Marvel Studios' Loki introduced some bizarre characters and concepts to the MCU, even by the standards set by the company's previous films and shows. However, head writer Michael Waldron recently revealed that he had an idea for a key scene involving Sophia Di Martino's Sylvie that provided to be too weird even for Kevin Feige.
The first two episodes of Loki largely centered on the God of Mischief's reluctant effort to help the Time Variance Authority track down a more lethal variant of himself. While the identity of the Variant remained a mystery for some time, the conclusion of the second episode revealed that the mysterious killer was a female version of Loki named Sylvie.
The third episode of Loki opened with Sylvie using her abilities to project an emulated memory into the mind of the captive Hunter C-20, one of the many TVA agents who along with Loki managed to track the Variant down to 2050 Alabama. In the final version of the episode, Sylvie uses a repressed memory of Hunter C-20's to place both of them in a restaurant, where C-20 believes she's simply dining with a friend. Sylvie uses her ability to extract information about the TVA from Hunter C-20 without too much hassle, but Waldron told The Ringer-Verse pocast that he originally wrote the scene to include defenses the TVA had in place to prevent the infiltration of its agents' minds. "That actually turned into kind of a fight sequence where the TVA had defenses in place. So there are people in the memory, and the beach bar actually turned on Sylvie and were attacking her, and it got crazier and crazier," Waldron explained, "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."
Of course, the sequence ended up being toned down significantly by the time the episode of Loki debuted on Disney Plus. The reason for dialing back the scene was evidently because Feige felt it just might set the new bar for being too bizarre. However, it appears the concept resonated with Feige, as Waldron noted that the Marvel Studios boss often references the idea to him.
While it seems odd for Feige to shy away from the idea of an armed armadillo when the series included an Alligator Loki, perhaps the issue wasn't about the concept itself but more its proposed placement. While Alligator Loki makes as much sense as it can in a realm where multiple God of Mischief variants were banished, a laser-totting armadillo in a scene about Sylvie trying to extract key information about the TVA seems more out of place.
However, with Loki season 2 confirmed by Disney Plus, Feige may be open to such an outlandish concept now that fans have shown they approve of the many oddities introduced in the series. Of course, with Kang the Conqueror set to appear in the second season of the show, Loki and Sylvie probably have their hands full without deadly armadillos.
Loki season 1 is now available on Disney Plus.
Source: The Ringer-Verse