In the first episode of Loki, the trickster god of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—last seen escaping in a time-travel snafu during Avengers: Endgame—is captured and taken to a mysterious hinterland that exists outside of time and space and resembles nothing so much as a mushroom-colored 1970s airport.
This claustrophobically bureaucratic place is the Time Variance Authority, a nontemporal zone set up to stamp out any time-travel shenanigans that threaten the integrity of the “sacred timeline.” The MCU has sent its heroes and antiheroes hurtling through space; it’s set them up as gladiators on garbage planets; it’s had them absorb the heat of stars and channel the power of the entire universe.
But the show’s unmistakably dystopian, sci-fi aesthetic, in which cityscapes fade into nothingness in infinite shades of brown, suggests that the TVA might be more malign than it seems. There are other allusions to autocracy too: In the scene where Loki resentfully accepts his ticket, framed posters on the walls bear graphic eyes that represent an all-seeing police state, and cheerfully menacing slogans: BEHAVE OR GET YOUR CLOCK CLEANED.
When she was in talks for the job, she presented bosses at Marvel with what amounted to a lengthy PowerPoint presentation on what she thought the show should be: the architecture of the TVA, the show’s music, even the dynamics of Loki’s character arc over the past 10 years.
It’s almost a Vegas-like office city in a sense.” She pulled ideas from Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 absurdist sci-fi about a man trapped in a bureaucratic dystopia; from the 1927 German expressionist drama Metropolis, set in a futuristic megacity; and from Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi neo-noir, Blade Runner.
When Loki tells Agent Mobius that “this place is a nightmare,” Mobius replies, “That’s another department.” The justice system within which Loki is tried is perfunctory and immutable; he stands to either be sentenced to stay forever in this perpetual officescape of retro technology and futuristic torture, or be liquidated for his crimes.
Herron left England when she was hired on Loki in 2019 and flew to Los Angeles then Atlanta, where to her surprise she ended up staying for two years, after the pandemic shut filming down.