Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, TV | Tagged: disney, Ke Huy Quan, loki, Marvel Studios, sophia di martino, tom hiddleston

Loki S02 Head Writer: COVID Impact, Final Eps, Character Shifts & More

Eric Martin opens up about his promotion to head writer on Disney+'s MCU series Loki, making sense of the chaos in Season 2, and much more.

Eric Martin became the unsung hero of the Disney+ MCU chaotic romp Loki, trusted with the keys of the convertible when showrunner Michael Waldron left to work on the 2022 sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. As it was later revealed, Martin did a lot more work than expected with the pandemic's effect on production. As head writer, Martin's role in season two is to make sense of the fallout with Sylvie's (Sophia Di Martino) assassination of "He Who Remains" (Jonathan Majors) and shifting character motivations. The fallout from "The Heart of the TVA" with the temporal loom's radiation overwhelming the TVA crew along with the recruit and Kang variant, Victor Timely (Majors), is seen in the latest episode, "Science/Fiction."

Loki: Season 1 Production Issues & Transitioning to Season 2

When it came to how Martin got the promotion to head writer, "So when Michael left to go do 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,' he passed off the reins to me for season one, so I was the production writer, and we co-wrote episode six," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "So I finished that one off, and then Covid hit, and I had to rewrite a ton of the season because of all the new realities we were facing. So [the promotion] was somewhere along that process, but I can't even remember when. I should probably write these things down. It would be nice to know the date when my life changed, but Marvel contacted me and said, 'Hey, we're going to do season two, for sure.' We had talked about it for a long time, but it hadn't been a certainty. So they asked me to be the head writer, and it made a lot of sense for me. I had been so deep in everything from the beginning of the season one writer's room all the way through production and everything, so it was just a natural step. Because I'd taken over for production and then rewritten things throughout the pandemic, it felt like I'd already done this job in a smaller way. So it was a comfortable leap."

As far as how much Martin was initially involved in Loki, "I was there for both seasons, heavily. They're such big projects, and you're dealing with a huge production but also a lot of written material. So it's just necessary to be there throughout pre-production and then production," he said. "When asked how much he had to do with setup, 'I actually had to do zero. There was never a conversation like, 'You need to end somebody here. You can do this, you can't do that.' And maybe it's just because we've created a little bit of a sandbox where we are a little bit separate from things. Obviously, we do affect the greater story, but by working in that sandbox, I think we've just had some freedom to tell our story. And maybe it's just that we do stuff that aligns well enough, but there was never a conversation about that."

When it came to the time travel continuity issues that conflict with 2019's Avengers: Endgame, "It's absolutely that, and it shouldn't be possible," Martin explained on how Ke Huy Quan's character provides exposition into Loki's time travel narrative. "[Ouroboros] sees this [time slipping], and it's like, 'We don't actually have time. We don't age. This should not be something that can happen.' And so there are different rules in the TVA itself, and we don't even quite understand what that means yet. It's not that I was trying to not work within the rules we've established; I was just trying to continue to grow them. I really didn't want one scene to be something that broke the paradigm, although it was a scene that came to me and just stuck immediately. So that's very much the scene that we talked about in the room. I definitely was trying to not just stay within the rules we had but also expand them, grow them, and grow out our world of the TVA as a whole, and really ask the question, 'Well, if that's not possible, how is it happening?'"

For more, including Martin talking about Syvlie's alternate life at McDonald's, Rafael Casal's X-5, episode four fall out, Miss Minutes' motives, and season finale tease, you can check out the interview here. The Loki season finale streams Thursday on Disney+.

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