Page 1 of 3
In the original Marvel comics, every single agent working for the Time Variance Authority was drawn to look exactly like real-life Marvel writer and editor Mark Gruenwald. It was a cheeky in-joke, because Gruenwald's actual day job was keeping Marvel's endless timelines consistent, which is basically what the TVA does in the show.
Owen Wilson let slip in an interview that he'd grown a moustache for playing Mobius, and later that day he got a text from an unknown number that just said "Strike 1." He reckons it might have been Kevin Feige himself on a burner phone, and after that he was a lot more careful about what he said in press.
When Loki turns up in the Gobi Desert right at the start of the show, the shot is staged to echo Tony Stark's landing after escaping the Ten Rings in the very first Iron Man film. It quietly puts Loki in that same "I just survived something huge" headspace Tony was in back in 2008.
In the Loki variant lair during "Journey Into Mystery," there's an arcade cabinet in the background for a game called Polybius. In the real world Polybius is a famous urban legend about a supposedly mind-warping arcade machine that never actually existed, which fits a room full of unstable alternate Lokis pretty well.
One of the extra Loki variants hanging around in the underground vault is a dead ringer for the version of the character from the 2016 comic run "Vote Loki," right down to the look. Easy to miss him among the crowd of horned, sunglasses-wearing alternates.
Just before Loki and the variants head into the vault, there's a small toy helicopter sitting around with "Thanos" written on the side. It's modelled on a helicopter Thanos piloted in a 1979 Spidey Super Stories comic, a simplified Spider-Man tie-in most people have genuinely never heard of.
