Midnight on Oct. 6, the long-awaited first episode of Loki Season 2, dropped on Disney+. Marvel fans have been anxiously anticipating this release since the exciting cliffhanger in July of 2021 — but this episode didn’t quite ease any of our earlier concerns. In fact, it just raised more burning — the most pressing of which is whether Thor will appear in Season 2 of Loki or not. Spoiler alert: Spoilers for Loki Season 2 Episode 1 follow.
In the two years since we’ve seen the God of Mischief, dedicated fans have been itching to see where his adventure will take him next — especially if it takes him back to his brother.
If you need a recap of the series, I’ve got you covered. The Loki series picks up right at the namesake’s prime of villainy: the 2012 attack on New York, where Loki attempts to make himself ruler of Earth. Of course, this particularly embarrassing moment on Loki’s timeline is far from the hero we saw sacrifice himself to Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. His character was still on his journey, growing and learning.
But at the start of Loki, he is still Thor’s jealous adopted brother, burdened with glorious (self-proclaimed) purpose, when the Avengers (from 2023) scrambled a few things on the timeline and allowed the prisoner of war to escape the rubble of the battle in New York.
When Loki is meant to return to Asgard with Thor, initiating the events that take place in Thor: The Dark World, he is arrested by the Time Variance Authority (TVA): the omniscient governance of the “Sacred Timeline” that maintains the flow of time as we know it.
On his adventure through season one, Loki becomes friends with TVA detective, Mobius (Owen Wilson), and develops feelings for a female variant of himself, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). At the end of the season, he travels to the end of time with Sylvie, to find and kill the creator of the TVA, and the person who stole them from their timelines.
Here, the audience gets their first appearance of Kang, or as Loki fans know him — He Who Remains, a strange and “terrifying” man who compressed the multiverse down to a single timeline to prevent multiversal war.
Suddenly Loki’s dilemma becomes much more complicated: do they kill He Who Remains and risk the fate of the multiverse? For Sylvie, the answer hasn’t changed.
At the end of this journey, Loki is a changed man, understanding the error of his selfish and not-so-mischievous ways, while Sylvie represents everything that Loki was, unable to see past her own pain, killing without thinking, and kickstarting the multiverse.
Loki Season 2 picks up right where we left off.
In this second season, we pick up right where we left off: Loki desperately trying to understand what is going on now that Sylvie has killed He Who Remains. But there’s a twist: no one in the TVA remembers him or his time with them.
Loki has returned to a pre-TVA reality, where He Who Remains is the known ruler of the TVA. Soon, Loki finds himself “time slipping” back to a familiar TVA. Over and over, Loki is pulled back and forth between the TVA’s past and present.
Throughout the episode, he and his friends attempt to fix this “time slipping,” unknowing of the chaos transpiring in the rest of the TVA: a full manhunt for Sylvie, the continuing branching of timelines, and of course, where Sylvie has gone.
So, will Thor be in Season 2 of Loki?
Other than a momentary and unclear appearance from her in the TVA, Sylvie has mysteriously disappeared. But don’t worry — Marvel never disappoints with their post-credit scenes.
In this scene, Sylvie appears in Broxton, Oklahoma, where she enters a McDonalds and observes the tranquility surrounding her. Here, there is no TVA, no war, just simple people sitting at a simple fast-food restaurant. Taking it in, Sylvie tells the cashier “I want to try everything,” ready to begin the life that was stolen from her.
This sweet moment means more than just a symbol for Sylvie’s fresh start, though. It is a hidden easter egg laid out for true Marvel fans to catch. In the Marvel Comics, Broxton is not just any small town, it’s home to Asgard after the events of Ragnarok and the death of the Asgardians.
When Asgard rebuilds in our reality for Avengers: Endgame, Thor and Valkyrie relocate the kingdom to a fishing town in Norway. But as Marvel fans well know — nothing in the MCU is a coincidence. In fact, producer Kevin Wright, recently confirmed that a Thor-Loki reunion was always a priority for the network in an interview with Variety.
THOR AND LOKI REUNION?? DONT PLAY WITH ME MR WRIGHT https://t.co/qlzHT9iKg3
— Loki’s Babe 🕰️ (@softyellowpetal) October 3, 2023
“That’s the hope. I think the sun shining on Loki and Thor once again has always been the priority of the story we’re telling,” Wright tells Variety. “But for that meeting to be fulfilling, we have to get Loki to a certain place emotionally. I think that’s been the goal of these two seasons.”
So, Marvel fans, it is not so bold to assume that Sylvie’s arrival in Broxton will trigger the sequence of events that leads to this reunion. Perhaps, just as Loki assured his brother back in 2018, the sun will shine on them again.