Loki Season 2, Episode 2 Clues and Easter Eggs - 7 Things To Know From "Breaking Brad"

Loki Season 2, Episode 2 Clues and Easter Eggs - 7 Things To Know From "Breaking Brad" https://ift.tt/7ovq8mI

This week on Loki, the trickster god goes to the movies, finally meets back up with his other self, and shows Mobius that McDonald's is a high-quality restaurant that serves great food. The product placement is strong with this one.

Warning: The rest of this article is full of spoilers for Loki Season 2, Episode 2.

As this episode begins, Mobius and Loki have traveled to London 1977 in search of Hunter X-05, who has gone rogue in between episodes and apparently knows where Sylvie is. X-05 has apparently decided to adopt a life on Earth as a movie star--he's now Brade Wolfe, star of the movie Zaniac (more on that shortly).

Loki and Mobius pull X-05 out of the timeline and back to the Time Variance Authority HQ, where they do a little bit of interrogation involving putting X-05 in a box that gets progressively smaller until it threatens to crush him. X-05 gives up Sylvie in Oklahoma--it isn't explained why he knows where she is, but his intel is correct.

They find Sylvie in Oklahoma in 1982 at her McDonald's, but she's not interested in leaving. Her life is nice and boring here, and she likes it that way. But X-05, who Loki and Mobius brought along, is getting antsy--he says General Dox, his boss at the TVA played by Kate Dickie, is going to prune this and every other fresh timeline that has popped up since He Who Remains died.

So Loki, Sylvie and Mobius all go after Dox, and they manage to defeat her people and capture her, but they're too late. According to the timeline graph, all the branched timelines have been deleted.

It's hard to understand what this all means at this point, since the ending of this episode is a cliffhanger--we're not meant to get it just yet. But we can take a look at the Easter eggs and hints from this week's episode and see what we might be able to glean from them. If you missed our rundown of last week's season 2 premiere, you can check it out right here.

1. Zaniac movie

Hunter X-05 becomes a celebrity named Brad Wolfe to star in a movie called Zaniac, which is a nod to an obscure Marvel villain who popped up during a Thor storyline in the comics in the early 1980s. In that storyline, Zaniac was actually a swarm of demonic parasites from the Dark Dimension--that's where the big bad from the first Doctor Strange movie was from--who possessed the movie star Brad Wolfe. The kicker is that Wolfe was playing a slasher villain named Zaniac when it happened, and that's where the parasite swarm got its silly name.

2. "Mobius, you were clearly ahead of me"

One of the new TVA locations in Loki Season 2 is the one curved hallway lined with filing cabinets that Loki and Mobius have to walk down to get anywhere in the underbelly of the facility where Ouroboros hangs out. So there are many scenes in which Mobius and Loki walk down this hallway while they deliver exposition or otherwise talk about what's going on. One time in this episode, though, that hallway takes them someplace new: a pie automat.

Mobius, exasperated, claims he was following Loki, which isn't true. "Mobius, you were clearly ahead of me," Loki retorts. This whole thing feels like a meta joke about the endless curved hallway, the nature of time travel, and generally all the weird nonlinear aspects of this series. And likely of Mobius, himself, since a Mobius strip is an endless curve that folds back on itself--the hallway is Mobius, and whoever he's with is always the real driver of the action.

3.Automat

In any case, the place they end up during this joke is a place called an automat: an old-timey self-serve restaurant that went out of style in America with the rise of modern fast food joints in the '70s and '80s. This one only has pie, but in real life, an automat would usually have a variety of options.

4. Loki jokingly refers to the Battle of New York from the first Avengers movie

Loki at one point during this scene makes a flippant reference to "that time I held the whole of New York City hostage with an alien army?" And since for this Loki, that happened at the beginning of this series, it made me wonder: how much subjective time has passed for him since he killed all those people on Earth? Weeks? Months? Probably not very long. It's a reminder of how Marvel had to shortcut this version of the character for this show--he didn't have years to evolve like the one who died in Infinity War.

5. Loki cranked this torture machine on like a lawnmower

Just before Loki puts X-05 inside the magic shrinking box, he does a dramatic show of starting the thing up, but the mechanism for turning this thing on is pretty hilarious: He has to repeatedly pull a cord to crank the thing on, like it's a crappy little gas lawn mower. Another delightful little analog quirk of this series.

6. Product placement

Loki, Mobius, and Sylvie spend a LOT of time at McDonald's in this episode, and Mobius makes a number of overly complimentary comments about the place, even going so far as to declare to X-05: "I thought you were setting us up for an ambush. But, hell, you were just setting us up for a great meal!"

Now, this definitely feels, on some level, like product placement for McDonald's, but the praise for the cheap food is a bit over the top, leading me to suspect that the writing staff on Loki tried to have some meta fun with it--I bet they added the extra gusto themselves as a joke.

7. Multiverse deleted?

While Loki and pals catch General Dox, they fail to stop her from deleting all the branch timelines. What does that mean, though? Did something important just get removed from existence, like Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man? Will there be any ramifications to this at all? Or is the destruction of these timelines and the deaths of everyone in them, as Hunter B-15 describes it, really just an intangible event that takes place on a graphic?

Also, Sylvie goes back to Oklahoma at the end of the episode, despite that being labeled a branched timeline both earlier in this episode and last week--that seems important. Was the sacred timeline one of the ones that were deleted?