‘Loki’: Executive Producer Kevin Wright Teases “Beautiful” Episodes 5 and 6

What's next for the TVA?

This is probably cause for alarm but, uh, the Temporal Loom has overloaded and exploded and now the Time Variance Authority appears to be no more. At the end of Episode 4, “Heart of the TVA” of the second season of Marvel Studios’ Loki, a hard truth hits the titular character — there might not be a way to undo what’s happened. The timelines are in disarray and now that Victor Timely has spaghetti’d away is there anything else that even can be done? This might be the end.

While Loki stands among his friends and co-workers (Mobius, Sylvie, Hunter B-15, Casey, and O.B.) looking out the blast windows at the spiraling timelines, everything cuts to white.

Episode 4 ends with a bang, literally. What now? What’s going to happen? Are the timelines OK? Is Loki OK? There are a lot of questions that need answering heading into the last two episodes of the second season. The creative team knew they needed to raise the bar and do something bigger than The Void and Alioth in Season 1, and as Executive Producer Kevin Wright explains, they “wanted to keep pushing things.”

Wright cites some of the things the team learned finishing off Season 1 and the desire to push the story forward at an accelerated rate. The TVA cutting to white “feels like a thing that would be happening in Episode 6.”

“What we always like to do in all of the scripts, and in all of our storytelling, is that thing you think is going to happen in Episode 6, or could happen in the finale or towards the end, what happens if we move that forward?” He explains. “What if we just accelerate all of the storytelling, hit it early.”

Viewers don’t expect to see the demise of the TVA so quickly and abruptly (and honestly, neither does Loki), but that’s the point. It creates new hurdles and challenges for Loki & Co. to face, with Wright elaborating that this has two effects.

“One, It'll be super shocking that it happened as early as it does. And two, it allows the filmmakers to kind of flex a different part of their brain which goes, OK, I thought that was going to happen later. What happens after that? What do we do now if we've got two episodes going forward? It forces you to think about where we go now and what do we do. It lets it go to really surprising and unexpected places.”

So, wherever you think Loki — and Mobius, Sylvie, Hunter B-15, Casey, and O.B. — is going next, think again.

Wright is excited for viewers to see Episodes 5 and 6, teasing that they’re both “beautiful,” and that’s only possible because the TVA exploded in Episode 4.

“I think that's the beauty of Episodes 5 and 6. If people liked Episode 4, I genuinely think 5 and 6 are maybe the two best episodes of this series. They're beautiful and they're profound. They're deeply moving. And we only get to go there because of that story acceleration.”