The premiere of the hotly anticipated series Loki arrived bearing a surprisingly comedic tone, juxtaposing the MCU action against absurdist science fiction bureaucracy. This fun new direction seems to have taken inspiration from Douglas Adams' beloved English comedy franchise The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

Initially debuted as a series of radio plays in 1978, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy comprises six novels, a 2005 film, a 1981 television series, and two video games. The dry humor of the franchise sees massive existential concepts boiled down to brilliant gags, as well as characters comically nonchalant in the face of absurd intergalactic chaos.

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Loki sees the titular God of Mischief in a new dimension literally, and a new role in the narrative. This new timeline's Loki escapes his capture after the events of 2012's The Avengers by using the Tesseract. Doing so lands him in the hands of the Time Variance Authority, a previously unheard of quasi-military organization which hunts and eliminates branches from the one true timeline. Loki spends the first episode of the series being forcefully dragged throughout the TVA headquarters, giving fans a ton of new insights into the organization. Loki, perhaps for the first time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the rube of the series, hopelessly lost in a fish out of water situation.

The TVA is a massively powerful organization, capable of traversing and dissolving entire branches of time, armed with technology that can slow or reverse individuals' personal timelines and willing to erase rogue variants in the blink of an eye. Simultaneously, the headquarters is staffed by pedantic drones and comically bound in red tape. This juxtaposition is extremely reminiscent of Douglas Adams' approach to dry comedy about existential themes. The idea of a single organization that governs and maintains the fate of all life by ensuring adherence to the central timeline, with an almost religious zeal towards which events are and are not meant to occur is haunting. The idea that the organization's functions are as dull and workaday as the average office job is absurd humor straight from the Hitchhikers Guide.

Some scenes provide a glimpse into the bizarre rules and regulations which rule over the TVA. As Loki is processed before his trial, he is undressed via laser by a robot with a simplistic frowny face, asked to sign paperwork verifying every word he has ever said, and is run through a machine that guarantees that he is not a robot. That last test sends Loki into a bit of an existential crisis, genuinely questioning his own reality as the possibility that he might, unbeknownst even to himself, be a machine programmed after himself. This moment seems almost out of character for the imperious and arrogant God of Mischief, but his new circumstances have changed him, shifting him into the role of the Arthur Dent-esque new arrival.

The Hitchhiker's Guide franchise centers around Arthur Dent, the last human man left after the destruction of Earth, guided from one crisis to another throughout the galaxy by Ford Prefect, an alien writer contributing to the titular Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. This double act, a wildly uninformed fish out of water following the lead of an experienced straight man who remains calm and confident is very reminiscent of the interplay between Loki and Owen Wilson's Agent Mobius. Fans do not know much about Mobius yet, but he is clearly an experienced agent of the TVA who takes a particular interest in Loki. He is the one who pulls back the curtain to show Loki the scale of the organization, all the while blithely leading him down long hallways, shrugging off questions and death threats in turn. This relationship could develop further in this way, the two play off of each other fantastically, Loki's medieval soliloquys falling upon Mobius' deaf ears as he drags the God along for his own purposes.

Some of the jokes in the series premier have the scale of a Deep Thought style universe-spanning gag, but work only within the context of the MCU. Loki escapes Mobius briefly, demanding access to the Tesseract so he can leave the TVA. The evidence cart which Loki gets access to carries a wide variety of items, including a treasure trove of infinity stones. The employee of the TVA explains that they have so many of the legendary stones that many employees use them as paperweights.

This gag trivializes the MCU's biggest plot motivator, many movies have centered entirely around heroes and villains fighting to gain control of the stones. Taking the instruments used to wipe out half of all life and demonstrating them as ultimately pointless rocks boils down massive events to a point of absurdity, comparable in-universe to a super-computer answering the universal question with a single number.

Loki has a great confluence of tones that blend humor, action and even cosmic dread. Taking inspiration from the beloved works of Douglas Adams to drive the comedy is a brilliant concept for a show like Loki. The time-hopping shenanigans blending fantastical magic, bizarre science fiction, and comical bureaucracy will hopefully continue to surprise and delight fans of the MCUs most mischievous scamp.

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