The first episode just dropped this morning - I’ll spoiler my thoughts for now unless we want to make this a “spoilers as it airs” thread.
The idea of a Cosmic Bureaucracy has been done in sci-fi before, but the TVA is a pretty interesting and amusing take on it. I’m choosing to imagine right now that their true forms are incomprehensible and they present as the same species as the person interacting with them, so they appear humanoid to Loki but would appear as a Kree or a Skrull to one of them. Major Mobius makes a great foil for Loki and I look forward to seeing the chemistry between them develop, and the fact that his beverage of choice is Josta (which hasn’t existed in our timeline since the '90s) was a funny little easter egg.
Loki’s transition from boastful egotist to nihilistic surrender after he discovers his fate in the true timeline, and that the TVA just have dozens of Infinity Stones lying around, was well-performed by Hiddleston. Loki as DB Cooper was amusing, though I was bothered by the fact that they have him parachute out of the plane in broad daylight when the real Cooper met his fate long after dusk.
The variant Loki who’s been hunting the TVA is certainly giving me a Mephisto-ish vibe between the use of fire as a weapon, the one attack taking place in a church, and the French peasant girl pointing at a stained glass portrayal of Satan. But then again I was certain Mephisto was going to be the Big Bad in Wandavision, so I could easily be wrong.
OK, I now have Disney+ and have binge-watched ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’.
‘The Mandalorian’, ‘WandaVision’ and … ‘Loki’ to come.
I have connected a computer to my large TV via a simple cable, so I go to the appropriate website and watch stuff on my big screen.
Does Amazon Firestick do anything different from that setup?
I really liked the aesthetic of the TVA. Is it an entirely new genre of a look? Like steampunk is gears and brass… this had the rounded plastics of the 50s-70s but with fancy, more modern tech. Like the projector, it was so red and shiny instead of a beige nightmare from my memory.
It had a lot of The Good Place and Defending Your Life vibes, even if it wasn’t a true afterlife. The bureaucracy of the metaphysical.
It’s Jet Age retro-futurism - projecting back from today to create what the Jet Age would project forward as futuristic technology. It is sort of a new genre of look, which I think has become increasingly popular in the wake of Mad Men. As mentioned upthread, the very similar agency in Umbrella Academy has a very similar aesthetic. 20 years ago, I think the TVA would have a steampunk aesthetic. Nowadays, it’s Jet Age retro-futurism.
Oddly I reacted with how unoriginal it was. Original when Gilliam did similar yes, in Legion for stylistics maybe, maybe in The Umbrella Academy, but now just borrowing without even bothering to alter much.
Long enough to not have to spoiler I hope.
Before the end reveal I wondered if Loki was going to end up being Number 5ish but I was surprised to see them going there already…
I still think I like it.
I’m not rooting for the Time Keepers and the Sacred Timeline. To establish that Free Will does not exist in the MCU ( other than within the TVA)? Not a good outcome.
My whole take on the “Time Keepers” and the “Sacred Timeline” was from a comics perspective.
How the comics went all different directions with the stories depending on who was writing a particular title at a particular time and how Marvel, and DC, have reset the timelines and multiverses several times over the years, “The Time Line Wars”, because you end up with 5,347 different Superman/Spiderman timelines/multiverses over the 50+ years.
And how the MCU, “The Time Keepers”, had to come up with one time line, “The Sacred Timeline” for the movies universe for the movie going audience to follow. So anyone could come in and watch the movies and see them and understand them as one continuous timeline and not have to worry about what the comics have gotten up to in the past.
It also solves the “problem” with the Netflix shows, and the hulu shows, and the ABC shows, and the freeform shows - not part of the “Sacred Timeline” the TVA cleaned them up. The events in those “happened,” they just didn’t happen happen and you can still use the actors if you want to down the road.
I created the now locked thread because this thread is from January and was about how to watch it.
Anyway, I liked it and am really excited to see what is going to happen. Of the three shows that I knew were coming(WandaVision, Winter Soldier, and Loki), it was Loki I was most looking forward to and I think it started off great.
They erase/reset all the other multiverses so that there is only the one left that is “sacred”? Sucks to be in an alternate timeline in the multiverse and makes Thanos look benign.
Power levels here?
We have gods like Thor and Loki … just aliens with magic powers and really long life spans I guess?
Elder gods like Chthon … bigger? stronger?
Dormammu?
And these Time Keepers? Above them all? Or at a Gallafrian Time Lord level?
Do the good guys tend to go along with the desires of these Time Keepers or revolt against bending all of the multiverse to their vision of what one is sacred and which many other complete realities must be destroyed?
In the comic books anyway - understood that the MCU is under no obligation to follow suit in any way.
Fundamentally, yes. In the comic books (and, in the MCU, with respect to the Asgardians, at least), the “god” races like the Asgardians and Olympians were extra-dimensional aliens who were substantially more powerful, and much longer-lived, than the humans of Earth, and thus became worshiped as gods on Earth. Even a “normal” Asgardian (i.e., not one of the big-name characters, but a “civilian”) is effectively a superhuman, with superior strength, speed, and lifespan compared to a human.
I don’t think they are erasing all other multiverses. Just the ones that aren’t supposed to exist. For instance the Universe that Loki came from was supposed to exist but he wasn’t supposed to get the Tesseract. The universe that Captain America lived to old age I presume was also supposed to exist.
to come. 
