Marvel 'Nuked' A Key Loki Season 2 Episode - And The Original Version Sounds Wild
There is a reason why the end of Disney+'s "Loki" feels so satisfying for the MCU. After a decade and a half of Tom Hiddleston's reign as the God of Mischief, we finally experience the slow burn of Loki's character development coming to fruition. The Norse god embraces his humanity and becomes the deity we always knew he could be. This is thanks in part to head writer Eric Martin, who believes in character coming before everything. In a conversation with SCRIPT Magazine, Martin explained the time travel rules are secondary to characters having a fully realized arc. But while Martin's intentions were undoubtedly pure, the studio questioned some of the writer's ideas. The original Season 2, Episode 5, in fact, ended up scrapped. The "Loki" production team had to retool the episode over the weekend, resulting in the heartbreaking sequence where Sylvie listens to a Velvet Underground song as the world falls away.
"What was in my head was quite emotional," Martin acknowledged about the episode that never made it to screen. "But what [the production] did with all of that, with everything slowly creeping, and then finally she sees Lyle, the record store guy, just dissolve in her hands. It worked on such a level that I really thought they elevated that scene beyond what I even had in mind." Martin says Episode 5 turned out how it should have, but the original episode could have been unprecedented.
One Loki episode was too weird for Marvel
Eric Martin held back from specifying the details for the episode that never was. But he explained MCU's thought process that went into giving it the axe. Though the episode was a favorite of many who were involved, Marvel didn't necessarily feel the same way.
"It was just something that the studio wasn't into," Martin noted. "It would have been one of the stranger things that the MCU had ever done. It was a big swing. It was a really big conceptual swing and I think dramatic swing. When that got nuked, it was funny because that was the thing where people would stop me in the hallways like, 'Oh man, I'm so sorry. Like, that was my favorite episode.'"
Despite the setback, there were no hard feelings about the episode's demise. The story that made it to the screen was instrumental in the overarching plot of the season. Though we may never know what the scrapped episode contained, there is no doubt that the actual penultimate episode did its work. The stakes cannot be higher as the meltdown of the Temporal Loom dooms everything but The Sacred Timeline to annihilation. This plot point is the motivation Loki needs to harness his power over time and do what he needs to in the season finale. Season 2 is a fully realized story that needed every component to work to pull it off.