The following post contains mild spoilers for Loki‘s first season.
Rest assured, YouTube-scouring Loki fans: Your eyes were not deceiving you while watching trailers for the Disney+ series.
Not long after the Marvel Studios project wrapped its first season on Wednesday, fans began puzzling over scenes that appeared briefly in the trailers for Loki but did not take place during the full episodes. A popular theory suggested that the scenes depicted Tom Hiddleston as King Loki — a villainous future version of the Asgardian who appears in Marvel comics — which in turn sparked speculation that Loki‘s recently announced second season has perhaps already been filmed. (One of the missing scenes appears at 1:41 in the full-length Loki trailer.)
But Kate Herron, who directed all six Loki episodes, explains to TVLine that the scenes in question were intended as “memory scenes in Asgard,” which Loki would have watched on the highlight reel of his life during Episode 1. The sequences were filmed, but they ultimately didn’t strike the right tone for the final cut of the episode, she says.
“They tended to lean a bit more into comedy, and the scenes weren’t bad. But when we were putting the edit together, they were quite near where [Loki] sees Frigga [dying],” Herron tells us. “Obviously, we didn’t want to take away from that moment, because it’s his mom dying and it’s very emotional. It’s always tricky. The scenes weren’t necessarily not good, but they weren’t quite sitting right. That’s why there’s sometimes bits that people see that don’t end up in the show.”
Herron also elaborated on her decision to sit out Season 2 of the show, confirming that “I always planned to come in and do this one season,” which required a substantial amount of work on her part.
“For me, there’s no bad feelings,” she says of the departure. “It’s a lot for one director to do six hours, particularly in the Marvel way. We didn’t have the showrunner system. We ran this like a giant film, which I’m forever grateful for and was a massive opportunity for me. But I threw so much at it, and it’s a lot. I’m so proud that I got to work on it. I felt like this was my bit for Loki’s story, and I hope I work with Marvel again in the future.”