Loki Season 2 Theory: Is Ke Huy Quan's OB Secretly [SPOILER]?

Contains spoilers for "Loki" Season 2, Episode 1 — "Ouroboros"

He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) might be gone, but that doesn't mean life is suddenly easy for Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and the Time Variance Authority. The first episode of "Loki" Season 2 continues where Season 1 leaves things, and it's immediately clear that everyone's in trouble. Loki is time-hopping between the past, the future, and the era he's familiar with, finding out some interesting things about the TVA while he's at it. As they strive to get Loki's temporal status stabilized, Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) also have to deal with General Dox's (Kate Dickie) struggle to accept the new status quo. 

All of this is even more difficult because Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) has been working for He Who Remains all along, which means the agency can't trust the mascot. This removes a major asset from the TVA bag of tricks and, perhaps more importantly, strips the show of a fun know-it-all character that can explain various wacky sci-fi concepts to the audience.  

Fortunately, a replacement steps into the spotlight when Loki and Mobius visit TVA handyman Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), or "OB" for short. Just like Miss Minutes before her true nature is revealed, OB comes across as a funny, jovial character — but from his very first scene, it's clear that the gadgeteer has hidden depths. In fact, he's so similar to Miss Minutes that they might actually be the same entity ... or, at the very least, OB may be the guy who created and controls the mascot. Let's take a moment to kick the tires of this fun "Loki" Season 2 theory.

In "Loki" Season 2, Episode 1, Ouroboros reveals that he's the person who wrote the TVA guidebook, which details everything there is to know about the agency's equipment and its maintenance, much in the same way Miss Minutes explains and enforces TVA rules and its creator's will. This yin-yang setup already makes the characters' alignments pretty similar. Just like the mascot, OB seems to know everything there is to know about the TVA. What's more, the two strange characters clearly collaborate. As OB explains to Loki and Mobius, Miss Minutes has been autonomously maintaining the Temporal Loom (and possibly other important functions) for a long time while he runs diagnostics.  

There's also the fact that apart from Loki, Miss Minutes and OB are the only truly powerful characters that we've seen actively working with the TVA. The former is a seemingly omniscient non-human entity who's extremely ambiguous about her true nature. Meanwhile, OB has been working without as much as a nap break for hundreds — or perhaps thousands — of years and specifically states that he intends to go on forever. This confirms that he's no ordinary human TVA agent, either. After all, the majority of the agency consists of human variants who have been abducted from their timelines, which shouldn't give them the kind of constitution that would allow them to work eternally without rest.

So, to recap: When Miss Minutes is conspicuously absent from the show, OB immediately steps in to fill her narrative role as a goofy all-knowing presence. The two have similar goals and motivations, at least when it comes to the TVA. They're basically the same character — and while Ke Huy Quan gives OB a tremendous amount of likable energy while Tara Strong infuses Miss Minutes' cheer with hints of malice, the underlying similarity is hard to ignore.

Of course, it would be pretty far-fetched to assume that OB and Miss Minutes are literally the exact same character. Instead, when we speculate that they're the same, we're calling them two different aspects of the same entity. For instance, it's possible that OB is the character in control and the sassy cartoon clock is simply an avatar he deploys for hands-on stuff while tucked in his hidden room and quietly pulling the strings. Then again, maybe it's the other way around and Miss Minutes is the controlling entity while OB is some sort of advanced life model decoy, locked away toiling in his gadget room. 

As mentioned before, this could also be a yin-yang situation, making both characters equal halves of a larger whole, where OB is the hardware that keeps things running and Miss Minutes is the software that determines the direction. It's also worth noting the name Ouroboros represents the repeating progression of creation and destruction — aka the flat, circular nature of time — while "Miss Minutes" is a pun on time that's lost or altogether missing. Together, they could define the concept of timelines and how the TVA attempts to prune them. 

If any of the above turns out to be true, the connection between OB and Miss Minutes has worrying implications for the protagonists. OB might come across as a nice guy, but we already know that Miss Minutes hides a sinister side behind her smiling cartoon facade. With all of OB's knowledge of the agency's inner workings, what could happen to Loki and the TVA if OB also chooses to drop the act?