Loki Season 2: Ke Huy Quan’s Ouroboros explained

❘ Published: 2023-11-09T10:30:45

Disney+

OB, played by Ke Huy Quan, is one of the best characters to be introduced in Loki Season 2 – so, here’s a breakdown of who Ouroborus is and what you should know.

The second season doesn’t waste any time: after Sylvie booted Loki back to the TVA and killed He Who Remains, the God of Mischief is now caught in a vicious cycle of “time-slipping”, constantly being ripped through the past, present, and future.

While he’s pursued by Mobius and co. at first, he eventually makes his way back to the TVA he knows, where he warns of “more malevolence and violence” if they don’t find a way to stabilize the Sacred Timeline.

First, Mobius wants to fix Loki’s time-slipping issue – so, he takes him to see Ke Huy Quan’s repairman, Ouroboros.

Ke Huy Quan’s Ouroboros in Loki Season 2 explained

Ouroboros, played by Ke Huy Quan, is the head of repairs and advancement at the TVA. He’s been working there for hundreds of years.

When Loki and Mobius first arrive at R&A, he reveals he hasn’t had any visitors for 400 years. He spends all of his time tinkering with broken things. “The work orders really pile up if I take a break, so I just keep at it,” he says.

He’s also the author of the TVA guidebook every employee is given when they start working there – aka, after they were abducted and had their brain wiped by He Who Remains.

Quan is best known for his young performances in The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but he also won an Oscar for his turn in Everything Everywhere All at Once – which attracted the eye of Kevin Feige.

“One day my agent told me, ‘Kevin Feige is going to give you a call from Marvel Studios’, and he told me between a certain time, between 5 and 7, and I was so nervous but at the same time I was also very, very excited,” he told Marvel.

“In the beginning I was quite nervous because it’s such a well-written character and I wanted to do it justice. I had a lot of creative meetings with our producers and with our directors. I would sit down, and I would ask them all these kinds of questions because I wanted to give justice to this wonderfully created character by our writer and producer.”

Why is he called Ouroboros?

While Ouroboros is an original character created for Loki, there are some clues in the comics and wider mythology about his name.

There’s the Oculus Oroboros, a conduit for elemental magic introduced in Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #62 in 1993. Its name stems from the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, said to represent the cycle of life, death, and rebirth – this seems to be the likeliest reasoning for his name, as OB is critical to the function of everything in the TVA, through eons of lives, deaths, and timelines being pruned and spawned.

“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,” executive producer Kevin Wright told EW.

If you look deeper, there are other connections, but none of them appear to be related: in Silver Surfer Vol 7 #11 in 2015, he meets Admiral Ouroboros after finding himself stuck in a time loop, and there’s also an organization named Ouroboros in Marvel’s Contest of Champions.

There’s also a compelling theory about OB that could explain his name in the context of Season 2’s TVA arc – and it could be rather shocking by the time the finale rolls around.

Loki Season 2 Episodes 1-5 are now streaming on Disney Plus, which you can sign up for here. You can check out our other coverage below:

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