed. Loki fans will be much pleased.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Once the premise for the series is in place, things get very fun, as Loki channels his mischievous brilliance into splendid detective work and he and Mobius engage in some timey-wimey theory testing, all building to a tantalizing, two-pronged reveal — one capping each hour — that opens up all kinds of possibilities for the rest of the six-episode season.
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Radio TimesOct 3, 2023
Season 2 Review:
There is a slight loss in momentum at the beginning of season 2 after the world-ending stakes at the end of season 1, but the show quickly finds its stride again and by episode 3, gets into the heart of the story. .... But it seems the god of mischief is very much back in business.
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Radio TimesDec 2, 2021
Season 1 Review:
If there are any minor quibbles – a slightly hand-wavey explanation of some time travel rules, a couple of dodgy accents, some slightly low-key action scenes – they’re easily outweighed by the performances, world-building and general confidence of this series. Right now, it’s the best Marvel Disney Plus series so far.
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The IndependentJun 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Hiddleston is effusive, while Wilson is wry and restrained. Yet they work, as inexplicably as the world they inhabit. Loki’s premise may not be as bold as Wandavision, nor as crowd-pleasing as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it’s proven to have the strongest opening of the three.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Loki is pretty fun, actually! What a nice surprise. ... Much of the credit for Loki’s fun side goes to Owen Wilson. ... It seems likely that Loki will eventually collapse back toward the Marvel narrative mean. Until that point, though, it’s nice to be able to enjoy Loki for the fun storytelling variant it is.
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The Daily BeastJun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Loki zigs and zags without sacrificing coherence—a not-inconsiderable feat considering the wealth of explanatory time-travel exposition required by the plot. Suffice it to say, watching these six episodes will likely be necessary for anyone wanting to make heads or tails of where the MCU is headed. Still, the series never feels as if it’s drowning in educational mumbo-jumbo.
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Oct 3, 2023
Season 2 Review:
It’s remarkable how Hiddleston, now in his second decade playing the God of Mischief after making his debut in 2011’s “Thor,” continues to find unexcavated layers of pathos and complexity in the fan-favorite former villain. Sure, sometimes it’s good to be bad, but watching someone struggle to be good can often be just as compelling.
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Jun 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Creator and screenwriter Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron have a ball with the multiverse and competing-timeline angles. While the show’s overall narrative apparently feeds into the forthcoming 2022 “Doctor Strange” sequel, which Waldron worked on, these first two episodes work on their own.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Even though Loki delivers his usual subservience-is-freedom speeches and has bouts of self-analysis, the touch here is pretty light. Hiddleston is a wonderfully physical comic actor, all twitches and muttered asides, and Wilson offers a casual contrast to Loki’s royal airs.
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Oct 12, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The storytelling chaos that Loki sews can cause headaches. But this series remains worthwhile and entertaining because its cast is so great. Tom Hiddleston, Wunmi Mosaku, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Owen Wilson, and Sophia Di Martino keep us in this thing even as the premise sometimes skids along the edge of a deep, unknowable chasm.
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Jun 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It's enjoyable enough and aesthetically potent, borrowing design influences from the late '60s and '70s – which may remind some people of another Marvel-rrelated TV property, "Legion." The similar visuals add breeziness to this show's tone as well, aided by Hiddleston and Wilson's combined appeal. However, that FX show was substantially weirder, immediately more perplexing but seductively so. "Loki" lacks this. If anything the plot is excessively plain.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
A little lightness is welcome, and the 45-minute episodes of “Loki” fly by painlessly, though they may not deliver quite as much jokey satisfaction per minute as you’d like. If the writing has dull patches, there’s always the company of a stellar cast. ... A little less Marvel and a little more “Rick and Morty” would be something to look forward to.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Waldron finds just enough different ways to keep inserting more information, and director Kate Herron effectively makes Loki feel like more than a series of mythology dumps. ... Having set everything up to an exhausting degree, things could be lined up to get really entertaining. ... Or Loki might just be a lot of Hiddleston and Wilson talking, which might still be engaging for six episodes, but will surely require Marvel course correction, once the audience murmuring begins.
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Movie NationJun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
There’s little pretense to social satire here, so “Loki” is easier to get into the spirit of this than “WandaVision,” although I’m of the minority opinion that none of these Marvel small-screen spinoffs pack enough wit, action, pathos or what have you into them to justify “series length” treatment. But Loki and Hiddleston — in all their many colors — are fun enough to bring one back to the stream to catch each new episode to see what that “scamp” is up to now.
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Oct 5, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Online explainers will surely lay out the logistics in exhaustive detail, but they can’t create the sense of emotional urgency the season palpably lacks. At least there are the performances, delivered by an ensemble within the MCU’s mega-ensemble that remains one of its best.
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Oct 3, 2023
Season 2 Review:
The four new episodes sent to critics have only a little of the esoteric oddness that so frequently made the first season a blast. The plot is so convoluted that the sense of fun rarely breaks through, but thanks to the sterling cast and some of the best production design on TV, there’s almost always something to hold your attention — if not to trigger any emotional investment.
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iDec 3, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Hiddleston and Wilson are perfect screen partners. ... And yet Loki still felt limp. The introduction of variants and timeline laws managed to be both overly knotty and explained away, and the lack of either Marvel-esque combat or quirky subtlety rendered the episode a little unambitious.
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The GuardianJun 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The first two episodes of Loki (which were all that was made available for review – there are six in total), however, felt flat. The opener was a lengthy, exposition-heavy setup that felt very static, and the second spent its first half going over much the same ground. ... Still, things do perk up by the very end of the second episode.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The slow wind-up has characterized all three of Marvel's Disney+ series, but the pacing feels particularly sluggish — and the endgame, pardon the expression, elusive — watching the first two episodes of "Loki." Seeing Tom Hiddleston reprise his role as the suave Thor villain certainly has its charms, but thus far the god of mischief hasn't taken the shape of a wholly compelling concept.
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Jun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Only two episodes of “Loki” were screened for critics, making it hard to know exactly how successful the 6-episode season might be in shaping its own identity within the onscreen Marvel universe. Of these first two episodes, however, the second was far more engaging. ... When Loki sighs in frustration about the TVA’s tedious overreach dictating his story when he could be doing something much more dangerous and strange, it’s hard not to agree.
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The PlaylistOct 3, 2023
Oct 3, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Those expecting a new multiversally manic season of Loki should temper their expectations; the absence of director Kate Herron has seemingly removed the series’ wily sense of anything-goes possibility, effectively turning Season 2 – and, shockingly, Loki himself – into an obedient, uninteresting cog in the MCU’s increasingly unwieldy mega-structure.
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IndieWireOct 3, 2023
Season 2 Review:
It’s with great regret and zero surprise that I can report “Loki” Season 2 does not evolve, does not bring its best parts to the forefront, and does not escape the stagnant familiarity hindering Marvel’s uninspiring spate of recent projects. It’s more of the same. And it knows it.
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The PlaylistJun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
At times, “Loki” feels like a Marvel clip show. ... The setting of the TVA is both interesting and purposefully bland. It’s essentially supposed to be the DMV of time and space; a hellish, boring time suck that makes one want to die, filled with annoying bureaucracy. But a much more superior, more drab, and much funnier version of this idea was already seen in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and “Loki” can’t match, update or expand of that absurdism.
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The TelegraphJun 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Loki could well improve, now that its arduous task of educating us about multiverses, and glumly explaining Loki to himself, is with any luck behind it. Let’s hope so. The character deserves a lot more room to get frisky and freaky than these cramped openers carved out.
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