Loki Trailer and More of This Week's News for Nerds

Welcome to this week’s PUNCHLIST, where we round up the biggest news in nerd culture. We highlight the tastiest morsel in some detail and then close you out with a link round-up.

New Loki Trailer from Disney+

Loki – Hints at What’s to Come

Loki looks like its going get all wibbly wobbly timey whimey on us! We saw some time travel in Endgame, but now we learn (if you didn’t already know via the comics) that there is an organization that exists in the Marvel universe solely to monitor such shenanigans: The TVA, or Time Variance Authority. Whatever else may take place during the course of Loki, the presence of the TVA and a couple of its showcased members are likely to play major roles as setup for both confirmed and suspected MCU characters and conflicts.

Morbius M. Morbius, played by Owen Wilson, prosecuted the Fantastic Four – among others – in the comics for time traveling hijinks.
Judge Renslayer, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, has significant ties to Kang the Conqueror who will be portrayed by Johnathan Majors in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
There is also a scene many believe to feature Lady Loki (suspected to be played by Sophia Di Martino), and others think may be Natasha aka Black Widow.

The very presence of this variant Loki (ie he’s not the Loki who we “grew up with” that was killed by Thanos, but another version of himself from one of these alternate timelines before any of his reforms) opens the door wide open for other variants. We seem to catch a glimpse of the President variant of Loki and a King of Asgard variant, as well. And maybe we’ll see other variant but very familiar faces from the MCU as Loki tries to fix what he broke.

Loki premiers on June 11. Maybe they’ll change that logo between now and then. Two of our writers independently described it as “something an overzealous 9th grader would cobble together in a PowerPoint presentation to look cool” and something straight off a “90s era youth ministry book cover.”