In AD79, up to 16,000 people were horribly killed by a pyroclastic surge of rock, gas and lava from the erupting Mount Vesuvius. And now, in further bad news for the poor residents of Pompeii, Tom Hiddleston is wandering around their plaster-cast corpses being cringe.
Hiddleston, of Marvel fame, is a historian now. He’s the host of National Geographic’s Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, a new documentary series cut together with dramatic reconstructions, which is also in some ways a secret spin-off for his impish, time-travelling Marvel character Loki. Hiddleston clicks his fingers and rewinds the action throughout, throws computer data into mid-air a la Minority Report or Sherlock Holmes’s mind palace, and halts conversations (“Wait, pause!”) to tell a professor of classics that actually he can speak fluent Latin so can do the translating for him.
