Warning: Spoilers ahead for Captain Marvel.
By now, we’re all familiar with the new trailer for Disney+’s next Marvel spinoff series Loki. But what we haven’t talked about enough is its surprise introduction of … a cat. Or, “cat.”
As we see in the trailer, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is immediately confronted by a noticeably chill tabby cat upon being released into an office after meeting with Owen Wilson’s Mobius. The cat even begins purring when Loki drops into the adjacent chair. Now, anyone who’s had the good fortune to interact with a cat would find this suspicious: What pet on Earth would be that content when next to an empty bowl, or that calm when a fugitive God of Mischief interrupts their afternoon?
But that’s exactly it: They’re not on Earth. Loki is a prisoner of the Time Variance Authority, which – despite its name – exists in a dimension outside of time. So, how would a cat even get there? And why would it even be allowed to stay? One possible explanation is that it’s not a cat at all, but, indeed, a Flerken. What’s a Flerken, you say?
We first met Flerkens in Captain Marvel, where furry sidekick Goose was revealed to be a tentacle-mouthed alien species capable of inter-dimensional travel and boundless internal storage. (You know, pocket realities, things of that nature.) At the film’s climax, Goose captures the Tesseract, later regurgitating it onto the desk of one Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Mind you, this is the same Tesseract that leads a post-Battle of New York Loki to the TVA’s doorstep nearly two decades on.
So, is it possible that we’re meeting another Flerken? And if so, would that signify something larger?
The presence of an office Flerken could indicate Kree infiltration into the TVA. Thinking aloud, perhaps the worker responsible for getting Loki to initial paperwork is more than just a bureaucratic drone. On the other tentacle, we already know that Loki will tie into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so something as playfully weird as a Flerken may only exist here as a reminder that they, well, exist. Then again, maybe the little guy is just Chekhov’s cat, and we’ll never get the answers we desperately need.
Would a Loki-Flerken alliance too much to hope for? Come June 11th, we’ll know for certain.
