Loki

Marvel as a franchise hasn't really impressed me for a while, I don't hate Marvel or anything, it just never surprises me anymore. This series however did, for a number of reasons. Loki as a character to me had just become increasingly more tiresome to watch as his entire character was to be bad one minute then good another and the countless deaths.. after every death I thought please make this the last because where are the stakes for this guy? So bringing him back was always going to make my eyes roll into the back of my head. But to my surprise it's handled really well here and instead of making him the good guy only to betray somebody at the last minute, they gave him his own goals and just let him do his own thing and it really worked and even fleshed the character out a significant amount. The other big thing that surprised me was that the finale actually did something different. Wandavision did a really frustrating thing where instead of doing something fun and unique they gave us the most cliché and easy finale we could possibly imagine and whilst this finale falls into a few of the same traps (a lot of exposition is dumped on us and it actually sort of shares a pretty big plot point) it doesn't resort to a flying laser battle in the sky, it actually opens the door for some very interesting things the franchise hasn't really touched upon much at all and that I know will actually satisfy a lot of fans. Now that Black Widow is out of the way I don't see any reason why the next "phase" of these films won't have a lot of (potentially) very cool things to throw at us because oh boy do I love that cosmic space bullshit way more than when Marvel tries to actually take itself seriously. I can definitely say without a doubt that whilst it's not perfect, this is the most interesting piece of Marvel media we have had for a very long time. And it also gave us Richard E. Grant running around in a lycra suit, so thank you for that. P.S. I mentioned Tom Hiddleston as being a great choice for Doctor Who and I know that will never happen, Sophia Di Martino on the other hand would also make a fantastic Time Lord 👀