Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Loki, Season 1, Episode 2, "The Variant."
Hi! My name's Greg, and my greatest fear is the impending climate change-fueled end of the world.
Climate change/global warming is not a new cultural conversation, but thanks to folks like Greta Thunberg, and to some truly apocalyptic reporting disseminated quite commonly, the conversation is louder than ever. As such, examinations of our earth's disastrously rising temperatures pop up in prestigious, critic-friendly works of art like Bo Burnham's Inside, The 1975's Notes on a Conditional Form (featuring Thunberg), and Paul Schrader's First Reformed.
I expect these pieces of "high art" to tackle this heavy issue. I can even hang with them, ignoring "that funny feeling" in the back of my throat and top of my heart to engage with "what the piece is saying" more intellectually. When I start to freak out, when this ever-present scab gets ripped open to bleed, is when this issue shows up casually in pieces of mass, popcorn-friendly entertainment. Like, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like, say, in Episode 2 of their new television series Loki.
To an extent, Loki bringing up something like climate change should not surprise me. The two previous Disney+ MCU shows, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, were more than willing to dive into deep issues beyond any requisite thrills or lore-setting. Heck, Episode 1 of Loki itself was an existential dive into a human's capacity to shut down when faced with the fact of death.
The specificity of climate change in Loki does surprise me, though. Partially because so many of Disney's markets, from the USA to China, are so directly responsible for the worsening of climate change (and we've seen how eager Disney is to erase any fact of life to make it more lucratively palatable for its markets). Partially because Loki's previous exploration of death was still filtered through a character, rather than through its viewers.
But when it arrives in Episode 2, it arrives wholly. It arrives ready to state, as a fact, that we human beings will be devastated by many climate disasters to come. And most provocatively, it arrives with a blunt sense of humor, a pointed sense of satire, and a grimly prescient foresight as to how we human beings will deal with it all.
Apocalypses, plural, are inevitabilities in working for the TVA, in examining the various timelines of existence. It's not "will the world end," it's "which end of the world are you talking about?" So when Loki (Tom Hiddleston) poses a theory to Agent Morbius (Owen Wilson) that the variant Loki they're looking for would be hiding in an apocalypse, they head to Pompeii right before Mount Vesuvius erupted and killed all the city's inhabitants. This is a real piece of human history, but one so removed from our everyday life, so abstracted as to have been the subject of a Paul W.S. Anderson disaster film, that we can swallow it being used as the springboard for entertainment somewhat easily. Even when Loki starts dancing at the onset of the eruption, shouting gleefully terrifying bursts of existentialism like, "Enjoy your last meal while you can! Nothing matters! Nothing has any consequence! Dance while you still can!", a sense of intellectual remove occurs. "I can enjoy this as being unusual," we think, "because I am so removed from anything like this happening."
This disconnect does not happen when Loki looks toward future apocalypses, despite them technically being theoretical, speculative apocalypses. As I write this in the year 2021, human history has already suffered through numerous climate disasters; it feels as though every summer in California, my state of residence, is marked by a literal city being burned to the ground. When will mine be next? Loki tells me, with the emotional sensitivity of a trickster god ruffling quickly through files, it'll certainly be within my lifetime. As he tries to find a clue for where Variant Loki could be, he mentions quickly, thoughtlessly, that "it’s not the climate disaster of 2048 or the tsunami of 2051. The extinction of the swallow, is that a thing?" Mobius responds that, like the endangering and extinction of many of our needed animals, it is very much a thing, and "it completely ruined the ecosystem." Even for Mobius, who sorts through these kinds of files and events every day, this is a lot to process at once. "God, it’s just one damn thing after another, isn’t it? Cyclone, famine, volcanoes, flood." Mobius is basically listing the things that have happened and will keep happening to us as a direct result of climate change. If it's a lot to process for a fictional time bureaucrat, how are we people stuck in actual human existence supposed to process it, especially when our escapist pieces of pop culture are stuck on it, too?
Eventually, Loki and Mobius find their apocalypse: A hurricane hitting Alabama in 2050. When Loki, Mobius, and a crew of TVA field agents actually travel to this disaster, the setting feels drawn by Mike Judge taking no prisoners; a gut-punch of exacting satire on the corruption of American cities by casual capitalism, and how we will use those imprisoning forces to deal with the very climate change caused by them. "Haven Hills, Alabama," says Morbius. "Corporate town owned by Roxxcart until it’s wiped out by a hurricane." With just one line, Loki nails the impedance of corporations on small towns, and predicts with startling believability how they will end, too. Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) further explains the city's backstory by explaining how they, and we, will deal with their disaster: "Roxxcart is a vast superstore common to the era. It consists of a series of sprawling sections, including a warehouse. This warehouse is being used by civilians as a shelter trying to ride out the storm. Remember, this is a class 10 apocalypse." If we didn't believe her then, the first shot of Haven Hills will force us to: A town sign, painting a bygone era of prosperity and loveliness, smashed to pieces by debris; a resulting tracking shot revealing an Alabama battered with rain, flooded beyond comprehension, and completely under siege. The shot looks an awful lot like any piece of news coverage during any recent hurricane.
Even during a class 10 apocalypse, people will visit this vast, common superstore not just as a kind of physical sanctuary, but for short-term emotional comfort, too. When Loki and Hunter B-15 happen upon a shopper (Lucius Baston) seemingly acting casual during this devastating storm, they ask him what he's doing. "Shopping for plants," is his response. "In this storm?" presses Loki. "It's a hurricane sale," responds the shopper, quizzically. "Azaleas are half off."
This brief interaction stabbed me in my gut. I laughed bitterly at its authenticity. It's a quick piece of satire that nails corporate responses to such pieces of devastation — why not just buy more? — and a dispiriting piece of satire that nails many human responses to such placating efforts of consumerism — sure, I will buy more. During one of those aforementioned California fires, I absolutely resorted to impulse purchases to comfort myself; tracking this cause-and-effect with the explicitness of language and the cravenness of our corporate feeders is only our next logical step. In this quick piece of satire — communicated by a shopper who's soon revealed to be the Variant Loki, proving that even a trickster god understands capitalism enough to thoroughly, scarily dunk on it — Loki Episode 2 has aligned itself with pioneering feats of genre cinema like Dawn of the Dead or They Live. It has stated we will take comfort over death, most likely at the same time, even if that comforter is what's killing us.
Phew! How are you feeling? Bad? Yeah, me too. What the heck do we do now? Do we accept that, as Loki opines, "if everything and everyone around you is destined for imminent destruction, then nothing that I say or do will matter"? Do we enjoy our last meals, ride out the storm until we can't, innoculate ourselves with guilt-ridden pleasures, and say, "I give up"?
Well, no. And I don't think Loki wants us to, either, even as it presents all of this so factually.
If we are breathing, we can change. On a second-to-second level, this is true for you and me and everyone else, no matter what alarmist, "definitive" article you read on your daily doomscroll. Change can happen even in the fictional world of Loki, with stifling assurances that every possible decision on every possible timeline has been calcified, with every single variance quickly punished and dealt with. The fact that variances can happen is proof positive that change exists in this world, and that it will come summarily for its title character, and perhaps have wide-reaching impact on how the TVA views everything else. Episode 1 saw Loki examining his life and death. It saw him not liking what he saw. And as Mobius guesses, he will likely mess with that until he does. "Maybe he wants to mix it up," he says to his superior Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). "Sometimes you get tired of playing the same part. Is that possible? Can he change?" This answer, particularly for an earth that so many wish to define as being hellbound, simply needs to be "Yes."
How can we shift our brains to a "yes"? How can we affect this change? And how can we avoid sliding into a kind of despair, no matter how critically friendly that despair can be when filtered into art or a Twitter feed? How do we stay proactive?
Well, talking about it in pieces of popcorn entertainment like Loki helps. And talking about it in the tones and styles more widely accepted as "pieces of popcorn entertainment," like the zippy-but-deadpan sense of humor rollicking throughout Loki, helps it seem like a more palatable, engageable issue. "Anything that’s human is mentionable," says Fred Rogers, "and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable." Climate change is certainly "human," in that its most devastating effects are human-caused. But humans can cause all kinds of things, including changes in a more positive direction. By mentioning such efforts, both good and bad, in an episode of Loki, we are forced to manage it, forced to see both timelines, and forced to decide ourselves.
In summation, as Mobius puts it, "most things in history are kinda dumb and everything gets ruined eventually." That doesn't stop him from wanting a brighter future, which for him, is symbolized by his love of the jet-ski. It's a silly thing to love, especially in the face of such higher-stakes, existence-threatening issues. But Mobius loves it all the same. And when asked why, he responds simply: "Helps remind me of what we’re fighting for."
Change is possible, through the motivation of joy, of your favorite popcorn TV shows, of anything you can grab your hands on. It just has to be.
New episodes of Loki premiere Wednesdays on Disney+.
