#when i catch you michael waldron

[comeback-from-the-dead]

Wanda maximoff deserve a better writing :(

Like give her to me if you don't know how to handle her???

Reblog and put in the tags a character who was ruined by bad writing.

[comeback-from-the-dead]

Scarlet Witch Solo movie but it's just Wanda Maximoff spinning inside a microwave

[tobiasdrake]

Mobius's interview with Loki is one of the best scenes in this show. Loki doesn't understand what's going on and neither do we. Mobius insists that he just wants to understand what makes Loki tick, but that can't be all, can it?

Like. He literally just interrupted Loki's impending time execution to pull him aside, sit him in a room and just. Talk. About stuff. Going over his past history with the Avengers, with Thor. Recapping the life that's brought Loki to this moment, and the further life beyond in the Sacred Timeline that 2012 Loki never got to experience.

Why? What's the point? What is he driving at? What is he trying to do? Does he want to ingratiate himself with Loki? Is he trying to recruit Loki? What's the angle here!? Why is this conversation really happening!? Even though they're literally just sitting across a table from each other and talking about old Marvel movies, this scene is tense and unsettling and confusing in a good way.

And it's a great conversation, mind. Michael Waldron has the unpleasant task of trying to discuss Avengers 2012 while still capturing the right voice for Loki and he nails it. Loki enthusiastically defends himself but his arguments come from the correct place. Me, me, I, I, me, I, me. His dialogue is peppered with self. I make my choices, you don't control me, I will take what's mine because I deserve better.

But why is it happening? And the answer. The beautiful answer. The catch, the trick, the great illusion being cast by Mobius's actions. Is that there is no catch. There is no trick. This is exactly what Mobius said it was, and nothing more.

The reason they are in this room talking about Loki's behavior is because Mobius is chasing a particularly elusive variant Loki. And in order to try and get ahead of this variant, Mobius has sat down our Loki to psychoanalyze him. That's it. He really, truly does just want to understand the way Loki's mind works, so that he can use that knowledge to capture his perp.

It is. Beautiful. It's a scene that works great the first time you see it and then works even better when you understand the mystery. And it serves a vital role in helping to catch Loki up on his post-2012 character development so that the show can move forward with a more enlightened version of him.

(Which, like, the fact that they do that may be disappointing. I'm just saying that this scene and the events that follow do it well, not commenting on the creative choice itself.)

[james-stark-the-writer]

okay, i have bad news, i guess, i have unfortunately not been able to stop thinking about Phase 4 projects like Hawkeye and Eternals and She-Hulk and how much i ADORE the absolute fuck out them, and with the Agatha show coming up and wanting to see more of Kathryn devouring the role, unfortunately the brainworms are too convincing rn. if you see me catching up with Phase 5 on here in the next few weeks, ignore me. or better yet, forgive me.

thing i'm most excited to see is Echo, since i still haven't gotten to it and i'm really excited to see what they do with the character since she was one of the best parts of Hawkeye; another thing i'm excited to see is The Marvels just to see more of Iman Vellani; what i'm least excited to see is Loki because season one of Loki is still basically at the bottom of my MCU tierlist (Michael Waldron, i LOATHE you and your work); what i'm weirded out by on principle is Secret Invasion (yes it's the intro shit); and what i'm deeply unconcerned with getting to is What If? bc that shit was actually the worst thing in Phase 4 by a dozen country miles (Loki was saved from being the worst thing by What If? S01, and No Way Home at least tried for a chunk of its runtime.). i've already seen Guardians Vol. 3 and D&W, so i don't have too much to catch up with in terms of pure runtime.

anyway. i'm shockingly optimistic about things for some reason. i'm sure the good shit will still be good, and if it's even half as great as Phase 4 was, i'll be glad to have seen it. i just hope the bad shit isn't as bad as the bad shit in Phase 4 bc that was insufferable.

fun bonus that took me actual HOURS of effort to make since there are apparently no up to date templates including every marvel production and the shows separated by seasons, since those are obviously not created equally and their quality fluctuates a bunch (and when i tried making my own template — after spending far too long trying to find unique and interesting posters that were also legible enough at these tiny sizes to actually be useful — the website just crashed and refused to let me make it) but: if you're curious where i place most Marvel projects, well. here ya go [check the alt text if you can't identify a poster or are confused about which season it is etc., and if you're curious about why things are where they are, here's my letterboxd which has reviews for almost everything ranked here, besides the TV shows that aren't on there, obviously.]:

[gloriousburden]

(i truly apologize if i mention things here that were already previously mentioned by others, or even by myself. i had a thousand points that popped into my head that i wanted to get across.)

as much as i absolutely adore loki, he has done evil things. i’m not going to lie and act like he doesn’t have bad traits, and that he’s this very innocent character who is completely good. but of course with that being said, this wiki page could not be further from wrong. my point is, he doesn’t commit those evil acts just for the fun of it or just to be evil. loki doesn’t go out of his way to be evil. everything he does, he’s done those things for a reason. marvel forgets that loki is a very intelligent character with actual motives.

in avengers 2012, him at his worst, we can see that he very clearly had numerous plans that the avengers didn’t fully catch onto until later on. his plan to get himself caught by the avengers and put into the cell that was made for the hulk, the plan to rile up the avengers and have them turn on each other with the mind stone, his plan to unleash the hulk, his plan to get the iridium in stuttgart. even killing coulson. these were not acts that were done for fun, or just to be evil. they all had a motive.

although he has an evil smirk while he’s taking that museum guy’s (sorry i forgot the term for his position.) eye out, i really don’t believe he was doing that just to be evil or just for the fun of it. he genuinely needed the eye and he was also more impressed by the people running away in fear, rather than the fact he was able to hurt someone. i believe he had that smirk because his plan was falling in place, not due to the satisfaction he got out of hurting someone. even before i was really a big fan of loki, that’s what i got from the scene anyway.

all of his acts, had genuine reasoning behind them. his satisfaction did not come from hurting people, it was from the fact that his plan was falling into place.

but thank you to taika waititi, michael waldron and eric martin who are all so insanely careless with everything that they do, people really believe this shit and don’t see through the act, the facade, that loki has been putting up now. i know that mcu casuals and non thor/loki fans have this huge dislike of the dark world, but do they not remember this scene?

“no more illusions.” “now you see me, brother.”

you have all this proof of loki’s evil acts being a facade, yet they truly believe that he is a narcissist. like mentioned by one of the posts before, the scene in thor 1 where loki mentions to thor that it was never about a throne and that he just wanted to be equal to thor, a true narcissist would not believe themselves as inequal to others. that is like… pretty much the entire point. if loki was actually a narcissist, there would pretty much be no further thor movies or even avengers 2012, to be honest. since he would have never felt he needed to prove himself in the first place.

loki is such a misunderstood character with so much depth. how could you not see that? it’s right in front of you. but since taika waititi, michael waldron, eric martin, etc.. evidently don’t actually watch past marvel movies when writing/directing stories for these characters, they don’t know anything about the characters they are profiting off of.

that’s not even me being bitter or a “obsessed loki fangirl who looks too deeply into things”. these people have pretty much all in some way admitted that they are careless with their work, and that they have not watched previous marvel projects. i would be upset with that even if i wasn’t a loki fangirl. you should put care into your work and realize why the characters you are making a new story for are so beloved by fans.

it upsets me a lot that others don't see loki for who he actually is. they act like loki was being “overdramatic” about the very evident abuse he faced. it was sooooo bad that he finally chose to defend himself after enduring so much abuse from not only odin, but from others too. they forget that loki genuinely was abused. it literally wasn’t just him misunderstanding something that odin had said to him. loki’s whole life, odin has treated him less than. with loki ending up blaming himself for this for most of his life and not knowing the actual truth as to why odin favored thor. but then he found out that this all was because odin had stolen him, (from a race who loki was taught to dislike growing up, btw) using him only as a pawn. he realized that he would never be enough or seen as worthy despite everything he’s done to prove himself. i would classify that as genuine abuse. not just loki being “overdramatic.”

(this line really breaks my heart btw. one of the saddest.)

in reference to loki hating thor, in this scene, loki is about to defend thor. but of course is silenced by odin.

(sorry i could not find a gif for that actually shows odin, but it is the scene in thor 1 where odin yells at loki.)

and although it did work in loki’s favor, thor being cast out/exiled was not a part of his plan. he did not know that would happen. loki, in thor 1, truly did defend and care for thor. it was apparent that he loved thor. it was the fact that odin favored thor over him which truly tore them apart.

although thor obviously played a part in loki feeling inferior.

and for others to truly think loki’s attempt in thor 1 was really just because he wanted to spite thor, and not because the fact he was so upset that odin rejected and did not accept him even after loki murdered his own biological father in his (odin’s) name, is actually so upsetting and just blatantly wrong. it had nothing to do with spiting thor. like i previously mentioned, it was the fact that no matter what loki did for odin, it was never enough. he was genuinely upset and hurt by odin’s rejection.

anyway this is all over the place, and i’m probably forgetting some things and there’s probably mistakes here and there, but i wish others would take the time to actually understand maybe even just a few things about loki’s character before writing things about/for him. whether that be a movie, wiki page, or a series. reading that wiki page truly upset me, honestly. the (unfortunate) very common mischaracterization and misunderstanding of loki’s character is just so saddening. i don’t know if it’s just because i’m very attached to him and he’s clearly very important to me, but it’s just like Ugh:?/&:2&;!3 how do you not see how everything you’re saying is so simplified, completely wrong, and makes no sense!!! how do you not see what i see?

Has anyone read the Loki wiki page recently? I was always under the impression that wiki pages were supposed to remain unbiased. Loki did some fucked up shit, obviously, but I don't know if this page accurately displays all of his motivations and feelings regarding why he did what he did in Thor 1. It implies (or really states) that he basically always hated Thor and Odin, and he is a sociopath that never loved his family (besides a small degree). Additionally, that he always felt like he was owed everything and his arrogance is crazy. The arrogance part was a later addition to make him more evil in Avengers, just saying. No clue when this was added, but it feels very post-Ragnarok. Again, not a great person, but this seems very much "Loki hated everyone always and anytime he was happy he was scheming."

[imposterogers]

Imagine what could happen if they fired Michael Waldron and had David Jenkins take over on the Loki series

ok but imagine how different the first season would have been if jenkins had been behind the wheel like

-I feel like it would have been more comedy driven but also more character-focused. perhaps competent mischief maker gremlin man loki instead of ... well.

-my ideal plotline was the original premise for the series which was 'loki goes on a romp thru time causing trouble while time cop mobius is hot on his trail' so i'm going to pretend jenkins would have gone for that. it would have been so fun! mobius / loki was initially described as having a catch me if you can type relationship and while not realistic in this hc disney would have let there been a romantic aspect to it

-loki lets mobius catch him sometimes just to escape last minute & loki at one point calls it their date night

-more interesting / developed minor characters. desk guy has a whole backstory. one TVA agent makes jewelry out of the infinity stones. ramona renslayer watches soap operas reruns from the 80s and quotes them in group meetings. hunter b-15 has a girlfriend who leaves stickers on her armor

-sylvie and loki's relationship is obviously not romantic. instead its a competitive sibling dynamic that eventually leads to their capture and downfall.

-costumes! imagine how many costume changes loki would make. the explanation would be "magic" (i feel like we would have seen a lot more magic in general)

-kang the conquerer is still the main "villain" and when loki & sylvie realize they've essentially been played sylvie is like "so all this was for nothing. pointless.' and loki looks at a knick knack he 'stole' from mobius and smiles 'well, maybe not for nothing' (yes I made this very lokius centric but I just think jenkins would have made it gayer fr fr fr)

[munmunx5]

From Assembled: “The Making of Loki” describing the Loki and Sylvie’s storyline:

“One of the writers in our writer’s room, Elissa Karasik, she came in with a real strong POV that it should run at that love-story thing. And it was something the whole writer’s room got behind from day one.” Michael Waldron

“You know, it’s so chaotic to fall in love with a version of yourself, but at the same time, it’s such a bad idea and so mischievous, it’s like, of course Loki would fall in love with himself.” Kate Herron

“So the heart of it, it is a love story and you never fall in love at the right time. And I think the nice thing about it is Crater Lake is where these two characters really come together, and they realize there’s something deeper going on here.” Kate Herron

“You know, in life, we all go through struggles, but we can’t do it alone. And if we have people we can trust, it lightens the load and it gladdens the heart. And I think the relationship between Loki and Sylvie is about that connection. That they learn, each of them, to care about the other.” Tom Hiddleston

“People in love often speak of time stopping when they first catch that jolting glance of their paramours as if our brain, perhaps even the universe, is telling us, ‘Your life is forever changed.’ ‘Sear this moment into your memory.’ So much is forgotten and discarded every day. A password, an acquaintance’s name. Our inability to control what stays and what goes is a constant reminder of the fallibility of the human mind. Objects in the rear view are often much smaller than they appear, and they get smaller and smaller each day. But as we march forever onward, we will inevitability arrive at one of those defining moments where clarity arrive, followed quickly by more uncertainty. What we do in this moment can often define our lives in ways we never dreamed of.” Tom Hiddleston

Main takeaways:

- Season 1 was written as a love story from Day freakin’ ONE.

- THANK YOU, THANK YOU to Elissa Karasik, the true creator of this ship.

- Loki and Sylvie’s nexus event was them realizing that they have FALLEN IN LOVE, as beautifully narrated by Tom Hiddleston.

[lokiondisneyplus]

"Humanity, look how far you’ve fallen,” a voice drawled out of the darkness of San Diego’s Comic-Con. In the summer of 2013 actor Tom Hiddleston took the stage in full Loki costume to promote what was supposed to be his last turn as everybody’s favorite Marvel villain in Thor: The Dark World. The already boisterous crowd went absolutely bananas chanting “Loki! Loki! Loki!” as Hiddleston, channeling iconic pro-wrestling heels like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, fed off the mixture of screams and boos, pointed menacingly at the crowd and hurled elaborate insults. Go ahead and google “mewling quim” if you’re feeling brave.

It was a star-making moment for an already popular character—one that racked up millions of views online and ensured Hiddleston’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU. It’s the reason, according to longtime Marvel producer Nate Moore, that Hiddleston’s character escaped death once again in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame to land his very own show, Loki, debuting June 9 on Disney+. “If you’ve ever been to a Comic-Con where Tom Hiddleston makes an appearance,” Moore says, ”you see what magic that is.

”The same year Hiddleston turned in the WWE-worthy performance in San Diego, lifelong pro-wrestling enthusiast and Loki head writer Michael Waldron began an MFA program in screenwriting just a couple hundred miles up the California coast, at Pepperdine University. Waldron rode his love for Hulk Hogan and the drama of the wrestling world all the way out from Atlanta to the shores of Malibu. His ride, from there, took him straight to the top. This is how one man’s lifelong love affair with wrestling became critical to the development of Marvel Phase Four.

Less than a decade later, with an Emmy-winning stint on Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon’s fiercely beloved animated series Rick and Morty in his rearview, Waldron has become the chosen favorite of Marvel president Kevin Feige, who was so impressed with the now 34-year-old’s work as head writer on Loki, that he tapped him to take over writing duties on the upcoming Doctor Strange sequel. Impressed with Strange, Feige then handpicked Waldron to work on his top-secret Star Wars project. With Loki set to make a big splash next week, Waldron shared his unusual inspirations for both Loki and Strange, his rapid climb to the top of the Hollywood heap and how, really, he just wants to be the next Nora Ephron.

While still a student at Pepperdine, Waldron landed an assistant gig with one of his comedy heroes: Dan Harmon. Stationed outside the Rick and Morty writers room, Waldron was desperate to catch Harmon’s eye and decided launching a softball league would be the key. “What I knew about him before was that he was a guy that would love a bunch of attention, like everybody,” Harmon says. “When he started coaching the softball team, it became obvious that he deserved attention.”

“We were terrible. We were the worst team in Burbank rec league history,” Waldron recalls. “But it was a great opportunity for me to trick everybody into reading my writing.” Waldron leaned on his “Southern roots” to channel Friday Night Lights’ coach Taylor every week.

“We lost every single game and he’d take us out to the parking lot and give us this pep talk,” Harmon says. “What was the point of pep talking this terrible team? He kept on, which was a job that you couldn’t accomplish by being ironic or cynical.” One day, fortune smiled on both Waldron and the team when, in the frenzied excitement after their first-ever softball win, Harmon offered Waldron a writers assistant job on the fifth season of his NBC sitcom Community. “I look at all the amazing moments I’ve had in my career, and I’ve been so lucky, I don’t think I’ll ever have anything more exciting than that one,” Waldron says.

“He wanted to be a writer and I was like, ‘Too bad. You’re very handsome and charming. Get on the phone and talk to these producers for me,’” Harmon recalls of his early treatment of Waldron. “So there he is on Community as a writers P.A. and as a ‘facilities manager’ simultaneously—which is code for fixing things that go wrong in the bathroom.”

Waldron, not content to work in Harmon’s bathroom forever, began pitching a show he wrote while still in school about his first love: wrestling. Starz gave Waldron a crack at it, and in the summer of 2017, despite never having written a script that made it to air, Waldron ran his first writers room. “What I loved about wrestling, even as a kid, was there were stakes,” Waldron says. “If Hulk Hogan turned bad one week, that had big ramifications for the rest of my life, as far as I was concerned.”

The wrestling show Heels was born and just as quickly fell apart. “We couldn’t cast it,” Waldron says. “So much for my meteoric rise. My career’s over. I’m like 29 and really, really languishing. I licked my wounds after Heels went on the shelf and said, ‘All right, let me prove to myself that I can still write.’”

With his eye on impressing the likes of Marvel and Lucasfilm, Waldron took two weeks to whip together the first draft of a time-traveling/sci-fi/romance feature worthy of both Nora Ephron and the Rick and Morty writers room, titled Worst Guy of All Time. Waldron’s team was disinclined to share a copy of the script (possibly because it’s in development or its DNA will be found in some other project he’s working on) but you can read write-ups of it here and here. The story about the worst guy in the world, the girl who was sent through time to kill him, and how they fell, disastrously, in love landed Waldron on the 2018 Black List alongside Emerald Fennell’s Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman. It also caught the eye of Kevin Feige.

Meanwhile, Dan Harmon had finally seen the light. In 2018, Harmon and his Ricky and Morty team decided to staff “blind” with writers submitting anonymous cold opens for the fourth season of his irreverent, animated journey through time and space featuring a young boy (Morty) and his drunk, Doc Brown–esque grandfather (Rick). “It was such a Sword in the Stone thing,” Harmon says. Someone informed Harmon that the two submissions he identified as “clearly the best” were “both by the same writer and that writer was the guy cleaning your toilets and all other manner of dirty work and trying to develop a Starz show on his off hours.”

Harmon was so impressed that he not only hired Waldron to write for season four, he offered him a showrunner position for season five. “We’re like, ‘Okay. He’s a little green, but he’s moving so quickly and he learns so fast and he’s such a hard worker. We’re crazy for doing it. Let’s take a chance on this kid,’” Harmon says. “He’s like, ‘Guys, I’m so flattered by this. I have a meeting at Marvel this afternoon. I think I might be running a show for them.’ That’s the story of how we loved, semi-supported, semi-discouraged, and definitely lost Michael Waldron.”

Dan Harmon is no stranger to losing talent to Kevin Feige. Longtime MCU directors Joe and Anthony Russo were plucked from Community. And in 2020 Marvel hired another Rick and Morty writer, Jeff Loveness, to write Ant-Man 3. It’s no mystery why. When sitting down for a lengthy interview with Vanity Fair in 2017, Feige was as eager to talk about the Rick and Morty season-three finale as anything else.

“Well, you can’t fight Kevin Feige in the street,” Harmon says. “He’ll just say, ‘Oh, I love that you’re fighting me, this is so wonderful,’ and everyone will start booing you for being a bully. I am honored and validated by the idea that if people leave me, they leave me for Marvel. That’s an amazing legacy.”

When Michael Waldron left for Marvel in 2019, he went with his Rick and Morty experience, his love of wrestling, a time-travel romance screenplay, and very little actual comic book knowledge. This last part may have appealed to Feige the most. The head of Marvel Studios himself didn’t grow up reading comics and has said that someone with an outsider’s approach to a comic book story can be more valuable than a writer stuck in the weeds of back issues. “I grew up a pro-wrestling guy, probably more of a Star Wars guy,” Waldron says, “but my love of Marvel came from the movies.”

When Waldron met with Marvel for Loki, the executive team had already decided to set the show in the world of the TVA (or Time Variance Authority), a sci-fi bureaucratic agency that cleans up any anomalies in Marvel’s increasingly complex and branching timelines and realities.

“That was the sandbox that we had to play in,” Waldron says. “I came up with the emotional engine of the whole thing. The fans of Loki watched him experience a character arc through Infinity War and, in a lot of ways, maybe even arc out. How do we break new ground with this character? What better movies and TV shows did I intend to rip off in each episode?”

Marvel itself solved the “arc out” problem by plucking Loki from earlier in his timeline at the end of 2012’s Avengers. Hiddleston’s character enters the show a time criminal captured by the TVA who may, in the end, prove its most valuable asset. Loki, the series, presents a less evolved, more mischievous god of mischief and Waldron considers Hiddleston’s versatility the show’s ultimate weapon. The ceiling for Loki felt “so high” that Waldron was free to draw on a broad range of films and TV shows to construct Loki’s latest journey through the MCU.

The time-and-space-hopping adventure spirit of Rick and Morty is an obvious inspiration. “At first I was carrying in the Rick and Morty sensibility and I had to recalibrate,” he says. “I'm not writing a 22-minute cartoon. I was watching Quentin Tarantino movies — Inglourious Basterds. Movies that luxuriate in long scenes of dialogue and tension building.” Waldron also rattles off some other surprising inspirations: Blade Runner, Before Sunrise, and Catch Me If You Can.

But just because he’s pulling from cinema doesn’t mean Waldron thinks of Loki as a six-hour movie. “I’d say it’s something totally new! It’s MCU. It was important that every episode stood alone. The Leftovers or Watchmen, which I admired so much—every one of those episodes felt like a distinct short story. That’s the sign of a great episode of TV. ‘Oh, it’s that episode of Loki.’” (If you’re wondering how delightfully weird Loki might get, Waldron mentions the lion sex cult boat episode of The Leftovers, “It’s A Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World,” as a personal favorite.)

Close watchers of Loki trailers have already singled out what they think is a Mad Men reference in an homage to unsolved mystery man D.B. Cooper. Waldron says the connections to Mad Men, his favorite show of all time, run deeper. “Mad Men is about characters becoming aware of who they are,” he says. “Don Draper gained an awareness of how he was broken and why.”

Here, Waldron says, is where time travel stories really come in handy: “You can literally hold up a mirror to your characters. Perhaps they can encounter other versions of themselves at different points in their lives. In the case of Back to the Future’s Marty McFly, he can encounter versions of his parents and then he understands himself better.”

Fans of the Loki comics know things can get even wilder than Lorraine and George McFly. On the page Loki has shown up as a little kid, and as a seductive figure known as Lady Loki—could these be versions of himself that Loki meets on his journey? Could meeting yourself be literalized in this way? “It certainly could,” Waldron says. “What being is more chaotic than Loki? What do you have to learn from any version of yourself?” If this is the case, Marvel is keeping that aspect of the show a secret but fans have noticed that a few Loki actors, including the decidedly Hiddleston-esque Richard E. Grant, have yet to be assigned roles. Could Grant be playing an elder Loki?

It’s the juvenile iteration of Loki that caught Waldron’s attention. The Kid Loki comic Journey Into Mystery #622-636 by Kieron Gillen was inspirational “not necessarily because our show is about a child version of Loki, but because it excavates his humanity in a more vulnerable space in a way that you only can with a child. A child version of Loki is still burdened by the sins of his past self which is very much what our version of Loki is running up against in the TVA. Can a tiger change its stripes?”

As for Lady Loki, remember the toxic romance Blacklist screenplay that first got Michael Waldron in the door at Marvel. Loki’s cinematic journey has been so tied up in his relationship with his brother, Thor, that he’s never had an on-screen love interest. Waldron, who still aspires to be Nora Ephron, says there certainly are some love stories running through his season.

One love story to keep an eye out for is brewing between Hiddleston’s god of mischief and Owen Wilson’s TVA bureaucrat Mr. Mobius. The two spark and spar, building on the duo’s chemistry from Midnight in Paris. “Mobius and Loki, that's one of the love stories you might see in Loki for sure,” he says. “Although if you print that, knowing our fans, they’re going to take it the wrong way.” When I clarified that their love story might be more akin to the platonic one between Tom Hanks’ FBI Agent Carl Hanratty and Leonardo DiCaprio’s con man Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can, Waldron says: “Exactly. Right.”

As fruitful as the time travel genre can be when it comes to juicy emotional development, Waldron knows it can also be a logistical nightmare if not plotted carefully. “I can show you what was all over our writers room,” he says, quickly sketching out a branching timeline. “We had to create an insane institutional knowledge of how time travel would work within the TVA so the audience never has to think about it again. It was a lot of drawings of squiggly timelines.”

Marvel already made its case for how time travel works in Avengers: Endgame but that, Waldron points out, “is the way the Avengers understand it.” With a TV show it’s a little different. “I was always very acutely aware of the fact that there's a week between each of our episodes and these fans are going to do exactly what I would do, which is pick this apart. We wanted to create a time travel logic that was so air-tight it could sustain over six hours. There's some time-travel sci-fi concepts here that I'm eager for my Rick and Morty colleagues to see.”

Part of the fun on a Marvel project like this, Waldron says, is creating a disaster and just saying, “‘Yeah, we'll leave that for the next writer.’ But then you do that on Loki and you find yourself writing Doctor Strange and you have to clean up your own mess.”

Like WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier before it, Loki has two main creatives working alongside the team of Marvel producers and executives. In the world of Marvel on Disney+, a head writer like Waldron will get the ball rolling and then a director, in this case Kate Herron (Sex Education), will join in shaping the project going forward.

“Kate's a great creator,” Waldron says. “Suddenly we had the benefit of fresh eyes on this whole thing as we hurtled into production. It's been run more like a feature in that it’s ultimately more director-driven. I'm not the showrunner in the sense that I'm not the one with the budget hanging over my head.”

Waldron wasn’t even on set while Loki was shooting because in February of last year, just before he was to leave for Atlanta, Kevin Feige called and let Waldron know “they were going in a different direction on Doctor Strange.” Original Strange director Scott Derrickson left the project over “creative differences” and Feige, likely eager to hit the target production date of May, made an offer to Waldron.

“I knew I wanted to stay in the family,” Waldron says. “I felt like Loki was in a great place and I was eager for what the next challenge would be.” Director Sam Raimi, a longtime hero of Waldron’s and someone Feige knows from his early days as a producer on the Raimi’s Spider-Man films, was brought on board a week later to direct.

Time was tight. “How do we just make a movie in two months?” Waldron recalls thinking. “But COVID quickly descended upon us. We're not shooting now until November. So I got to spend my 2020 on Zooms with Sam Raimi. Not too bad.” While acknowledging the foundation Derrickson laid for him, Waldron says he and Raimi started “from scratch.”

Waldron began juggling his Strange duties while still keeping one “hand on the wheel of Loki.” (Oh and somewhere in there he also scooped up an Emmy for Rick and Morty over Zoom.) He put his trust in Herron and fellow Rick and Morty alum, writer Eric Martin, to handle the day-to-day of Loki while Martin and Waldron would collaborate on any re-writes needed to make the series come together.

Waldron found a real-life touchstone for Loki in Apple mogul Steve Jobs. They’re both adopted, he points out, and they love control. For Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Stephen Strange, Waldron says: “I gravitated towards [travel documentarian and chef] Anthony Bourdain. Strange is an elitist as a neurosurgeon and a sorcerer. Anthony Bourdain was a man of the people, but there was that intense intellect. You always felt like he could eviscerate anybody with his words at any time. But yet Anthony Bourdain never really punched down. That was the first ingredient in the stew for Doctor Strange.”

Waldron also connects Bourdain’s world-traveling to Strange’s own reality-hopping adventure: “Anthony Bourdain had been everywhere, seen everything. What surprises you at this point? I think for all of the heroes in the MCU, in a post-Endgame world, how do you rally yourself to fight the stand-alone movie villains after you fought Thanos?”

Strange’s fighting spirit led Waldron to his next inspiration. “He's Indiana Jones in a cloak to me,” he says. “He's a hero who can take a punch. That's what made those Harrison Ford heroes so great. Those guys get their asses kicked. Look at Stephen Strange in the first movie. He's really getting beat up but he's very capable and everything. I can tell you that it's a ride...very Sam Raimi. The film is incredibly visually thrilling. John Mathieson our DP, who shot Gladiator and Logan — I think the look of it is going to be unlike anything you've seen in the MCU before.”

“He just wanted to write a really great Indiana Jones-esque blockbuster,” Waldron’s close friend, fellow Rick and Morty alum and Ant-Man 3 writer Jeff Loveness says. “He nailed it. It’s a kind of a throwback.” Waldron, he adds, may have an even more personal connection to Strange: “His wife is a [physician’s assistant]. He really got to the heart of the character, how doctors do have to be cocky. He got the Hawkeye Pierce energy of Strange.”

Waldron says whatever plans he had for Strange weren’t greatly impacted by the fact that the character was meant to show up (and then didn’t) in WandaVision. But Waldron’s close friendship with WandaVision head writer Jac Schaeffer, forged in the halls of Marvel as he was working on Loki, loomed large over the production. “I admired her so much,” he says. Schaeffer, who recently signed an overall deal with Marvel Studios, created a show around Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff which will lead directly into Waldron’s first feature film. “When I got brought on to Doctor Strange — especially because Wanda is part of that story — I just wanted to make sure I wasn't gonna let my friend down,” he says. “I can't shit the bed because she did such a great job. So we had a lot of conversations. Getting to continue Wanda's story was amazing.”

Waldron found himself in frequent communication with Schaeffer and Loveness, creating a kind of friend-based network of writers you don’t often see across several MCU projects. “He was still in the middle of his highly strenuous shoot and running another show, and working on another secret movie and he came onto our Zoom and collaborated on some story stuff,” Loveness recalls, “It's like swimming in the ocean over there. There's always going to be 10 movies that yours ties into. They're going to change Doctor Strange so that it will affect Ant-Man and that'll affect season eight of The Mandalorian.”

Waldron notes that one of his Loki writers, Bisha Ali, went on to create Ms. Marvel and that the whole interconnected enterprise hangs together better if they can think of it as a family: ”Jeff’s dealing with the Quantum Realm and I was dealing with time travel and the multi-verse. Our conversations are probably illegal to have, digitally. We have to meet on a bridge somewhere.”

“Iwas like eight weeks into writing Loki and I finally moved on,” Waldron recalls. “I'd spent a year driving past the old Heels writers room and feeling like a failure. Now I'd risen like a phoenix from the ashes and then, of course, the jilted lover calls and says, ‘Hey, what are you up to?’”

In 2019, Starz came calling to see if Waldron would be interested in reviving his old wrestling show Heels. Arrow star Stephen Amell, having wrapped up his superhero duties on the CW, was available. Waldron, of course, was a bit busy.

“I had to surrender control over the thing that I had been the most maniacally obsessive over,” Waldron says of giving the reins to actor turned showrunner Mike O’Malley. “Mike, to his great credit, was just so generous and patient with me as I did that. There's still so much of it that's mine.” Waldron spent some of his 2021 working on post-production for the show which will debut this August.

By then, Waldron may be even busier tackling another cinematic galaxy. He can’t say much about getting the call to work on Feige’s Star Wars, but he can say: “You’ve heard all my references here. Star Wars! Indiana Jones! [Kathleen Kennedy], she’s made so many of my favorite movies. So to get to collaborate with both of those entities is a dream come true.” Waldron's Lucasfilm gig came with a lucrative overall deal at Disney.

Setting sail on a steady ship like Marvel is one thing, but diving into a fractured fandom like Star Wars is a much bigger challenge. Then again, Waldron survived the Rick and Morty Szechuan Sauce Wars of 2017, so anything is possible. “I think he can be the guy to really kickstart the cinematic grandeur of those movies,” Loveness says. “That's probably laying it on a little thick, but I really think he's the guy to do it.”

“Star Wars is definitely sticky because if you make a certain brand of nerd happy, you're actually middle fingering an adjacent breed of nerd,” Harmon says. “If you take it too seriously, you're doing it wrong. If you don't take it seriously enough, you're definitely doing it wrong. It needs that total joy of the greatest franchise ever, along with a kind of swagger. I do think that Waldron would make a good match for that, but I don't know if he would make a good match for the machine that's carrying that stuff.”

Then again, this is Feige’s Star Wars and it’s not at all difficult to see why these two have forged a successful partnership. Feige and Waldron are both nice guys from the East Coast with wives in the medical field who like action blockbusters from the 80s, have a connection to Nora Ephron, and weren’t brought up on comic books. But the parallels run even deeper. Feige and Waldron see story in a similar way: constantly pushing beloved comic book characters through the lens of favorite blockbusters like Back to the Future. More crucially, both seem to have mastered the art of being political and ambitious without ever seeming disingenuous.

“I remember when he said [he was going to] Marvel and I was like, ‘Oh, god. That's perfect. He's going to be such a team player,” Harmon says. “Orson Welles is not going to work well at Marvel. The Russo brothers, they were collaborators always, first and foremost. That also didn't surprise me. There's a tremendous mandate at Marvel about ‘all for one’ and respecting the franchise. Their leader, Kevin Feige, leads by example. If your ego is simultaneously powerful but flexible enough to fit through that pipe, you are rewarded and you have a home there forever. It's the most obvious place in the world for Waldron. He is an Avenger.”

Growing up in Atlanta and watching his hero Hulk Hogan captivate a crowd, Michael Waldron may not have even known what an Avenger was. But possibly the two worlds aren’t all that different. “In the Heels pilot, somebody compares wrestlers to superheroes because there's the aspirational quality of putting ourselves in their shoes,” Waldron says. “But superheroes aren't just gods, even the ones that are gods. They're human. They're broken just like us. So whether it's a towering, hulking wrestler in the middle of the ring or a pompous demi-god shooting green balls of energy out of his hands, there's a vulnerability in there. I think that's just a really thrilling thing to get to explore.”

More from Michael Waldron and a Loki preview on this week's Still Watching podcast.

[twh-news]

Tom Hiddleston on Mobius, Loki, and Queer Identity

This article contains frank discussion of the Loki series premiere, “Glorious Purpose.” If you’re not caught up, now is the time to leave.

When Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff and Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson set sail for their Disney+ shows, they had some familiar company in the shape of Paul Bettany’s Vision and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes. But as Tom Hiddleston’s Loki hops out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline and into his adventures with the Time Variance Authority, he does so without another previously established Marvel companion along for the ride.

As we see in the series premiere, the defining relationship for Loki in this show will likely be with the character of Mobius, played by Owen Wilson. Head writer Michael Waldron has described theirs as a love relationship, though not a romantic one. Hiddleston spoke with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast about the love story between Mobius and Loki as well as the obligation he feels around his character’s canonically queer and gender-fluid identity. You can hear the full interview here, or read some key excerpts below.

When director Taika Waititi was tasked with reinventing the character of Thor for his film Thor: Ragnarok, he did so by stripping away all the things that had previously defined the god of thunder. He cut Thor’s hair, broke his hammer, killed off Thor’s buddies, and destroyed his home of Asgard. In a 2017 interview, though, Waititi revealed that he was told not to mess with Loki. The character was too popular; Marvel wanted to keep him as he was.

But here, in his own Disney+ series, Loki is getting the treatment his brother Thor got in Ragnarok. “Thor is nowhere to be seen, and Asgard is very far away,” Hiddleston says. “There are no Avengers near at hand. He’s even stripped of his status and his power. What is left if you strip Loki of all the things that are familiar to him? What remains? That’s for him to discover as much as the audience.”

Helping Loki through this journey of self-discovery is Mobius, who gives Hiddleston’s character a healthy dose of psychiatric analysis in the series premiere. Mobius, Hiddleston says, is uniquely positioned to help Loki through his first story without his brother Thor by his side. “The thing that was so new and fresh for me was that Mobius is a character who is emotionally detached from Loki’s emotional turmoil and all the tricks that Loki tries to play in,” Hiddleston says. “[The things that] work on everybody else, provocation or manipulation, just don’t land with Mobius.”

While Mobius is occasionally harsh with Loki, there are also some kernels of compassion there. Hiddleston sees Mobius as “delighted,” with an “academic curiosity,” about having Loki in front of him. “They’re both very clever and both trying to outsmart each other, and realize very early on they need each for different reasons,” he says. “That’s a feeling that’s unusual and in needing each other, they might have to try to trust each other, which is going to be very difficult.” Loki head writer Michael Waldron has compared their relationship to the one shared by Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can.

There’s a temptation to slide Mobius into an almost paternal role. He’s capable of giving Loki the approval Loki was dying to receive from his father, Odin. There’s a moment in the premiere where Loki insists he’s very smart, and Mobius genially agrees: “I know you are.” Hiddleston says that moment is “destabilizing” for Loki, who “finds himself in the presence of someone who is confronting him with who he is, who he might be, seemingly without judgment.”

But as Hiddleston goes on to describe the dynamic between Loki and Mobius, it becomes clear that he sees the characters as mirrors of one another. “There’s some similarity there,” he says. “Just a part of who he is mirrored by Loki’s playfulness and an independence of spirit. There’s a kinship there, which is interesting because they’re not aware of it themselves—at least initially.” It’s interesting to talk about mirrors in a show about Loki’s refracted identity, and the possibility of multiple Lokis. Is there any way that Mobius turns out to be another undercover Loki? Maybe not—and that kind of speculation is possibly best left to the podcast, anyway.

The paternal/avuncular/reflective love story of Mobius and Loki aside, longtime fans of the character are eager to know if the Disney+ version of Loki will finally lean into the canonically queer, pansexual, and gender-fluid identity Loki has in the comics. The answer to the latter, at least, appears to be yes. In a TVA file on Loki, the god’s gender is listed as “fluid.” What about everything else?

“I have always been aware of it,” Hiddleston says of Loki’s queer identity. “I see it as my responsibility as somebody who is able to portray this character, at this time, that I honor the aspects of the character which are there in the canon. It was important to [series director] Kate [Herron] and important to Michael [Waldron].… The whole point of Loki is that Loki is a trickster, and crosses boundaries and can represent many different shapes. I was really pleased that we got to touch on that in this series.”

[rekaspbrak]

I saw lots of “we were promised a love story between Loki and Mobius and Marvel queerbaited us” takes lately - especially on twitter and, uh, that’s not the case?

Michael Waldron never queerbaited us with ‘love story between Loki and Mobius’. 

That quote was taken out of context. In the actual podcast interview (Vanity Fair 3.6.2021) he was talking with an interviewer about how his friend gave him an advice how “every story is a love story in a way”  - because it’s true

This is the transcript: 

I: “I was talking to someone much smarter than me who was just talking about how every story, should be a love story. That Wandavision is so compelling because it’s a love story and, this is at the beginning of Falcon and the Winter soldier, he was saying,’Falcon and the Winter soldier should be a love story about Sam and Bucky, it doesn’t have to be romance, it can just be about, you know, these two characters coming together.

MW: “I think that’s great, James Poncel, who’s one of my friends and collaborators, he said that before and it stuck with me that every love story is a love story or something like that, and it’s true. And that can be a story between a father and a son. Goodwill Hunting is a love story between Matt Damon, Robert Williams’ characters. So I’m always looking for that.

MW: I think Mobius was always, uh, we knew so much was going to ride on casting that character because you know he serves as kind of the face of the TVA and in a way, and as you can see from the trailers somebody that was gonna have a lot of interaction with Tom and his energy was gonna have to complement Loki's energy in a compelling way. They had a relationship obviously, from Midnight in Paris, they've worked together on that for a little bit and they instantly clicked creatively and so, you know, that, I would say Mobius and Loki, that's one of the love stories that you might see in Loki for sure. Although if you print that the fans are gonna, like, take it the wrong way-”

I: “No, no, I won't, I won't, I won't put it that way. Don't worry.”

MW: “I know our fans-”

I: “In that context I know what you mean. I mean, you referenced 'Catch me if you can' before. And I would consider 'Catch me if you can' a love story between Tom Hanks' character and Leonardo Dicaprio's character.”

MW: “Exactly. Right.”

This isn’t queerbaiting. I’m queer myself and I understood where he was coming from perfectly. A love story doesn’t have to be romantic. It can be familiar, it can be platonic, it can be paternal etc.,  and his “wrong way” wasn’t him saying that shipping two male presenting characters is ‘wrong’. He was trying to, albeit a bit clumsily, clear up what he said so that his quote wouldn’t be taken out of context/misinterpreted and give fans like us a false sense of belief that we will get an actual romantic love story between Loki and Mobius.

Because like it or not, he IS right. Fans misinterpret a lot of things they read on the internet - thanks to certain sites twisting words (I’m looking at your MCU Direct) or straight up clickbait articles who post unfounded rumours.

Remember that “Loki willl have male and female love interest” rumour? It came from Daniel Richthman’s ‘rumours’ section of his Patreon. Daniel is a scooper and unfortunately has a very bad track record when it comes to actual plot details so it had a 99% chance of being wrong - yet people saw that rumour being picked up by large twitter accoungts and media and started taking it as an official/confirmed fact that came from Marvel. And now we have people claiming “Marvel promised us a male and female love interest for Loki”. No, they didn’t,

I, for one, appreciate the fact that Michael tried his best to not raise our expectations regarding Loki/Mobius. Because Loki and Mobius were never meant to be a romantic relationship from the start.

Falcon and the winter soldier was accused of queerbaiting bi Bucky and SamBucky and the Loki team wanted to avoid that and I appreciate that.

Kate said that Loki and Mobius have a paternal kind of relationship and I can definitely see that and you know, I dig it. In canon, Mobius does seem like a parental type of figure towards Loki and even told him that he sees him as a scared little boy. 

I like Loki/Mobius as much as the next person, but at the end of the day it’s a fanon pairing, and it was never meant to be canon so saying they queerbaited us with this ship so we would watch the show is inaccurate.

[gentleranium]

I’d like to talk about the crux of the issue about representation in the media and storytelling. This issue is systemic. It is not limited to Loki. Rather, a recent interview with the show creator and head writer provided one of the clearest examples of the issue:

This brings us up to date with Loki, and while fans may be excited for Tom Hiddleston’s character to catch up with the comics, Michael Waldron is quick to say Loki’s genderfluid identity isn’t something he’s qualified to speak on.

“I think that is best experienced in the show, as opposed to me, a cis straight white guy giving clunky answers about it,” Waldron says.

From "IS LOKI GENDERFLUID? 'IT'S ALWAYS BEEN THERE,' TOM HIDDLESTON TELLS INVERSE." “A cis straight white guy" says he's not qualified to speak on a character's genderfluid identity, yet sees no issue with telling a story about one.

Here’s the thing that applies to all of us: if you're not able to talk about a fundamental part of a character that is going to drive the narrative without "giving clunky answers," how on earth do you expect to write about them with empathy, depth, and understanding?

Shelve the project. Read more. Investigate how folks that occupy whatever identity you’re writing about tell their own stories. Then try again. Maybe it turns out you’re not the person to tell the story, and that’s okay. But you’ve got to do the legwork.

There will never be a time when you’re done learning.

[comeback-from-the-dead]

Stop fcking tell me that Wanda is dead no she is not like if she's dead show me her rotting dead corpse...ya fucking hooeys

[iamnmbr3]

We're missing a step between Waldron's movie script and the Loki series, and that's the TVA series. Imagine: There's a new recruit at the TVA. Let's call him Michael. He's not quite sure how he got here, and things are weird. Time passes strangely. Does he even have an apartment somewhere? Despite the weirdness, he still has a job to do, and that's to help his partner agent Mobius catch the most dastardly threat to ever threaten the sacred timeline. 1/7

Michael is, to put it bluntly, a blithering idiot, clumsy and generally clueless, but he seems (somehow) to have some relevant skills, because he deduces that the threat is hiding in apocalypses. Something something, and Michael and the threat (let's call her Sylvia) wind up stranded in an apocalypse. Here, it's revealed that Michael himself is a variant. He and Sylvia fall in love (they're probably not variants of each other), something something, and wind up recaptured and back at the TVA. 2/7

Michael tries and succeeds in convincing his former partner that everyone there is a variant. He still gets pruned, and here is where we learn who Michael used to be, and boy was he a bad person (this, and the "romance" are the parts lifted from the movie script). The person behind the timeline is none other than the very worst version of Michael himself. (I don't know if the character of Michael is meant to be some other comic book character, and I don't care enough to think about it) 3/7

This explains the following: why the depiction of the TVA goes from obviously glaringly evil in ep 1 to just kinda weird in ep 2. Why the transition from the supermarket to the TVA between 2 & 3 seems so bizarre (why would Sylvie leave the portal open just long enough for Loki to be indecisive and then follow her??) It was originally something else, and they didn't take to the time to make it make sense. 4/7

Why the reveal that the TVA employees are all variants is so casual, when it should have been one of the show's holy shit moments. It has much more meaning if one of the characters in the conversation didn't know he was a variant. Why Sylvie devolves to a stereotypical hyper-competent Strong Female Character in eps 4 and 5 (2 and 3 required more magic, and were therefore more rewritten). 5/7

Why ep 5 felt a lot like filler, but it's much less so if the purpose is the learn and explore the main character's true identity. Why the supposed main character feels like just an accessory to the plot, and the pacing issues surrounding that. And most of all, why Loki feels like a completely different character *except* in the second half of the first episode. He was competent! Stealing the remote, escaping, being capable of fighting B-15. 6/7

That's because it was the only episode in the goddamn series actually written for the character. Obviously, quite a bit of dialogue and some scenes were changed (and I bet the show creators thought they were so clever making Loki and Sylvie variants of one another), but Loki was just pasted on top of Waldron's worst person in the world, in the script and also possibly in Waldron's mind, given his alternate reality interviews. 7/7

Huh. Interesting theory! You could have something there.

[maryxglz]

Loki on Disney Plus: Release date, cast, plot and everything you need to know

"I am burdened with glorious purpose."

Thor’s troublesome adoptive brother low-key died at the beginning of Infinity War, but that won’t stop Loki from returning soon on the upcoming streaming service Disney+.

However, Tom Hiddleston’s character won’t be the same one who redeemed himself at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. Instead, Loki will focus on an alternate version of the villain from Endgame, one who survived those messy time-travel antics with the Tesseract in hand.

It’s fitting then that Rick and Morty writer Michael Waldron has been hired to oversee Loki’s small-screen debut. Like Rick, the God of Mischief also manipulates the people he loves and it seems likely that Loki’s show will play around with misdirection too.

Join us as we cut through the confusion and keep you updated on everything you need to know about Loki, the mischievous show soon heading to Disney+.

Loki release date: When will it premiere?

Following Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki will be the second Marvel TV show to hit Disney+ when it debuts in spring 2021.

As it arrives around the same time as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, there’s a chance that the two could connect in some way. After all, Loki is no stranger to magic and the alternate timeline that his show explores could draw the attention of a certain Sorcerer Supreme...

Loki cast: who will be in it?

The only cast member confirmed to appear so far in Loki is Tom Hiddleston, although he’ll be playing a different version of the character than we’ve become used to. Without the redemptive arc he enjoyed in recent films like Thor: Ragnarok, this new Loki will hark back to the sneaky anti-hero we last saw in the first Avengers movie.It’s safe to say that Loki will be up to no good in his new show, so who will try to rein him in? It’s likely that possible guest appearances could include some of Loki’s fellow Asgardians like Thor or Valkyrie, but story-wise it actually makes more sense if Captain America returns on the show.

At the end of Endgame, old man Steve recalled how he travelled through time to return all of the infinity stones back where they belonged. Given that his mission was a success, Cap must have encountered Loki at some point on his travels and the Russo brothers seem to agree, hinting as much in a recent interview with Business Insider. If that’s true, then this may not be the last we’ve seen of America’s ass, after all.

Loki plot: What will happen?

The Tesseract provides Loki with the power to travel anywhere in space, but when we finally catch up with him on Disney+, it looks like the God of Mischief will be able to travel through time as well.

The official synopsis teases as much, suggesting that Loki will deliberately work to influence key moments throughout history. How he gains that power remains to be seen, but it’s not a stretch to imagine him meddling with important events like this. Don’t be surprised if the Avengers wake up one day to find out that Loki’s face is plastered all over Mount Rushmore.

The first leaked image from the show confirms that one of Loki’s destinations will be 1975 thanks to a Jaws billboard spotted in the background. If Marvel want to go real meta, then Loki could visit Jaws director Steven Spielberg decades before Hiddleston went on to work with him on War Horse.

Whatever happens, we’re certain that Loki will have mischief on the brain and maybe even revenge too. Bear in mind that this is the guy who got Hulk-smashed over and over in the most humiliating way possible. Don’t be surprised if he’s out to reclaim his dignity and prove his divine worth.

Loki trailer: When can I watch it?

We probably won't see any footage from Loki until at least the end of 2020 once it's begun filming. On the plus side though, Loki impersonator Matt Damon will soon reprise a different Loki role in the upcoming Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which is essentially the next best thing.

Loki is set to premiere on Disney+ in spring 2021.

[imposterogers]

Charles in MoM says his iconic phrase from DOFP, "Just because someone stumbles and loses their way, doesn't mean they are lost forever" about Stephen fucking Strange and I GOT SO MAD because it felt so hollow and meaningless. also Peggy is the last one of the Illuminati to die and the first one is fucking Reed Richards?? lmaoaoao Michael Waldron WHEN I CATCH YOU

michael waldon said “how can I take iconic lines and completely strip them of all meaning”

[lokiondisneyplus]

Natalie Holt's timeline was turned upside down last fall when she landed the highly-coveted composer gig for Marvel Studios' Loki series on Disney+.

"My agent got a general call-out looking for a composer on a Marvel project," she tells SYFY WIRE during a conversation over Zoom. "So, I didn’t know what it was. It was [described as] spacey and quite epic ... I sent in my show reel and then got an interview and got sent the script and then I realized what it was for. I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ It was amazing ... Loki was already one of my favorite characters, so I was really stoked to get to give him a theme and flesh him out in this way."

***WARNING! The following contains certain plot spoilers for the first four episodes of Loki!***

Imbued with glorious purpose, Holt knew the score had to match the show's gonzo premise about the Time Variance Authority, an organization that secretly watches over and manages every single timeline across the Marvel multiverse. The proposition of such an out-there sci-fi concept inspired the composer to bring in uniquely strange sounds, courtesy of synthesizers and a theremin.

"I got my friend, Charlie Draper, to play the theremin on my pitch that I had to do," she recalls. "They gave me a scene to score, which I’m sure they gave to loads of other composers. It was the Time Theater sequence in Episode 1. The bit from where he goes up the elevator and then into the Time Theater ... I just went to town on it and I wanted to impress them and win the job and put as many unusual sounds in there and make it as unique as possible."

The end result was a weird, borderline unnatural sound that wouldn't have felt out of place in a 1950s sci-fi B-movie about big-headed alien invaders. Rather than being turned off by Holt's avant garde ideas, Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige embraced them, only giving the composer a single piece of feedback: "Push it further."

Holt admits that she was slightly influenced by Thor: Ragnarok ("I loved the score for it and everything"), which wasn't afraid to lean into the wild, Jack Kirby-created ideas floating around Marvel's cosmic locales. Director Taika Waititi's colorful and bombastic set pieces were perfectly complimented by an '80s-inspired score concocted by Devo co-founder, Mark Mothersbaugh.

"To be honest, I tried not to listen to it on its own," Holt says of the Ragnarok soundtrack. "I didn’t want to be too influenced by it. I watched the film a couple of times a few years ago, so yeah, I don’t think I was heavily referencing it. But I definitely had a memory of it in my mind."

After boarding Loki last September, Holt spent the next six months (mostly in lockdown) crafting a soundtrack that would perfectly reflect the titular god of mischief played by Tom Hiddleston. One of the first things she came up with was the project's main theme — a slightly foreboding cue that pays homage to the temporal nature of the TVA, as well as the main character's flair for the dramatic. "He always does things with a lot of panache and flair, and he’s very classical in his delivery."

She describes it as an "over-the-top grand theme with these ornate flourishes" that plays nicely with Loki's Shakespearean aura. "I wanted those ornaments and grand gestures in what I was doing. Then I also wanted to reflect that slightly analog world of the TVA where everything has lots of knobs and buttons ... [I wanted to] give it that slightly grainy, faded [and] vintage-y sci-fi sound as well."

"I just wanted it to feel like it had this might and weight — like there was something almost like a requiem about it," Holt continues. "These chords that are really powerful and strident and then they’ve got this blinking [sound] over the top. I just came up with that when I was walking down the street and I hummed it into my phone. There’s a video where you can just see up my nose and I’m humming [the theme]. I came home and I played it."

As a classically-trained musician, Holt drew on her love of Mahler, Dvořák, Beethoven, Mozart, and most importantly, Wagner. A rather fitting decision, given that an actual Valkyrie (played by Tessa Thompson) exists within the confines of the MCU.

"I would say those flourishes over the top of the Loki theme are very much Wagner," Holt says. "They’re like 'Ride of the Valkyries.’ I wanted people to kind of recall those big, classical, bombastic pieces and I wanted to give that weight to Loki’s character. That was very much a conscious decision to root it in classical harmony and classical writing ... There’s a touch of the divine to the TVA. It’s in charge of everything, so that’s why those big powerful chords [are there]. I wanted people almost to be knocked off their socks when they heard it."

With the main theme in place, Holt could then play around with it in different styles, depending on the show's different narrative needs. Two prime examples are on display in the very first episode during Miss Minutes' introductory video and the flashback that reveals Loki to be the elusive D.B. Cooper.

"What was really fun was [with] each episode, I got to pull it away and do a samba version of the theme or do a kind of ‘50s sci-fi version of the theme," she explains. "I can’t say other versions of the theme because they’re in Episode 5 and 6…or like when Mobius is pruned, I did this really heartfelt and very emotional [take on the theme] when you see Loki tearing up as he’s going down in slow motion down that corridor. It was cool to have the opportunity to try out so many different styles and genres. And it was big enough to take it all. It was a big enough story."

The other side of the story speaks to the old world grandeur of Loki's royal upbringing on Asgard, a city amongst the stars that eventually found its way into Norse mythology.

"I went to a concert in London three years ago and I heard these Norwegian musicians playing in this group called the Lodestar Trio," Holt recalls. "They do a take on Bach, where they’re kind of giving it a folk-y twist … [They use] a nyckelharpa and a Hardanger fiddle — they’re two historic Norwegian folk instruments. I just remembered that sound and I was like, ‘Oh, I have to use those guys in our score.’ It seemed like the perfect thing. I was like, ‘Yes, the North/Norwegian folk instruments.’ It just felt like it was the perfect thing for his mother and Asgard and his origins."

That folk-inspired sound also helped shape the music for Sylvie (played by Sophia Di Martino), a female variant of Loki with a rather tragic past. "Obviously, we’ve seen in Episode 4 what happened to her as a child," Holt says. "I just feel like she’s so dark. She’s basically grown up living in apocalypses, so she has that Norwegian folk violin sound, but her theme is incredibly dark and menacing and also, you don’t see her. She’s just this dark figure who’s murdering people for a while."

And then there were all the core members of the TVA to contend with. As Holt mentioned above, fans recently lost Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), may he rest in prune. We mean peace. What? Too soon? During a recent interview with SYFY WIRE, Loki head writer Michael Waldron said that he based Mobius off of Tom Hanks's dogged FBI agent Carl Hanratty in 2002's Catch Me If You Can.

"There’s this thing that he loves jet ski magazines," Holt says. "I had this character in my head and then when I saw Owen Wilson’s performance, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s actually a lot lighter and he plays it in a different way from how I’d imagined.’ But I was listening to Bon Jovi and those slightly rock-y anthemic things. ‘90s rock music for some reason was my Mobius sound palette."

Mobius is pruned on the orders of his longtime friend, Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), after learning that everyone who works for the TVA is a variant who was unceremoniously plucked out of their original timelines. A high-ranking member of the quantum-based agency, Renslayer has a theme that "is quite tied in with Mobius and it’s like a high organ," Holt adds. "It doesn’t quite know where it’s going yet. But yeah, we’ll have to see what happens with that one."

Wilson's character isn't the only person fed up with the TVA's lies. Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) also became disillusioned with the place and allowed Sylvie to escape in the most recent episode

"Hunter B-15 has this moment in Episode 4 where Sylvie shows her her past, her memories. I thought that was a really powerful moment for her," Holt says. I feel like she’s such a fighter and when she comes into the Time-Keepers and she makes that decision, like, ‘I’m switching sides,’ so her theme is more like a drum rhythm. I actually kind of sampled my voice and you can hear that with the drums. I did loads of layers of it, just like this horrible sliding sound with this driving rhythm underneath it. So, that was B-15 and then her softer side when she has her memory given back to her."

Speaking of the Time-Keepers, we finally got to meet the creators of the Sacred Timeline...or at least we thought we did. Loki and Sylvie are shocked to learn that the red-eyed guardians of reality are nothing but a trio of high-end animatronics (ones that could probably be taken out by a raging Nicolas Cage). Even before Sylvie manages to behead one of them, something definitely feels off with the Time-Keepers, which meant Holt could underscore the uncanny valley feeling in the score.

"When they walked in for their audience with the Time-Keepers, it was like this huge gravitas," she says. "But you look up and there’s something a bit wrong about them. I don’t know if you felt that or if you just totally believed. You were like, ‘Oh, this is so strange.’ I just felt like there was something a little bit off and musically, it was fun to play around with that."

Holt is only the second solo female composer to work on an MCU project, following in the footsteps of Captain Marvel's Pinar Toprak. Her involvement with Loki represents the studio's growing commitment to diversity, both in front of and behind the camera. This Friday will see the wide release of Black Widow, the first Marvel film to be helmed solely by a woman (Cate Shortland). Four months after that, Chloé Zhao's Eternals will introduce the MCU's first openly gay character into the MCU.

"I just feel like it’s an honor and a privilege to have had that chance to be the second woman to score a thing in the MCU and to be in the same league as those incredible composers like Mothersbaugh and Alan Silvestri. They're just legends," Holt says. "Another distinctive thing about [the show] is that all the heads of department are pretty much women. Marvel are showing themselves to be really progressive and supportive and encouraging. I applaud [them]. Whatever they’re doing seems to be working and people seem to be liking it as well, so that’s awesome."

Holt's score for Vol. 1 of Loki (aka Episodes 1-3) are now streaming on every music-based platform you could think of. Episodes 1-4 are available to watch on Disney+ for subscribers. Episode 5 (the show's penultimate installment) debuts on the platform this coming Wednesday, July 7.

Natalie isn't able to give up any plot spoilers for the next two episodes (no surprise there), but does tease "the use of a big choir" in one of them. "Episode 6, I’m excited for people to hear it," she concludes. "That’s all I can say."