Loki showrunner Michael Waldron has revealed several unused plans for scenes in Loki, including detailing the previously-mentioned scenes in which the character had a lot of sex, and a fight scene that would have ended with a laser-mounted armadillo getting punted.
Warning: This story contains some small spoilers for Episodes 1 and 3 of Marvel’s Loki.
Speaking on the Ringer-Verse podcast, Waldron was asked about unused ideas for the time-hopping series, and particularly for details about a scene we had previously learned about in a Loki making-of feature. That feature included a shot of Waldron’s planning whiteboard for the show, which seemed to indicate plans for a scene in which Loki would collect the Infinity Stones and then have quite a lot of sex.
“It’s any writer’s nightmare that their whiteboard is photographed at any time, because it’s just pure chaos written on those things – but there you have it. That [whiteboard plan] was a little eight-beat mini-story that we were exploring,” Waldron explained, “perhaps playing out after Loki escapes from the Time Theater in Episode 1. We were wondering, would it be compelling if he actually escaped the TVA with a handful of Infinity Stones, and went and kind of had all of his dreams come true?”
Waldron expains that the scene would have been a, “Rick & Morty-style montage of Loki with the Infinity Gauntlet – and then at the end it’s just kind of like, ‘What does it matter? The TVA exists, they’re the greatest power.’ Ultimately we were able achieve that much more gracefully just with him looking at the Chrono-Monitor, and I think that was much better.”
A little startlingly, Waldron went on to describe a scene that is even stranger than that aborted plan: “Once upon a time, the opening of Episode 3 – when Sylvie is attempting to infiltrate Hunter C-20’s mind – that actually turned into kind of a fight sequence where the TVA had defences in place. So there’s people in the memory, and the beach bar actually turned on Sylvie and were attacking her, and it got crazier and crazier – and there were little kids attacking her, and then I literally wrote in that an armadillo with a laser mounted on it comes [into] the beach bar and is firing, and Sylvie kicks it like a soccer ball out into the ocean. That was in a script.”
Rather than just finding a more elegant solution, Waldron implies that that scene was toned down for being too bizarre, even for this show: “Kevin [Feige] often references that to me,” Waldron laughed. “He’s like, ‘That might be the bar for [being] too much.'”
Waldron also explained that there were multiple versions of the same major events within episodes, pointing to another major element of Episode 3 as an example, in which Loki accidentally destroys the Tempad that would be able to get he and Sylvie off of a doomed planet.
“There was a fun version once upon a time where the train was raided by bandits – you know, people kind of rebelling, the Proletariat here on this planet. One of them stole the Tempad off of Loki, and we still had the bit where Loki throws the dagger and misses, and one of these bandits away onto a hovercraft, they’re like 100 yards away, and Sylvie’s like, ‘F**k, they got away.’
“And Loki just takes a dagger, and he’s kind of drunk, and he just Tom Bradys it, and it sails, sails, and hits the guy in the back, and Loki’s like ‘Yes!’ We never shot this, but this is how it [was in the script]. And then you just see the hovercraft veer off the side of a canyon and just explode. That would have been fun, just because it was a moment of great triumph for him, followed by, ‘You blew up the Tempad, you asshole.'”
I’m sure you, like me, are mourning the loss of some of the ideas above but, with Loki returning for Season 2, and the first series ushering in a huge shift for the MCU, there’s always the possibility that the next set of episodes will actually be ever odder.
We don’t know when Season 2 will air, but we have a lot of questions that we’re hoping might be answered beforehand. That’s because there’s a huge number of Marvel streaming series and movies still on the slate, some of which are looking pretty weird themselves.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
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