Why Marvels Agatha Spinoff Series Should Avoid the Problems of Loki

Loki saw the God of Mischief dragged into the headquarters of the Time Variance Authority – a bunch of temporal cops whose mission was to prune creatures who dared stray off the path of the Sacred MCU Timeline – and Loki was given a ten billionth chance to reflect on his terrible actions and do something good with it. After meeting several other twisted versions of himself with various problematic issues, and having seen the grim path that was once set out before him, Loki finally started taking steps to trust other people and actually make friends.

Loki became a good guy, or at least a better God, by the time the ambitious series came to a close. This version of him was indeed determined to set things right instead of throwing a spanner in the works of those with better intentions.

But in transforming Loki into a viable protagonist that the audience could root for without feeling at least a little dirty about doing so, Marvel traded a villain for another kind of hero, and had sanded the edges off their golden goose somewhat. Make no mistake, that thing is still gonna lay a shitload of golden eggs, but the series asked a lot of its writers in terms of the character ground they had to cover by transforming Loki so quickly, and many fans merely went along for the ride rather than fully buying into his redemption arc.

And why not? We shouldn’t feel compelled to treat every cheeky villain under the Disney umbrella with the seriousness of a stiff-lipped college Lit class discussing narrative themes, should we?! At the end of the day this is family entertainment, and Loki is popular with a range of age groups (I haven’t fact-checked this, but I’m pretty sure there are least five corporate focus groups who would concur). And, hey, almost everyone deserves a shot at redemption. Even Loki.

But between WandaVision and Loki came The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which gave us a broken Bucky Barnes in therapy trying to make amends for his past misdeeds. Having once been a deadly assassin, Barnes would slowly put his support behind Marvel’s new Captain America, Sam Wilson. Along the way, he helped fix the Wilson family boat and spare the life of the charming but dastardly Baron Zemo. This new Winter Soldier is now a hero with a pardon from the US government who helps fight the bad guys instead of being one. I’m happy for him, even if it meant Marvel ultimately lost yet another of their coolest villains.

Meanwhile, on the movie side of things, we met Taskmaster and Wenwu in Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings respectively. By the time those movies wrapped, we had two more terrific but sympathetic villains to add to the Marvel roster. We might not see Wenwu again for obvious reasons, but Taskmaster is sure to re-emerge at some point with at least a slightly less savage modus operandi.

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