What do you call a Loki who might not be a Loki at all?

This post discusses the events of Loki’s third episode, “Lamentis.”

This week’s episode of Loki had a lot of running from one place to another in front of a number of colorful backdrops, from purple mountains being hammered by the crumbling debris of a crashing planet to a cyberpunk street market, but there was still time for the show to drop a couple of intriguing reveals. One is that the agents of the Time Variance Authority are apparently not fake people dreamed up by the Time-Keepers, literal office drones who exist for no reason beyond their temporal bureaucracy, but that they are time variants themselves—meaning, somewhere in the “Sacred Timeline,” there might be another version of Owen Wilson’s Mobius or Eugene Cordero’s character who didn’t know what a fish was. But these specific versions were pulled out of the timeline for whatever reason and repurposed as TVA employees. We’ll have to wait and see what that could possibly mean for the future of Loki, but it is, again, intriguing.

The other big reveal is that the other Loki variant introduced at the end of the last episode, Sophia Di Martino’s blonde-haired female Loki (or “Lady Loki”), doesn’t like being called Loki at all and would prefer to be called Sylvie. This wasn’t played as a big reveal, because it’s just a name and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it should’ve set off alarm bells for comic readers… because it might not just be a name and it might mean a whole lot, especially when taken alongside the TV branch of the MCU’s increasingly obvious hints about the Young Avengers (as covered in a Spoiler Space last week).

So who’s Sylvie?

If this show weren’t called Loki and Tom Hiddleston’s Man Loki didn’t insist on referring to Sophia Di Martino’s character as “a Loki,” you would’ve been forgiven for guessing she was an entirely different character altogether. She has the ability to “enchant” people (a word used repeatedly in this episode), she wears green, she has blonde hair, and she goes by the name “Sylvie,” which are all character details associated with a comics character called the Enchantress—specifically the second Enchantress, whose real name is Sylvie Lushton, not the Asgardian villain Amora.

Sylvie was introduced in the Young Avengers comics during the Dark Reign event in 2009, when Norman Osborn (the Green Goblin himself!) formed a team of “heroic” Avengers to replace the regular Avengers after he managed to defeat the Skrulls in the Secret Invasion event—except Osborn’s Avengers were mostly bad guys posing as good guys, with Daredevil nemesis Bullseye dressing like Hawkeye and Osborn himself wearing Captain America-themed Iron Man armor. With evil Avengers running around, there naturally had to be evil Young Avengers as well, which is how Sylvie Lushton comes in.

With mind control-y powers similar to that of the original Enchantress, Sylvie posed as (or at least allowed people to assume she was) an exiled Asgardian living on Earth, but it was eventually revealed that she was actually a regular person—not an Asgardian—who was given magic powers by Loki for the sake of, you know, general Loki-style mischief. There was also some indication that she may have been a wholly artificial person, having been entirely created by Loki just to cause general Loki-style mischief.

So who is this Sylvie? The one from Loki?

That’s the question! It’s very possible, perhaps even very likely, that she’s just who Hiddleston’s Loki and the TVA assume she is, which is to say a different version of Loki from a different timeline that was clipped off in favor of the Sacred Timeline where Loki is a man whose schemes are constantly foiled by Thor. Comic book movies have a history of pulling names and character descriptions from the comics just for the sake of not having to invent a whole new thing, as seen in this very episode of Loki (the planet Lamentis is mentioned in the excellent Annihilation: Conquest comic, but that probably has nothing to do with this beyond supporting any fan theories you may have about why it’s exploding).

But, that Loki is a trickster, after all. Why should we take anything that any Loki says at face value? Sylvie never told anyone she was a Loki, and she even bristles against being referred to as a Loki, so maybe she’s not a Loki at all? Maybe she’s this Enchantress and she has some kind of larger scheme beyond upending the Time Variance Authority’s… authority. We’re dealing with time travel here, so maybe she was even created by a future Loki and that’s why she’s so vague about any personal details about her life. There’s no way to know yet, so the safest option is to just not trust Loki—any Loki. Not even Loki the show.