How the Loki writers took inspiration from Rick and Morty

The head writer on Loki is Michael Waldron, who previously served as a writer and producer on the off-the-wall animated sci-fi show Rick and Morty. He told SyFy Wire about how his work on one show influenced the other:

"They’re both big sci-fi shows. Rick and Morty was all about, ‘Alright, introduce a sci-fi concept, make sure the audience can get it, but then shift it to the background, so we can really focus on the emotional story.’ And so, that was very helpful in doing a show about time travel that was gonna have a lot of big sci-fi concepts in it."

Indeed, Loki may be the most experimental of the Marvel Disney+ shows yet, which is saying a lot since we already had WandaVision. Loki is working with a vast bureaucracy called the Time Variance Authority that’s dedicated to preserving the “correct” flow of time. It sounds like the kind of organization that Rick Sanchez would look down on and probably spend 20 minutes destroying at some point.

“They’re all different,” Waldron said of how Loki relates to the Marvel series we’ve already seen. “They’re all great and really cool. I think that WandaVision is just so experimental and is so original. I’m astounded by that concept, the execution of it, and the commitment to it. That’s a show about grief in a lot of ways. Falcon and the Winter Soldier is just a blast of an adventure show that also is about legacy. And our show… maybe we exist somewhere a little more in between the two. I’d say [with] this show, we probably reckon with identity. [That’s] probably our biggest concern.”

Indeed, the plot of Loki involves the titular character hunting down a rogue version of…himself, and who knows how many more Lokis we could see before the series is over? “Identity” is indeed paramount.

How Loki is bringing something new to the MCU

“The most important thing about this show is to do something new,” Waldron continued. “There’s been the movies that exist and we know those. Those movies are great. Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Infinity War, but we’ve gotta do something new and I think because this is TV, there’s the opportunity to just go deeper on the character in the way that only television can. It can be a more in-depth character piece and that’s what our conversations were about and Marvel was as excited about that prospect as I was.”

One of the new things Waldron and his team added was the character of Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson). They didn’t invent him — he’s in the comics — but they did fill out his personality quite a bit. “I wanted to write somebody who would be a great foil for Loki,” Waldron said. “I thought about that and ultimately, he’s somebody who is similar to Loki in some ways and very different in others. I liked that Tom Hanks in Catch Me If You Can energy. He’s a real patient guy, a very cool customer, which is an interesting kind of person to deal with somebody who thrives by getting under your skin the way that Loki does.”

The chemistry between Loki and Mobius may be the best thing about the show so far, and considering how much it has going for it — the wild sci-fi concepts, the “Mad Men meets Blade Runner aesthetic, the introduction of fan-favorite characters like Lady Loki, etc — that’s saying a lot.

All we have to do now is wait for the next episode on Wednesday. “We worked really hard as a writing staff to make each episode feel different from the last,” Waldron said. “To build on the previous episode, but to really…’Ok, now let’s do something that in its own way feels singular.’ And so, yeah — hopefully, it feels like a different, but equally enjoyable experience to watching the first one…if you liked watching the first one.”

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