Loki Season 2: Ke Huy Quan's OB Is Just Data From The Goonies (In The Best Ways Possible)
Spoilers for the "Loki" season 2 premiere follow.
When news first dropped that Ke Huy Quan was officially joining the MCU in the second season of "Loki" (check out /FIlm's review), longtime fans of the beloved actor could hardly contain themselves. After bursting back through the gates of Hollywood after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his multi-layered performance in "Everything Everywhere All At Once," the continuation of the Quan-naissance was all but assured.
For a certain generation, Quan will always be immortalized as a certain archeologist's sidekick in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and, perhaps even more revered for his role as the bumbling young inventor Data in Richard Donner's "The Goonies." Along with all the other neighborhood kids from the wrong side of the tracks, Data teamed up with Mikey, Mouth, and Chunk to uncover the pirate treasure hidden by One-Eyed Willie to save their childhood homes. Looking back, it's debatable whether Data's inventions such as the pincers of power chattering teeth and his suction cup belt actually aided them in their quest. But Data was always a loyal friend and a tried-and-true goonie for life.
In "Loki" season 2, Quan joins forces with Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) for a much different kind of team-up with the fate of the known universe hanging in the balance. Playing a quirky cosmic tinkerer named Ouroboros (OB for short), Quan's first appearance in the MCU timeline introduces him as a one-man tech department for the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Undeniably, OB bears a striking resemblance to Data to the point where they could almost be variants of each other. If Data found himself amid the countless gadgets and gizmos inside the Repairs & Advancements department of the TVA, he'd probably be just as infinitely cheerful as OB is when we first meet him.
Quan adds one more character to love on Loki
To drive home the light-hearted connection with Data even further, "Loki" executive producer Kevin Wright described exactly what OB does in the show, telling Entertainment Weekly, "His job is basically every piece of tech, every computer, every thing that is running at the TVA, he either designed it, or he fixes it and keeps it running." That sounds a lot like Data, doesn't it?
As it turns out, OB's help is needed fairly early on, so fans won't have to wait long to see Quan's affable new character. In the season 2 premiere, Loki begins experiencing a rare anomaly causing him to jump in and out of time, sending him hurtling into specific moments from the past, present, and future. The effect looks painful and hilarious at the same time, an observation Mobius points out just before they travel down a dingy elevator to pay a visit to OB in hopes of finding out a way to stop Loki from time slipping. Hilariously, OB recalls that he hasn't seen Mobius for 400 years, also revealing that he never sleeps. He just fixes things. In that moment, Loki blips back to the past allowing him to meet OB again for the first time.
In an ingenious bit of time-splaining exposition, OB tells Loki he must prune himself to remove himself from time which, theoretically, would free him from time slipping. For that to happen, they need a Temporal Aura Extractor (of course!), a clunky device that OB builds in the past making it instantly available to Loki and Mobius in the present. The entire exchange only lasts a few minutes, but Quan already makes OB incredibly endearing, giving the character little eccentricities like repeating himself multiple times just like Data would probably do too as an adult.
Every team needs a nerdy inventor
Fortunately, Quan's high-profile inclusion into the cast of "Loki" season 2 isn't going to just be a minor role that only exists to capitalize on the Oscar-wining actor's big Hollywood comeback after "Everything Everywhere All At Once." OB isn't just left to his own devices (literally) to waste away in the TVA Repairs & Advancements room, he becomes an essential part of the premiere that propels the story forward. Marvel appears confident in giving "Loki" a true second season that leans into episodic storytelling in a big way. Expect Quan and his character OB to be an important part of the season going forward. Or backward, knowing how this series loves to mess with the timeline.
To that end, season 2 makes multiple references to He Who Remains, the all-powerful chaos agent that continues to threaten the harmony of the Sacred Timeline. On top of that grand dilemma, the upcoming story will follow Loki, Mobius, and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) as they travel back to the 1900s to face another nemesis named Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), a powerful industrialist and inventor who will likely also cross paths with Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). It makes perfect sense then for the team to recruit OB as another tech mastermind to help combat whatever nefarious plans Timely and He Who Remains are conjuring up.
There's a pretty big chance that the Temporal Aura Extractor won't be the only thing that OB ends up building to help Loki and the TVA restore balance to the time stream. With a little luck, the gadgets he comes up with won't happen to backfire like Data's inventions tended to do. Since Sylvie winds up ordering everything on the menu at a 1980s McDonald's at the end of the first episode, maybe there's a chance she'll also bring back some collector Goonies glasses if she happens to pop into a Godfather's Pizza in 1985.