The penultimate episode of Loki‘s second season drops Thursday night on Disney+, following a shocking cliff-hanger last week, which saw Tom Hiddleston‘s titular god of mischief and his allies, including Owen Wilson‘s Mobius and Ke Huy Quan‘s O.B., utterly fail to save the world.

The abrupt ending of the episode is being likened to the stunner at the climax of Avengers: Infinity War, which saw Earth’s Mightiest Heroes lose to Thanos.

Production designer Kasra Farahani, who also directed this season’s third episode, says Loki uses real sets and props and not green screen wherever possible, which lends gravity to episodes like that one. 

“That stuff is there. It’s in camera. You know, so much of that stuff on a lot of other jobs I would have done would have been written off as CG. And this was a special project because we got to build it all,” he tells ABC Audio.

He adds, “World building is often misunderstood to be about scale. But in my opinion, world building is about consistency, about having a set of visual rules that you stick to.”

As an example, Farahani says, “They don’t have, like, full color screens in the [Time Variance Authority]. Their most advanced technology is this, like, weird version of late ’60s to mid ’70s computer screens, offset with weird aberrant technologies that they have found in various places on the timelines.”  

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