Anyone who’s seen the trailer for Loki season 2 knows that Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and Owen Wilson’s Mobius have a new accomplice, a TVA worker known simply as O.B. and played by actor Ke Huy Quan. Here’s what we know about O.B. so far, and spoilers: it’s not a whole lot.
In the trailer, Mobius brings Loki to see O.B. after the god of mischief starts randomly time slipping—teleporting backward and forwards in time randomly and against his will—in hopes that O.B. can help him. Fans are now debating whether O.B. is a completely new character created by the Loki team or if his initials are a hint that he’s really the Marvel Comics character Mr. Ouroboros.
O.B. Is The TVA’s Repair Man
During an interview to promote the upcoming Loki season 2, executive producer Kevin Wright told Entertainment Weekly that O. B.’s job is basically to repair broken TVA equipment and invent new gadgets for the organization to use in their neverending quest to straighten out time.
According to Wright, O.B. works in a department of the TVA known as “Repairs and Advancement” out of a basement office stuffed with “a sprawling mishmash of gadgets and gizmos.” The producer went on to elaborate that every “piece of tech, every computer,” that the TVA employs was either designed by O.B. or else “he fixes it and keeps it running.”
Wright says that Kevin Feige called Quan personally about playing O.B. in Loki after seeing an early screening of Everything Everywhere All At Once and begged him to “please, please do this.” Little did the Marvel Studios exec know Quan is a huge Marvel nerd and had been dreaming about a role in the MCU ever since he’d seen the first Iron Man. The real question is, just what is that role?
Many fans have speculated that O.B. is short for Mr. Ouroboros, an extremely minor Marvel character that has made exactly one appearance in Marvel’s comic book universe. And while that very well may end up being correct—the Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki has already jumped the gun and is already listing Ke Huy Quan’s O.B. under the name Ouroboros despite no official confirmation from Marvel—it kinda, sorta, doesn’t really matter in the long run.
The MCU has a long history of taking character names from the comics to appease fans and then slapping them on completely different characters. For instance, the Mobius from Loki bears only a passing resemblance to the Morbius from the comics.
While they both have mustaches and both work for the TVA, one is a clone created by the TVA to be a perfect bureaucrat obsessed with continuity, while one is Owen Wilson playing a human variant who was kidnapped by the TVA and brainwashed into working for them.
Mr. Ouroboros
In much the same way that the Marvel Comics version of Mr. Ouroboros is a clone of Mr. Paradox, who is himself—like Mobius—a clone created by the TVA from the same genetic stock and bred to be the perfect bureaucrat while Loki‘s B.O. is most assuredly not.
Comic Ouroboros is a judge who, along with a promoted Mobius., presides over cases brought to him by the Justices (the TVA equivalent of the police). Mr. Ouroboros’ job is to either sentence variants to a lifetime of stasis in one of the TVA’s Time Cells or else doom them to complete erasure from existence via the use of the TVA’s Retroactive Cannon or Ret-Can for short.
The Loki version of Ouroboros —if that even turns out to be his real name—is, by contrast, an inventor and tinkerer, as stated above, and doesn’t seem to be at all concerned with the day-to-day running of the TVA, presumably choosing to toil away in his basement workspace instead working on new gadget designs and improving old ones.
Ultimately, it’s most likely that Loki‘s O.B. will end up having the name Ouroboros in order to give him a tenuous connection to the comics, but will end up being his own thing, possibly exhibiting traits similar to other famous Marvel inventors like Reed Richards or Forge but essentially a brand new character…which isn’t exactly a bad thing.
After all, the MCU’s version of Hank Pym is preferable to the abusive, spouse-beating version from the comics. Sometimes, deviating from the source material is a good thing.
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