Way back in the summer of 2022, some leaked Loki season 2 set photos showed Sylvie wearing a McDonald’s uniform. Now, an “As Featured In” promotion for McDonald’s is releasing tiny snippets of the scene they were filming, and you can view them on Snapchat by scanning a code on Loki-branded sweet and sour sauce packets. (Remember when McDonalds tie-ins were just little plastic toys? Those were simpler times.)
Now that a few clips have been released, we have a clearer idea of what’s happening in that scene from Loki season 2. Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) has started a new life in 1982 as a McDonald’s cashier, and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) finds out where she’s working. He comes in to confront her—or profess his undying love, or maybe a little of both—and she pretends not to know why he’s there, asking him if he’s going to order anything. Most of the scene is divided between these two promotional videos:
But … why, though? Sylvie is a literal goddess. She can travel anywhere on the timeline and make people do whatever she wants them to do. Why is she working at McDonald’s? In an interview with Fast Company, executive producer Kevin Wright shared some insight into why they decided to set Loki and Sylvie’s reunion scene at a McDonald’s:
When we stayed in the view of character, this woman who went on the run as a child, had been running through time, a fugitive of time, living in apocalypses, never being able to relax or slow down, the novelty of walking into a 1980s McDonald’s looked appealing … You play a Little League game and go to McDonald’s. You go to a kid’s birthday party at McDonald’s. Someone like Sylvie would never have experienced that, and would be really taken by that.
I mean, yeah, I can kind of see it. I was an ’80s kid myself, and back then, McDonald’s was the promised land: the food was delectable to my still-developing taste buds, and seeing which Happy Meal toy I’d gotten felt like a mini-Christmas. If Sylvie, who had her own childhood violently ripped away from her, came across kids having that experience at this one particular restaurant during her travels, then I can see her wanting to live vicariously through those kids. She can’t get her own childhood back, but at least she can help make other kids happy. She can watch families being together.
On the other hand, as a former McDonald’s employee, I can say from experience that that job can be pretty awful. I didn’t work there until I was a high school student in the late ’90s, so maybe the veneer had mostly worn off by then, but standing at that counter and assembling those orders was not fun. The job had all the problems of food service at large: an unpredictable schedule you had little say in; a manager who acted like a thin-skinned monarch; customers who treated you like a bit of filth they’d tracked in on their shoe. It was often grueling and degrading work, all for a minimum wage that was rapidly losing value. Plus, my uniform (a polo shirt and Dickies) wasn’t nearly as cute as Sylvie’s.
On the other other hand—that was the late ’90s, not the early ’80s. Sylvie’s paycheck would have gone much further than mine did, and you can see from her name tag that McDonald’s was still giving out little stars for accomplishments. That’s neat! And, I dunno, maybe the customers were nicer back then, before societal decay really started to ramp up?
But on the other other other hand, I can think of another, less wholesome reason why Sylvie might choose to work such a low-level job. Maybe, after pushing away the first person to ever care about her after her world was taken away—not to mention spending thousands of years committing atrocities in order to get back at the TVA—she felt like she had to punish herself? It doesn’t matter if you actually think Sylvie did anything wrong. What’s relevant is her perception of herself, and it’s possible that she’s internalized all the centuries of the TVA calling her a villain.
And in the end, her reasoning can include a little of everything, right? A desire to soak up family happiness, with a subtle side of masochism.
All I know is that I hope season 2 explains why a goddess with mind-control powers chooses to tap into wholesome family goodness in this particular way. She could go anywhere in time and space, enchant her way into any position imaginable, and she chooses to be a cashier at a fast food joint on Earth? Make me believe it, Disney.
(featured image: Disney+ / McDonald’s)
