Loki Season 2 Premiere Easter Eggs - 6 Things You Need to Know From "Ouroboros"

Loki Season 2 Premiere Easter Eggs - 6 Things You Need to Know From "Ouroboros" https://ift.tt/wutxyOX

Season 2 of Loki has finally arrived, and, oddly enough, this series was not referenced in any of the nine movies or nine seasons of TV that have come out in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Season 1. Loki, at least for now, exists in its own bubble separate from everything else in the franchise--the Season 2 premiere does nothing to change that.

Nonetheless, the events of this series are very important and ostensibly provide the foundation for the Multiverse Saga. This premiere episode, though, pretty much stays in the Time Variance Authority's bubble, because they've got some pretty catastrophic stuff to deal with in the immediate aftermath of He Who Remains' death. Let's talk about it.

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of Loki.

Season 1 ended when Loki and Sylvie finally met He Who Remains, the secret boss of the TVA. He goaded Sylvie into killing him, but Loki tried to stop her--and so she kicked him through a time door back to the TVA, and then murdered the old man. Back at TVA, Loki found a big statue of Kang the Conquerer where the TimeKeepers used to be, and his pal Mobius didn't recognize him.

In the Season 2 premiere, we learn that this wasn't what we thought. Loki hadn't arrived in a new, alternate version of the TVA that had come into existence because of what Sylvie did. Instead, he arrived at the same TVA, before he had originally shown up there at the start of the series. And then he disappears, and reappears back in the old TVA with the people who know him.

Before long, though, he disappears again, and pops up in another era of the TVA. This keeps happening--he goes back and forth between where he belongs and some other time period. Ouroboros, a new character who has apparently been keeping everything running for eons with no appreciation from his bosses or any of is co-workers, calls this phenomenon "time-slipping." Ouroboros, or OB, says this shouldn't be possible in the TVA, which exists outside of time and thus has no past or future. But it also is clearly happening, as OB acknowledges. What changed to make this possible? No explanation is given in this episode.

Fortunately, OB is a super-genius, and he knows how to fix Loki. They need to make use of the Temporal Loom, which is a gigantic physical device that controls the flow of time, to lock Loki into his present. But there's a problem: the Loom is breaking down because of all the new timeline branches popping up, so they don't have much time to pull this off.

But they do, right at the buzzer. Loki and the TVA live to fight another day, and we have a pile of Easter eggs and potential teases to mull over until we get another episode next week. Let's dive in.

1. Hunter X-05

Early in the episode, while Mobius, Loki and Hunter B-15 and the others are talking about what to do with all these new timeline branches--whether to get back to pruning or let the timelines roam free--when a new hunter shows up who goes by the designation X-05 (the 0 is silent). Mobius makes a crack about how he doesn't come down to their level very often--a fourth-wall-breaking joke acknowledging the awkwardness of adding a new major character we've never heard of before.

X-05 is an original character here, but the use of X as his letter is interesting. There's never been an X-05 or X-5 in Marvel lore, but there is an X-23, a mutant woman who got the Wolverine treatment, and an X-51, an obscure robot superhero better known as Machine Man. There's no connection that we can perceive between Hunter X-05 and those characters, but the designation is worth keeping in mind for now since it may not be random.

2. Ouroboros

Ke Huy Quan's new infrastructure engineer character is original to this show, but that name is an interesting one beyond just how it serves as more infinity imagery--the words "ouroboros" and "mobius" both refer to the infinity symbol. While there's no character by that name in the comics, there is an organization from the Marvel Contest of Champions, a mobile fighting game. In that game, Ouroboros is a group that rebels against the cosmic bad guys who control a dimension known as Battlerealm.

A mobile would be a random and pretty surprising thing to reference here, and is likely a coincidence because the thematic connection above makes much more sense as inspiration for the name. But there's a bit of a connection to be made: in the game's lore, this Battlerealm is where Battleworld from the Secret Wars comic storyline is. And we have a Battleworld movie coming up in a few years, with Avengers: Secret Wars on the schedule for 2026. Could Ouroboros, who's kind of an extreme super-nerd, be the sort of character who could serve as an opposite to Kang the Conqueror or Doctor Doom or whoever will end up serving as the boss of Battleworld in the movie version? Probably not, since this character isn't from the comics. But never say never.

3. Kang mural

While I said early that the TVA is the same as before, that may not be completely true. There are many things about the TVA in the present that we didn't see before, one of them being an extremely cool mural depicting the multiversal war that He Who Remains told Loki and Sylvie about. What's cool about this mural, though, is it features the comic book depiction of Kang the Conqueror, purple-and-green suit and everything. Was this mural always there? Was He Who Remains actually Kang rather than being a separate, nicer variant? I don't know what it means.

4. Temporal Loom control room

The Loki show loves its retro aesthetics, especially with its brutalist production design, and one of my low-key favorite sets in Season 2 is the Temporal Loom control room, a circular room that basically looks like the control room at the Chernobyl power plant from HBO's docudrama series and also real life--giant window looking out at the Temporal Loom aside, of course.

5.That anti-time bomb suit

In order to save Loki from his time-slipping problem, Mobius has to don a massive suit that looks like an earth space suit had a baby with an Explosive Ordinace Disposal suit, aka a military bomb suit like the ones from The Hurt Locker. The purpose of the suit is to protext him from the "temporal radiation" that surrounds the Loom, and even with all its bulk it can't last very long in those conditions. But that hybrid design that takes its inspiration from real-world looks is really cool.

6. Broxton, Oklahoma

In the season premiere's mid-credits scene, we finally catch up with Sylvie. She's in 1982 in a town called Broxton, Oklahoma, where she visits a McDonald's and expresses a desire to "try everything." Broxton is a real place in our world, though it's so small and rural that it's unincorporated.

But Broxton's real claim to fame is as a site of New Asgard in the Marvel Comics. New Asgard is in Norway in the MCU, though, so using Broxton here is likely just a fun little joke about Sylvie (who is Asgardian, you'll recall) making her own little New Asgard at that McDonald's now that she thinks her life's quest has wrapped up.