You never know when a Marvel or even Star Wars TV show is going to spring a post-credits scene on you these days, and Loki’s season 2 premiere episode is no different.
What’s fun about this particular scene is the hat tip it makes to a much-beloved era of Thor comics, in a time when Asgard was very different than the way it’s depicted in the MCU. So here’s the comics lowdown on Loki’s new credits scene, with confirmation from Loki executive producer Kevin Wright.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Loki season 2, episode 1.]
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In the quick scene, we are reintroduced to Sylvie, the rogue Loki variant whom so much of Loki season 1 revolved around. Since killing He Who Remains at the end of last season, she’s successfully made her escape. She steps out of a time door in — as the chyron tells us — Broxton, Oklahoma. Then she walks into a McDonald’s and, with an air of satisfaction, says she’d like to try everything.
What is Broxton, Oklahoma?
Broxton is a real town in Oklahoma. But in the world of Marvel Comics, it featured largely in Thor stories of the late ’00s and early ’10s. It was a period in which Ragnarok had finally wiped out the Asgardians, and Thor had just fought his way back from the void, only to find the spirits of his people had been embodied in human form with no knowledge of their godly origin.
In his search for all of them, Thor had to set up a home base somewhere, and since he happened to have reentered the mortal plane just outside of Broxton, Oklahoma, he summoned Asgard’s capital city to float above it. From 2007’s Thor #1 until 2014’s Thor: God of Thunder #24, the Asgardians retained a special relationship with Broxton’s citizens, and Asgard remained a floating city above a small town in the American Southwest. (Until an evil billionaire bought the whole town and forced the Asgardians out to make Thor mad.)
The Sylvie of Loki on Disney Plus even has an extra tie to Broxton: Her comic book namesake was a citizen of Broxton (sort of, it’s complicated).
What is Sylvie doing in Broxton?
Well, at the very least, it seems like she wants some McDonald’s.
“It’s mostly a tip of the hat to fans,” Kevin Wright, executive producer on Loki season 2, told Polygon about Broxton, “And just a little bit of a nod to the DNA of [Sylvie].”
“It felt fortuitous, in a sense,” Wright said, “that as we were looking to tell the story of where Sylvie went after leaving the Citadel at the end of time, that she would be really intrigued by a normal life, a small life, something quiet, a town where she could make friends and do [this normal thing]. Would she stay there forever? Who knows? But I think that would be intriguing; [if you were] somebody who grew up in apocalypses, you might go, I want to go see the opposite of that, a quiet, sleepy town. And Broxton is 100% that.”
What more can we expect from Broxton, Oklahoma? Will Sylvie be making a short stay or a long one? For that, we’ll have to keep watching Loki season 2.