#sylvie?

(The following story contains SPOILERS for the first two episodes of Marvel’s “Loki”)

The second episode of “Loki” introduced the MCU to Sophia Di Martino’s Lady Loki. Or did it?“We don’t quite have a handle on who they are yet,” director Kate Herron told TheWrap.

After the first episode of “Loki” revealed that the variant that Mobius (Owen Wilson) and the Time Variance Authority have been chasing down is another version of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) himself, the second episode ended with a major cliffhanger that it was Di Martino’s female version of the God of Mischief that was creating all sorts of havoc on the “sacred timeline."

Di Martino even wore a version of Loki’s outfit from “The Avengers” complete with the horns. But Herron said that all might not be what it seems, which seems par for the course with anything involving the Trickster God.A popular fan theory is that Di Martino is not Lady Loki but in fact Sylvie Lushton, also known as The Enchantress. In the comics, Sylvie (who has blond hair, while Loki typically sports brunette locks) is a human given special abilities by Loki that are modeled after the goddess Amora (who went by the name, you guessed it, Enchantress).

Though she’s not a normal human — she was actually created by Loki. A female Loki.This fan theory got even more legs when the Castilian Spanish version of the credits after the second episode lists Di Martino as “Sylvie” — in all other versions she’s described as “The Variant.”

Herron says we’re supposed to be just as confused as Loki is by the end of the episode as to who really is this mysterious woman. “We’re told that they are a Loki, and then the hood comes down — but are they a Loki? Are they not? We wanted to leave questions in regards to that identity at the end of this episode, and that’s definitely something that we do get into next week and beyond,” she said.

If she’s not Loki, the next question would be the same one we have about everything on this show: what’s going on? There didn’t seem to be much ambiguity when Di Martino showed up, since she was wearing what looked very much like a Loki costume, with horns and everything — which is not part of the Enchantress costume. It’s a conclusion the TVA had already jumped to as well.

If she isn’t Loki — which, if Herron is casting doubt, then she probably isn’t — then the obvious guess is that there is another Loki out there who brought Di Martino’s character into being. That Loki would be sticking to the shadows while using this woman as a decoy Loki.

We’ve already speculated that the villainous Loki is actually a future version of the show’s protagonist Loki, and we’ve got a big name actor in the cast we haven’t seen yet who fits the bill: Richard E. Grant. And if that’s the case, then the show would probably in turn be some kind of big time loop. Which brings us to the other question: why? It’s an answer we may not be able to understand until we meet that older Loki. If the character were to age up from Tom Hiddleston to Richard E. Grant, it would take thousands of years. That’s plenty of time for something dramatic to happen to him that might cause him to take drastic action like trying to create a multiverse. And since we don’t actually know for sure that there is a secret older Loki out there, we can’t really speak to his motivations.

But the idea has a lot of major potential ramifications, like conjuring mutants and the Fantastic Four into the MCU. It seems likely that Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who looks like he could become the Thanos of the next MCU cycle, is involved somehow. In the comics, the multiversal warlord has a domain outside of time just like the TVA does, and he’s obsessed with Ravonna Renslayer, who is a judge at the TVA on “Loki.”

As for everything else, well, we’ve got a feeling that this series isn’t going to stop being a mystery-filled mindbender any time soon.