‘The Avengers’: ‘Loki’ Director Pulled From 1 Iconic Scene for Episode 4
In The Avengers, Loki fights his brother, Thor, and the rest of the newly formed team. The film influenced many others in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially Avengers: Endgame. Now that Marvel’s brought its characters to the small screen, they’ve kept the Phase 1 illusions going — especially with one Loki scene.
‘Loki’ begins where ‘Avengers: Endgame’ left the character
In Avengers: Endgame, the eponymous heroes traveled through time to collect the Infinity Stones to reverse the effects of Thanos’ snap in Avengers: Infinity War. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers went back to the 2012 Battle of New York, as shown in The Avengers, to get the Space Stone.
Their plan goes awry when Hulk burst through a door, sending the briefcase containing the Tesseract flying, landing open at Loki’s feet. The recently apprehended trickster did exactly as he would have done at the time — grab the Stone and disappear. The TVA captures him at his next locale, kicking off Loki.
A ‘Loki’ Episode 4 scene mirrors one from the ‘The Avengers’
Because of the focus on time travel and the need to explain how the character changes between films, Loki has referenced several other MCU films. In one scene, the God of Mischief sees his mother’s death in Thor: The Dark World, as well as his own demise in Infinity War. But that’s not all.
In Loki Episode 4, titled “The Nexus Event,” the demi-god meets a different kind of end. As he’s about to tell Sylvie (believed to be a Loki from an alternate timeline) how he feels about her, Judge Ravonna Renslayer “prunes” him. In the mid-credits scene, he reappears elsewhere, confronted by three other Lokis.
As one Twitter account noted, the scene looks a lot like one from The Avengers, in which the heroes take down Loki. And that wasn’t an accident. “This was the reference me & [the show’s director of photography Autumn Durald] used for framing,” director Kate Herron tweeted, noting that she “couldn’t resist.”
The scenes don’t just resemble one another visually. Herron also paid tribute to the ironic Avengers moment with the score. “Oh oh and the music as well from [composer Natalie Holt] referenced it too but with a #loki twist on the reveal,” she added.
Another MCU scene referenced in ‘Loki’
The moment in which Loki gets pruned also looks like another from the MCU. Renslayer touches her device to his back as he embraces Sylvie, who’s shocked to see him disappear in front of her eyes. As one Marvel fan account pointed out, this mirrors a scene from another Disney+ series: WandaVision.
After coming to terms with the reality she’s created, Wanda Maximoff says goodbye to her home, her children, and, hardest of all, Vision. They share one last moment in the season 1 finale. Then she touches his face, allowing him and everything else to fade away.
Unlike The Avengers homage, it’s unclear whether or not these two scenes are meant to resemble one another. Loki and WandaVision featured entirely different casts and crews. And they shot around the same time — each starting in late 2019/early 2020 and completing most of the filming before resuming late in 2020.
