Loki writer drops multiverse hints and teases "moving" conclusion

Check out the full interview below but beware – minor Loki episode one spoilers are included.

Hi Michael – I imagine you've been doing quite a lot of these Loki interviews at this stage. You've probably been at this for about three weeks.

Oh yeah, I'm a pro. This is my 10,000th. And I'm very excited.

Well, I'm happy to hit that milestone with you. I feel like this one will be really special, I'm sure all the questions are completely unique stuff you've never been asked before.

I'm just gonna give you all the answers. I've been broken down.

That said, one thing is slightly different now – people have seen the first episode! How does it feel and has it had the reaction you hoped for?

It's humbling. It's an amazing feeling. It makes you reflect on time. Oddly enough, in a show about time travel and the passage of time, you can think back to where you were in your life when a process started. I can picture myself writing the first episode and everything.

So many people come together to work on these things and to make them excellent. And on this show, in particular, in the midst of a pandemic, people were away from their families for long stretches of time, and just worked so hard. And so I feel gratitude.

Read more: Meet the cast of Loki on Disney Plus

Folks seem to really love the first episode. From what I'm seeing – I don't know, that audience score on Rotten Tomatoes could have tanked in the last 10 minutes. But the bot farm that I paid to boost that score seems to have been a good investment so far.

Worth every penny.

Yeah, man. So no, I'm excited! We made the show for the fans and you know, it's like I think Tom would say: it's been their love and connection with this character that’s the reason that we all have this job and this opportunity. So I feel lucky.

The first episode sets quite a lot of things up, introducing the world of the show.. You've said in other interviews that you kind of wanted each episode of Loki to be quite different, very identifiable as the episode where ‘X’ happens – so how different are the episodes coming up and how individual are they?

That was the truth, and my writing staff heard me say that over and over again – that no episode could feel the same.

That's not to say that we're just breaking format entirely. But I really I hope – and this is a lesson I learned from some of my favourite TV shows like the Leftovers, Mad Men, The Sopranos, great television – you can always point to the show, you can say it's that episode.

It’s the Pine Barrens episode of Sopranos. It's the suitcase episode of Mad Men. And I hope folks can do that for each episode of Loki.

On another topic, one of the things that's interesting about Episode one is we learn the Marvel multiverse… doesn’t exist. And we do know that the multiverse – based on the titles of films that you may have written – is going to play a part in the MCU going forward. So might we assume that things are going to feed into that later film from Loki?

You know, it's always good to assume I guess. I guess ‘multiverse’ is in the title of that Doctor Strange movie, which I may or may not have worked on. But there's a lot of story left to be told between here and then. It was certainly our intention for Loki to have a huge impact on the MCU moving forward.

Speaking of that, how much of Loki was set before you joined and how closely did you have to follow an overall Marvel plan?

The big choice that had been made by Marvel was to put Loki in the TVA, that it was going to be a show about Loki running up against the Time Variance Authority. And that was their stroke of genius that then we had to pitch on and craft our show within.

But the charge from Marvel is always just make the show great. Make it as good as it can possibly be, and trust that it will fit into our plans. And that's one of the really exciting things about working over there.

We know that Tom Hiddleston's Loki is a kind of Loki variant in this series and, without giving too much away, episode two kind of touches on the possibility of other variants. Were there any variants that you guys discussed including but you didn't end up using? Or is that a spoiler in itself?

I think that's a spoiler in itself. I think that even the things that we discussed and then didn't use – seeds of those ideas, in ways and otherwise, even the bad ideas get recycled and refashioned into slightly less bad ideas.

OK, back to this Loki – he’s an earlier version, the Avengers villain, before he was partially redeemed. Was it tricky to balance that alongside the character development the “older” Loki had in later films? And is that why he ended up finding out his “true” fate in episode one?

Yeah, we absolutely knew this is a different Loki, an earlier version of the character. We wanted to tell a new story; we didn't want to just do the same arc that that guy went through in Thor: The Dark World, and Ragnarok and then Infinity War.

But at the same time, that stuff's very important, not just to the development of the character, for him to understand, ‘This is how my life was supposed to play out.’ But also just to the fans, because the fans experienced that stuff. That was their Loki – and still is in a lot of cases.

And so we didn't want to invalidate that or just throw it away as if, ‘Well, that stuff never mattered.’ It does matter. That's how his life was meant to play out. Fortunately, the Time Variance Authority is exactly the sort of organisation that would have the ability to show you how your life was supposed to play out.

And that was a day one discovery for us in the writers’ room. We talked about Toy Story when Buzz Lightyear reckons with the fact that he really is just a toy. That moment of Loki realising, ‘Oh my god, the TVA really has been in control all along.’ And I think that's really powerful sequence, and Tom does a great job obviously.

Definitely. One final question before I go – I know you can't talk too much about what's coming up but once the final episode of this series has aired, how do you hope viewers will feel? What's the kind of reaction you guys were going for?

You know, I feel like to answer that would be to spoil it. It would be to give it all away.

Still, I hope that they're moved. And then that they're thrilled and that they feel like it was a ride worth taking.

Loki episode one is streaming now on Disney Plus – for more information see our Loki release schedule guide. To watch, you can sign up to Disney Plus for £7.99 a month or £79.90 a year now.

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