Y’all, another escape room movie comes out this Friday, and it’s called Escape Room: Tournament of Champions. My obsession with escape room movies is well documented in several of this newsletter’s bonus issues, so you KNOW I’m gonna be writing about it for this week’s bonus issue. You’ll only be able to read it if you’re a paid subscriber, though — it’s $5 a month or $50 a year, so click below if you want in!
🚨 SPOILER ALARM: OKAY SO OBVIOUSLY THERE ARE LOKI SPOILERS BELOW, so stop reading if you haven’t watched yet. 🚨
So after six episodes, the season finale of Loki was… good! It was good. A semi-strong “like” from me. I think after both WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier I was primed to expect far more resolution from this finale, so it was a bit of a shock to not get that much closure. But then, Loki is the only Marvel TV series so far that’s been renewed for a second season, so perhaps I just need to readjust my expectations for the episode. (And to be fair, the finales of the other two shows weren’t that great.)
Because we do get some reveals! The Man at the End of It All is *a* version of Kang, infamous Marvel comics villain — though if you’re like me, and don’t know much Marvel comics history and didn’t already know the news about casting, it initially seemed like the Big Bad reveal was Just Some Guy Played By Jonathan Majors, Who Admittedly Was Great On Lovecraft Country And It’s Cool He’s In The MCU Now. It took a bit of Googling to realize that one, Kang is an actual character from the comics who tries to conquer multiverses, and two, Majors was cast to play Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which doesn’t come out until 2033(!), so him showing up here was meant as a bigger surprise than it was for me.
And Majors is great in this role! He hams it up perfectly, playing each line differently in a way that still feels like it has continuity — he’s been alive a very long time and has seen everything, and he’s the only thing preventing the timeline from splitting and alternate-universe versions of himself causing massive interdimensional war and carnage. If that requires taking away some freewill, well, isn’t that better than the alternative? It’s a lot of exposition that Majors does pretty well with, though perhaps it could have been parcelled out in chunks over the past couple of episodes instead of in one big infodump.
And we also get the weirdly-much-anticipated kiss between Loki and Sylvie-Loki, plus Loki’s delectably agonizing heartbreak when Silvie chooses revenge against Just Some Guy instead of figuring out a solution with her alternate self. It’s weird that we all wanted them to kiss, but it was a satisfying kiss, and Tom Hiddleston’s acting when Sylvie shoves him back to the TVA was top notch.
But other than that, we mostly got cliffhangers! Mobius doesn’t get his jet-ski moment, just a sad argument with Ravonna about which one of them betrayed the other, ending with Ravonna heading off to who/when knows where. And Loki doesn’t even get a nice reunion with Mobius in the TVA, because now that the timelines are branching out, this Mobius no longer remembers him at all — oh, and instead of statues of the TimeKeepers, there are now massive Just Some Guy statues instead. Dun dun DUNNNN.
I mean, it leaves plenty of room to build Season 2 on, in which Just Some Guy is dead but there’s the threat of Just Some Evil Guys showing up to fuck shit up, Loki being unknown by his friends but also being the only one who knows what danger is coming, and also the “why can’t those two crazy kids make things work?” of it all with Loki and Sylvie-Loki.
This whole season has been very fun, and of all the season finales of the three live-action Marvel series this year, I think it’s probably the best one. Of course, that might just be because they didn’t wrap everything up, instead just whetting our appetites for what’s to come. But then, is there anything more Marvel than that?
That’s all for me today, gorgeous! Talk to you soon.
Love,
Kat