“Friends against time, allies to the end.” Spoiler warning for Loki Episode 4, “The Nexus Event.” Wow. When Variant Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is re-arrested and interrogated by the Time Variance Authority for creating a branch from the Sacred Timeline with Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), he reveals that TVA Agent Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) is a brainwashed variant. Footage of the disappeared Hunter C-20 (Sasha Lane) on a TemPad stolen from Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Guga Mbatha-Raw) confirms the trickster God of Mischief is telling the truth, but the realization comes too late: Renslayer orders Mobius pruned, seemingly deleting him from reality in front of Loki — who, moments later, meets the same fate at the end of Renslayer’s baton.
“The relationship between Mobius and Renslayer, it’s the way you might have with your boss. Or when you’re back in school with the principal or someone in a position of authority and having to sort of try to charm them so you’re able to pursue your projects,” Wilson told Marvel.com. “That’s the dynamic between Mobius and Renslayer. She sort of loses patience with Mobius and with another one of his schemes. But, I think, she also sort of enjoys that he’s a little bit of a rascal.”
But “by the end of that relationship,” Wilson added, “it has become something very different.”
No longer Renslayer’s favorite analyst when one of her Minutemen prune Mobius, the back-to-back betrayals are “pretty shocking.”
“It’s a little bit of a hall of mirrors within the whole series, that people aren’t quite who they seem to be,” Wilson said. “In the same way that Loki, when he lands in this bizarre place called the TVA, Mobius will have sort of the same struggles. What is this organization? And is it something that is worthy of his devotion?”
But Mobius might live to one day ride a jet ski: in a post-credits scene, the pruned Variant Loki stirs awake amid the wreckage of a leveled New York City. It’s there that the still-living Loki meets four more variants — Boastful Loki (DeObia Oparei), Kid Loki (Jack Veal), Classic Loki (Richard E. Grant), and a Loki-gator — indicating Mobius was not permanently deleted from reality when pruned, but sent to a sort of virtual trash can of the Multiverse.
New episodes of Marvel’s Loki premiere Wednesdays on Disney+.
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