IN THE DARK REVIEWS

Between the Oct. 5 premieres of the second seasons of "Loki" on Disney+ and "Quantum Leap" on Peacock, plus the Oct. 6 premiere of "Totally Killer" on Amazon Prime Video, it was a banner weekend for time-travel capers on streaming media.

Before you dive into "Loki" Season 2, it's best to refresh yourself on Season 1, in which the Norse god Thor's trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) - or rather, an alternate timeline variant of Loki who didn't die fighting Thanos - was recruited by the absurdly powerful Time Variance Authority to track down Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), another alternate timeline variant of Loki, except she'd been born an equally rebellious woman.

Loki and Sylvie discovered the TVA was secretly being run by "He Who Remains" (Jonathan Majors), who was an alternate timeline variant of the 31st-century scientist who discovered parallel universes, and whose more villainous selves, known as "Kang the Conqueror," seek to wage war with each other for control over the multiverse.

"Loki"

Season 2 tasks Loki with convincing the TVA of what he's learned, so he and his recently gained friend, strait-laced TVA agent Moebius (Owen Wilson), can stop Kang and find Sylvie again, all while Loki is "time-slipping" between the past and present within the TVA, which shouldn't be possible. The TVA ostensibly exists outside of time.

In the words of Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet in Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs," everybody got that?

As with Season 1, the humor of "Loki" leans heavily on a Douglas Adams-flavored straight-faced ridiculousness, while its design resembles a mashup of Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian sci-fi film "Brazil" and a Soviet Union-produced version of AMC's "Mad Men."

A welcome addition to "Loki" Season 2 is Academy Award-winning actor Ke Huy Quan as TVA technician Ouroboros, nicknamed "O.B.," whose baffled but chipper optimism recalls his earlier role as likable child prodigy "Data" in 1985's "The Goonies."

I have no idea where this ride is heading, but it's one of the few frontiers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that doesn't seem to have succumbed to "superhero fatigue" yet, so in spite of a post-credits scene featuring the most egregious McDonald's product placement this side of Paul Rudd's beloved "Mac and Me," I'm strapped in and ready to go.

"Quantum Leap"

The second season of the "Quantum Leap" sequel series - the original series ran five seasons on NBC from 1989 to 1993 - opens with an action adventure that dispenses with our hero's time-travel mechanisms, until the shocking cliffhanger revelation of its final few seconds (no spoilers).

Without the guidance of his hologram fiancée Addison (Caitlin Bassett), or any of the rest of his Team Quantum Leap support crew in the future, polymath Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee) has to rely on his wits, his instincts and his sense of what's right as he and an outfit of misfit U.S. Air Force personnel conduct a covert Cold War operation that goes south, stranding them in the remote outskirts of Russia.

When it's effectively divorced from its time-travel premise, "Quantum Leap" is revealed as effectively running off the same storytelling engine as "The Pretender" - a nifty little chase serial in the style of "The Fugitive" that ran for four seasons on NBC from 1996 to 2000. That serial required a mentally gifted jack-of-all-trades to wander blindly into potentially hazardous circumstances, then bluff his way through those scenarios by pretending to be a subject-matter expert.

It's an inherently appealing setup, because while we're obviously not as bright nor as skilled as our protagonist, we can sympathize when he frantically scrambles to recall obscure but hopefully useful bits of information that might pertain to whatever crisis he's facing. I was there for Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett back in the day, and I'm here for fellow everyman hero Ben Song now, although I'd love it if Ben could finally bring Sam home.

"Totally Killer"

Which brings us to Blumhouse's latest high-concept, tongue-in-cheek thriller, "Totally Killer," which weaponizes the genre-savvy talents of veteran comedic actors ranging from Julie Bowen and Lochlyn Munro to Randall Park, who's under-used but nails every scene he's in.

More than three decades after a string of slasher murders during the late 1980s, the killer appears to have resumed his streak by targeting the now-middle-age mom who knew the original victims. It's up to her teenage daughter Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) to try and fix things after Jamie accidentally travels back in time, arriving just before the first of the serial slayings.

Blumhouse is occasionally clever enough to get away with its attention-seeking movies' moderately ambitious conceits, and while it always goes for the most broad and obvious punchlines, when the indie production company is at its best, those cheap shots actually score fairly consistently.

Yes, we're treated to all the expected jokes about how toxic and insensitive the 1980s would seem to today's youths, and how negligent schools were in protecting their students' safety and confidentiality, but Shipka's deft performance as Jamie is a big reason why "Totally Killer" doesn't come across as a crotchety screed against "snowflake" kids.

From "Mad Men" through "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" on Netflix, Shipka has developed a self-aware, naturalistic range as an actress that lends her character's metafictional commentary a dramatic heft beyond mere navel-gazing snark at the Halloween horror subgenre's expense, even when the film's plot mechanisms descend into cartoonish crudity.

"Totally Killer" borrows liberally from "Back to the Future," but rather than asking what it would be like to discover your parents were the nerdy George McFly or the sexually aggressive Lorraine Baines, "Totally Killer" confronts Jamie with learning her overly doting mom having been a Biff Tannen-level sociopathic bully to her less-popular peers.

And yes, like "Back to the Future," Jamie's attempts to fix the past yield an amusingly revised shared history for all the characters involved.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]