The Atlantic
A Marvel Series That Cares Little for Marvel’s Universe
For more than a decade, the studio’s films and shows have been paragons of careful continuity. So far,
Loki does away with that.
Loki
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For 13 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe built up the Infinity Stones as objects of grand power, capable of manipulating all existence when united. In
Avengers: Infinity War, they turned half of the cosmos to dust; in
Avengers: Endgame, the surviving heroes chased them down across time. In
Loki, the Disney+ series released today, they’re nothing more than colorful paperweights.
The cheeky gag befits a series about a trickster god, but it’s a surprising one for Marvel to pull. The studio has never dismissed its own storytelling this way more than a dozen films insisted on the profundity of the stones. Yet in a single scene, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) learns that the objects he’s long sought and by extension, the objects fans have long been conditioned to care ab