Loki: What’s hidden in plain sight in episode 5

Loki’s fifth episode gives us an Easter Egg hunt to end all Easter Eggs hunts, along with hints of a possible long-term conspiracy within the MCU.

After the emotional shock that was “The Nexus Event,” there was certainly pressure for the penultimate episode of Loki’s first season to deliver. And did it deliver. We had Loki (Tom Hiddleston) teaming up with other Lokis, and Lokis betraying other Lokis. Mobius (Owen Wilson) was still alive, and ready to tear down the TVA. Loki and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) shared a moment. And via Classic Loki (Richard E. Grant), a fan theory about Loki faking his death in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) got some long overdue recognition.

And if you thought this and other Marvel Disney Plus television programs showed more than enough Easter Eggs before, this episode essentially went, “Oh, you want an Easter Egg hunt? We’ll give you an Easter Egg hunt!” Even the episode title itself, “Journey Into Mystery,” is an Easter Egg referencing the original comic featuring Thor and the title of the Kid Loki (Jack Veal) ongoing series. We’ve got quite a few to cover, along with one or two conspiracy theories with some heavy SPOILERS, so let’s get started.

All that Void wreckage

The central premise of “Journey into Mystery” is that when the TVA prunes a branching timeline, not everything gets erased. Like Variants, what’s left over gets dropped into “The Void,” a world which exists at the End of Time. What this translates into for the screen is a grassy wasteland where anything and everything gets dumped. And from the very first moment we enter into “The Void,” we see a landscape littered with objects, large and small, from all corners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the comics, the real world, and beyond.

Some are self-explanatory, like the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Great Pyramids and Sphinx from Egypt. There’s also a shot of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and was once upon a time, one of the tallest man-made structures on Earth until it was destroyed by three separate earthquakes. And when it comes to the wonders of the Marvel Universe, we see glimpse of an enlarged version of Yellowjacket’s helmet from Ant-Man (2015), Ronan the Accuser’s spaceship from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) , a SHIELD helicarrier, or our good friend Throg whom we briefly touched upon last time.

Other structures and objects, however, were just a bit more bizarre, like the helicopter with Thanos painted on the side of it. Believe it or not, that’s an actual thing from the original comics. In “The Cat and the Cosmic Cube” from Spidey Super Stories #39, the Mad Titan took to the skies in his own personal Thanos-Copter to attack both Spider-Man and Hellcat when the later had possession of said Cosmic Cube, aka the Tesseract. Yes, this story, written for kids in the late 1970s, is pretty weird, which is probably why it doesn’t take place in-continuity.

Another strange object is what appears to be the visage of a three-headed statue wearing a veil. This is an image of one of the most powerful beings in Marvel’s cosmology, the Living Tribunal. His primary task is to maintain order and balance between the different universes throughout the Multiverse, making sure one doesn’t dominate or consume the other. Hopefully, this is just a statue and not the Living Tribunal’s actual head because if it is, that doesn’t bode well for the MCU.

Yet our first panoramic view of Limbo includes a shot of the Avengers Tower, formerly Stark Tower, with the word “Qeng” written on the side. We’ll come back to this as it ties into some other important clues from this episode. But for now, let’s talk a bit about the Loki Variants, specifically…