During its first season, Disney+'s Loki went literally all over space and time, but arguably the most whimsical and fun moments came in Episode 5, as Tom Hiddleston's God of Mischief met a bunch of his other variants within The Void. The episode was absolutely packed with fun visual references, both to the MCU's past and to oddball real-world situations, and it thankfully unleashed Alligator Loki into an unwitting world. But for everything that showed up on the screen for the episode, there were definitely some fun bits that were snipped out of The Void along the way.
CinemaBlend recently spoke with Loki head writer and executive producer Michael Waldron in the aftermath of Loki's Season 1 finale (and ahead of his new show Heels debuting on Starz), and when I asked about any ideas for The Void that didn't get pruned, he first shared this bonkers self-referential idea that was in the original script. According to Waldron:
Tom Kaufman wrote Episode 5 of the show. Tom's a Rick and Morty writer; he was there from the first season Rick and Morty. He's one of my great friends, and one of the funniest people alive. And his first draft of that script had so much amazing stuff. I think there was, at one point, a Loki Variance Authority, like an LVA with all the different Lokis who were down there.
How amusing would it have been to see the various captured-and-exiled Lokis working together to establish an organization that aped the very one that sent them to The Void in the first place? I so wish we could have seen what the Mobius-Loki would have looked like. I presume something more than just Tom Hiddleston with a mustache, or Owen Wilson with long hair, but it wouldn't NEED to be anything more.
Even if the group hadn't formed a bureaucracy (yet), Loki's fifth episode was indeed populated by an assortment of Loki variants, from Richard E. Grant's Classic Loki to Tom Hiddleston's "Vote Loki" iteration to all of the latter's hench-Lokis. So perhaps it's not so surprising that the smattering of devious villains also played into another excised idea from the original "Journey Into Mystery" script. As Michael Waldron put it:
He'd written a great thing, like an 'I am Spartacus' sort of thing, where Loki goes to talk to Alioth. It's like Loki is going to do the heroic thing, and then all of the other Loki starts standing up trying to do the same thing, and it's just narcissists. Everybody's trying to be the hero, and it just ends up being a disaster. His first draft is one for the ages.
Classic bits never grow old, so long as they're presented in the proper ways, and it would have been a cheeky delight to see Loki's take on what is likely the most-remembered sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 1960 epic Spartacus, with Kirk Douglas in the titular role. Admittedly, it doesn't seem like a large number of Lokis would be so willing to put themselves up for possible sacrifice in such a way, though it's not a stretch to think that situation would have played out in a way where the solidarity is anything but selfless, as it went in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
While I'm not exactly optimistic, I am really hoping Disney and Marvel's merchandising teams will one day release Loki's episodic scripts in book form (not to mention WandaVision's), where fans can possibly find more unused nuggets like this to tide us all over until the next big MCU project. And while I'm just randomly wishing for things, a massive LEGO set of The Void would be superb.
While we probably won't get many of our biggest questions answered ahead of Loki Season 2, at least all six episodes are available to stream at any time on Disney+.
