Warning: minor SPOILERS for Loki Season 2, Episode 2, titled “Breaking Brad,” are in play. If you haven’t seen this chapter of the God of Mischief’s adventures yet, you’ve been warned.
The mysteries of the Sacred Timeline and its fractured continuum continue to drive Loki Season 2’s main storyline. In just two episodes, we’ve gotten shadow trickery, enhanced interrogations and some serious questions about how time and space are going to survive with so many timelines filtering through the Temporal Loom.
But among all of this large-scale excitement, we’ve also gotten a peek into how Tom Hiddleston’s antihero remembers the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s history, and now I want to hear him tell the whole story, top to bottom. Consider this your last call to bail out if you haven’t used your Disney+ subscription to catch up on Loki.
Still here? Good, because it’s time to discuss why, and how, the adopted prince of Asgard’s storytelling skills should be put to the ultimate test.
How Loki Remembers The Battle Of New York
In a sort of “dark hour of the soul” moment, Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) are decompressing with some pie. Thanks to Hunter X-5, a.k.a. Brad Wolfe (Rafael Casal), being a particularly hard nut to crack in interrogation, our favorite TVA vet has gotten a bit angry and a little less tactical.
Loki has plenty of experience with that very scenario, and fesses up to it by telling a pretty familiar story. Here’s how the MCU’s Trickster God remembers the events of The Avengers:
You know sometimes a rage builds up, and you just gotta…let it out. Do you remember that time I was so angry with my father and my brother, I went down to Earth, and I held the whole of New York City hostage with an alien army? Tried to use the Mind Stone on Tony Stark. It didn’t work, so I threw him off a building. I mean, let me tell you something…wasn’t tactical. I lost it. Sometimes our emotions get the better of us.
So if I’m reading this correctly, Loki is admitting that the events of both Thor and The Avengers were all about his anger at his adopted brother and father. He also thinks he was so angry that he just had to try and claim Earth alongside the Chitauri, causing an estimated $160 billion in damage according to THR. Plus, throwing the late great Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) from Stark Tower merely "wasn’t tactical"?
Honestly, that is a refreshingly different angle on Infinity Saga history. Quite frankly, that’s part of the overriding reasons why Loki should retell the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe; or at least, the parts that he knows about.
Why Loki Should Retell The MCU’s Complete History
Let’s get the obvious benefit out of the way: we’d to hear Tom Hiddleston’s silken voice recounting events in the Marvel movies in order. Judging by his recollection of the Battle of New York, this is quite a huge benefit, as the man does have a fantastic reading voice.
What's even more exciting is the personal spin that would come from this charming, but totally unreliable narrator. Loki’s views on various battles and plot twists in Marvel Studios history excites me the way that some Disney Animation fans wish they could get more Olaf Presents shorts.
In this case though, there’d be way more explosions and the potential for some truth-bending. So maybe in this thought exercise, we need to include someone who’s just as good at telling Marvel stories and could also keep Loki honest. While the obvious partner would be Mobius, there are two other options available if Marvel wants to mix things up a bit.
Loki’s Marvel History Lesson Could Use Luis Or The Watcher
In order to keep Loki honest in his Loki- adjacent retelling of MCU history, there are two potential non-TVA partners that could do just that. For starters, there’s Luis (Michael Peña), the ex-con with a gift for gab and long form storytelling. His gift has been shown off in the Ant-Man movies, and unfortunately, that fan requested pre-Avengers: Endgame recap never did happen.
With Michael Peña's character missing in action since 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, this could be a great in-universe explanation for why he wasn’t present in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Also, you know being at the TVA wouldn’t phase Luis one bit, so he’d be able to keep his cool while helping to spin this web.
However, there’s another observer of the MCU that could keep Loki in check, and it’s none other that The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright). If we want to keep it cosmic, while also strengthening the ties between What If…? and the rest of the Marvel Universe, this would be the tactic to use.
The added bonus would be that we’d get to hear Wright and Tom Hiddleston square off with their impressive voices, as The Watcher fact checks every corner of the Multiverse to prove Loki wrong. Plus, this could be incentive to get a potential Jeffrey Wright live-action performance as his Marvel character.
The Only Hiccup In Having Loki Retell The MCU
Now here’s where the presence of a partner would be the ultimate advantage. The Loki variant we’ve been following only knows his own personal history, right up to his main counterpart's death in Avengers: Infinity War. And yet, this hiccup with having Loki retell MCU history is another reason that this potential Loki series spinoff would be an entertaining watch.
Picture our Tom Hiddleston’s charmingly unreliable narrator learning about how things really happened in real time. Or, the alternative scenario of Loki learning about his timeline and recalling his findings in real time, with some lively embellishments, also works just as well.
It all comes down to who’s running the show and what level of knowledge would best suit the character’s purposes, but I really want to see more of Loki’s glorious purpose through his research into Marvel’s complete history. It doesn’t even need to be an extended series, as a supplemental series of shorts would do just fine.
For the moment, at least on the current timeline we’re inhabiting, we’ll just have to keep tuning into Loki as it drops every Thursday night at 6 PM PT/9 PM ET. There’s sure to be plenty of mystery and intrigue waiting for eager fans in the weeks ahead, and you wouldn't want to miss any big moments.
