While it was being written, Loki contained quite a lot of Loki variants. Michael Waldron, head writer on the Marvel Cinematic Universe Disney Plus series, says the list in the writers room just kept growing.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Waldron was asked about how many were conceived during the season. “Hundreds. So many different Lokis,” Waldron explained. “There was one Loki, actually maybe it was a version of Mobius that took off his glasses, and he just had really tiny eagle eyes, like he could see everything. There was stuff like that all over the white board.” Tom Kauffman, another Rick and Morty writer who worked on the first three seasons, wrote ‘Journey Into Mystery’, where we meet all the variants, and Waldron says his first draft was “bananas”.
In Loki, we ultimately only get a few choice variations on Tom Hiddleston’s regular God of Mischief. There’s Classic Loki, modelled after his early years in the comics, Kid Loki, Boastful Loki, Alligator Loki, and Presidential Loki. Some discussion has flared up about whether Alligator Loki is actually another version of the trickster, or just a big lizard that got unlucky. Waldron’s take? “That’s the great debate. Let it rage.”
Loki and its variants kicked Marvel Phase 4 into high gear by essentially activating the multiverse. During the Loki ending, Kang the Conqueror is introduced, and we have an infinite number of branching timelines. This is going to reverberate throughout the franchise, most notably in Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
At the end of Loki, we got a confirmation of season two. It’s the first of the Disney Plus miniseries to do so, after WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Marvel What If…? is next, starting this month, and Hawkeye starts in November.
Nothing on when we can potentially expect to see Loki return, but here’s the best sci-fi series for more strange adventures.