Ian is joined by Musa Okwonga and Ryan Hunn to chat about the return of the Women’s Champions League, which saw great wins for Ajax, Lyon and Barcelona and two very controversial decisions during Real Madrid’s 2-2 draw with Chelsea (04:59). Then, following last week’s Loki Season 2 finale, they dive into a long discussion about one of Ian’s favourite TV shows (12:32), the highs, the lows, the lessons and much more!
Host: Ian Wright Guests: Musa Okwonga and Ryan Hunn Producers: Ryan Hunn, Roscoe Bowman and Jonathan Fisher
Los Angeles County has confirmed its first flu death of the season, and with the bulk of the season still ahead, health officials are reminding residents to get vaccinated.
The person who died was elderly and had multiple underlying health conditions, according to the county Department of Public Health. There was no record of the person being vaccinated for flu this season, officials added.
“Although most people recover from influenza without complications, this death is a reminder that influenza can be a serious illness. … Annually, thousands of people nationwide are hospitalized or die from influenza-associated illness,” health officials said in a statement.
Statewide, nine people have died from flu since Oct. 1, according to the latest data from the California Department of Public Health.
Flu season usually runs from October through May and peaks around February, but every season is different. An estimated 670 Californians died from flu during the 2022-23 season, public health figures show.
Federal health officials have long recommended most everyone get an annual flu shot. But that call has taken on increased urgency in recent years, given the additional threat posed by COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
Health officials are preparing for the possibility of a renewed “tripledemic” this winter, with all three viruses circulating widely at the same time. Last year, Southern California was hit hard by an early onslaught of RSV, a historically strong start to the flu season and a COVID-19 spike — straining a healthcare system already stretched thin and sending patients to the emergency room in droves.
“Current indicators of influenza activity in Los Angeles County are in line with past seasons and have been rising in recent weeks,” officials said.
As of the week that ended Nov. 4, the most recent period for which data are available, flu activity was still considered low statewide, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But flu activity is increasing as the holiday season approaches, and officials largely recommend everyone age 6 months and older, especially older adults and those with weakened immune systems, get vaccinated.
Although some healthy people may be unfazed by flu season, officials say they should still get the shot so they don’t spread the illness to someone who might not recover as quickly.
The first significant storm of the season is expected to arrive midweek in Southern California, bringing cooler temperatures and 1 to 2 inches of rain over several days.
The predicted rainfall total is “fairly significant for this early in the season,” said meteorologist David Gomberg with the National Weather Service. “This is more typical of what you would see in the winter.”
Current models show a 60% to 70% chance of rain beginning Wednesday, with the storm possibly extending into Saturday.
“It’s a fairly long duration of off-and-on rain, but the intensities at any given point don’t look to be too extreme as it stands right now,” Gomberg said Sunday morning. “It’s just kind of this longer duration of light-to-moderate rainfall that adds up over time.”
The storm’s expected steadiness “will help delay any severe fire weather conditions for a while,” he said. Foothill and mountain areas could receive slightly more rain, but the National Weather Service isn’t expecting significant debris flow or flash flooding.
Up in the Bay Area, weather officials are predicting 1 to 3 inches of intermittent and widespread rain throughout the week. Coastal areas could see rain as early as Monday night.
It’s been a long time coming, but the God of Mischief is officially no more. At the end of the second season of Loki, the Asgardian finally finds his glorious purpose as a deity deserving of a new title: the God of Stories.
Throughout six movies and one live-action TV series since 2011’s Thor, no character in the MCU has had a more significant evolution than Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. He started as a villain, became something of an antihero, and then a full-fledged superhero. But by the end of the Season 2 finale, aptly titled “Glorious Purpose,” Loki has transformed into something beyond such simple narrative archetypes. He has effectively become the multiverse itself, the gatekeeper of all hero’s journeys past, present, and future.
Loki’s 12th and potentially final episode is the culmination of more than a decade of the Asgardian’s appearances in the MCU. It’s at once a satisfying conclusion for Marvel’s flagship TV series and a bittersweet ending for one of its most tragic and beloved characters. The Prince of Lies once desired a royal throne over anything and anyone else, whether that meant hurting his brother, his parents, or millions of earthlings in the process. In “Glorious Purpose,” Loki ascends to a throne at last—it’s just not the one he had once dreamt of.
At the end of last week’s installment, Loki learned how to control his time slipping, turning what was once a problem into a potential solution to save all his friends. He used this new superpower to return to the TVA, moments before the Temporal Loom’s destruction, as he tried to understand what they could have done differently to prevent the disaster. When O.B. suggested that they took too long to even attempt to fix the Loom, Loki entered a time loop of his own making, trying again and again to speed up their process just enough for their mission to succeed. Loki had played with time loops for much of the second season, but with Loki’s emergent mastery of time, the finale takes this narrative device a step further as he creates his own Groundhog Day.
For the beginning of “Glorious Purpose,” Loki retraces his steps over the course of the second season to see how every action can be executed faster, spending literal centuries this way to achieve an optimal sequencing, much to the confusion of his allies. (At one point, Mobius even pulls him aside and asks, “What the shit are you doing?!”) But when they finally succeed in expanding the capacity of the Loom to account for the growing number of branches, they realize their efforts—and lifetimes of Loki’s work—were all for nothing. “The Loom will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growing multiverse,” Victor Timely explains. And so what starts as a tour through the greatest hits of Season 2 soon extends to the first season, as Loki finally understands that the only way to prevent the destruction of the Loom and the TVA is to return to the moment when Sylvie unlocked the true potential of the multiverse, and stop her from killing He Who Remains.
At the Citadel at the End of Time, Loki finds himself in another futile cycle, trying and failing to save He Who Remains from getting stabbed by Sylvie in each attempt. Only when the TVA’s mastermind pulls Loki out of it, using his advanced time-twisting TemPad to freeze Sylvie in place, does the full extent of Loki’s impossible predicament begin to take shape. He Who Remains paved the road for Loki and Sylvie to find him at the End of Time at the end of the first season, and here, the villain reveals to Loki that everything that has happened since then—from his death to Loki’s time slipping—has all proceeded as he anticipated. All along, the Temporal Loom was just a fail-safe, designed to protect the Sacred Timeline from the inevitable multiversal war and nothing more. Despite Sylvie’s best efforts, free will was never a possibility. “Make the hard choice,” He Who Remains tells Loki. “Break the Loom and you cause a war that kills us all. Game over. Or, kill her, and we protect what we can.”
Beginning with this conversation with He Who Remains, Loki skips backward and forward through time to figure out what he must do, seeking counsel as he comes up with the words to rewrite the story of the entire multiverse. It’s a clever way of revisiting some of the most critical junctures in the series to display how far Loki has come, while also providing the chance for him to have one last chat with the show’s most important characters. At this point, Loki has learned how to transport his body through time and space, and he’s grown powerful enough to dictate time for those around him—much like HWR’s Time Twister. Though it seems as if Loki could return to any moment in the past, with Mobius, he chooses one of their very first conversations, when he was just learning about the existence of the TVA in the series premiere.
Loki picks a moment in time when he was still in restraints and when Mobius was no more than a TVA analyst trying to figure out what made a Loki tick. In some ways, that choice makes this version of Mobius more objective; he has yet to learn about all the lies and deceptions that the TVA was built on, and is still a faithful servant to an organization that prunes every variant and branching timeline without exception.
As the duo sit across from each other in the TVA’s time theater, they decide to skip the rewatch of Loki’s life. Mobius instead tells him a story about an incident involving a pair of Hunters, a thinly-veiled anecdote about himself. Mobius recounts how this Hunter once “lost sight of the big picture,” as he failed to prune a variant because he was just a little boy. Thanks to his hesitation, a couple of Hunters died in the process, and matters would have been even worse if his partner, Ravonna, hadn’t stepped in to intervene. “Most purpose is more burden than glory,” Mobius explains.
By now, it seems clear that Loki’s only option is to kill Sylvie. As Mobius’s story helps frame it, it is the burden that Loki must choose. And so Loki makes one final stop, finding Sylvie at A.D. Doug’s Pasadena workshop from last week’s “Science/Fiction” to tell his multiversal counterpart of the unfortunate reality. For one last time, they debate the need for the TVA, the choice between dying with freedom or living under unjust rule, and their positions of unparalleled power over the lives of everyone in every universe. Sylvie helps him recognize that protecting the Sacred Timeline isn’t enough; for all that she has preached about the necessity of free will, her position finally breaks through to Loki. “Who are you to decide we can’t die fighting?” Sylvie asks him.
Instead of returning to the End of Time, Loki goes back to the Temporal Core, to those familiar final moments before the Loom gets destroyed and the multiverse begins to decay. Rather than playing within HWR’s range of rules, though, Loki chooses his own path. He takes one last look at his friends before setting off to be forever alone, accepting the fate he was most afraid of. “I know what I want,” he says to Sylvie and Mobius. “I know what kind of god I need to be … for you. For all of us.”
The final climactic scene of Loki is a stunning visual sequence backed by an epic score from composer Natalie Holt, whose finest work in the series arrives near the end of this finale. As Loki replaces Victor on the gangway leading to the Loom, his TVA attire disintegrates due to the room’s temporal radiation, with his magic producing an iconic green costume in its place to match his new unofficial title as the God of Stories. A horned helmet manifests on his head, bearing a similar black-and-gold aesthetic to He Who Remains’s Citadel and technology. Loki destroys the Loom, dispersing the branches into the void before him as they begin to decompose. He proceeds to grab these vine-like threads, whole universes crumbling in the palms of his hands, and pulls them together through a portal to the End of Time. And as Loki wraps himself in the branches of the multiverse, imbuing them with his magic all the while, he sits on a solitary throne at his own Citadel, creating a new type of Loom that’s better suited for an Asgardian god: Yggdrasil, the World’s Tree.
Screenshots via Disney+
The 12th episode of Loki serves as the second-season finale, but it’s also something of a creation myth. So much of this season was built on the themes of ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail in an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. And as Loki travels from one end of the series to its beginning, two episodes that share the title of “Glorious Purpose,” these paradoxes of time and infinity start to apply to the TV show at large. Was Loki the one who was responsible for pulling his friends—Mobius, B-15, O.B., and Casey—out of their lives to begin with? Was it Loki who created the TVA?
“Glorious Purpose” is the last chapter of a story that finds Loki sacrificing his desires to become a divine being with all the power one could ever dream of, and yet no one to enjoy it with. He has claimed his throne at the End of Time, a purpose of all burden, and no glory. Loki never actually declares its protagonist as the God of Stories, as he becomes in the comics, but it gives him the same fate, on the series’ own terms. Loki has now established a new multiverse for the rest of the MCU to live and grow in, one that is more alive and dynamic than the Sacred Timeline was ever designed to be.
The Epilogue
“Glorious Purpose” effectively ends with Loki restructuring the multiverse into a new type of World’s Tree. But rather than leaving the episode on something of a cliff-hanger, Loki tacks on a few brief scenes to show what happens in the aftermath of the Asgardian’s sacrifice. When Loki destroyed the Loom and took sole responsibility for managing an infinitely-growing multiverse, he all but ended any need for the TVA to continue existing as it had. But in its place, he has allowed a new organization to grow, find a new purpose, and do things a little differently this time.
O.B. has returned to the TVA to reassume his position as its tech expert, rebooting Miss Minutes—who will hopefully not try to kill them all this time—and writing a second edition of the TVA guidebook, with Victor Timely sharing an author credit. Casey and B-15 are both back as well and have received more power in what appears to be a more democratic restructuring of the TVA’s leadership: When they return to the War Room, it isn’t filled with a handful of judges or generals sitting in to debate among themselves, but one that is packed with new faces and more voices to reflect the shift in the organization’s mission and values. One interaction between B-15 and Mobius reveals that at least part of the TVA’s new goal is to monitor the other variants of He Who Remains and prevent the multiversal war from happening.
(In Mobius’s report, he cites an incident with a variant in a 616-adjacent realm that was handled. He’s referring to Kang the Conqueror and the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is thankfully the one time that that movie ever really came up this entire season.)
As for Ravonna Renslayer, whose fate had all been forgotten by Loki since she was pruned in Episode 4, we see her waking up in the Void. Just as Loki did in Season 1, Ravonna now finds herself in an unfamiliar world that exists out of time, facing down the realm’s guardian, the trans-temporal purple entity known as Alioth. It isn’t clear whether this is the end of the line for the former TVA judge or a tease that her story isn’t done quite yet; a shot of a pyramid and a Sphinx could be suggesting a potential connection between her and another Kang variant who appeared at the end of Quantumania, the time-traveling pharaoh known as Rama-Tut.
Meanwhile, the adult Victor Timely is nowhere to be seen. However, we see a young version of him back in Chicago. “Glorious Purpose” returns to that moment when he received his TVA guidebook in “1893,” except when Victor turns around to look at his windowsill, he sees that nothing is there—just the curtain blowing in the wind. In this new reality, Timely’s future is never altered, and instead of being put on a path that could lead him to become the next He Who Remains, the boy simply turns back to focus on making his candles.
Finally, the episode ends with two of the show’s most important characters behind Loki: Mobius and Sylvie. After Sylvie chewed out Mobius in “Heart of the TVA” for never even bothering to look into his past life on the Sacred Timeline, Mobius decides it’s time to leave the TVA and see what he’s been protecting all of these years. With Sylvie at his side, he watches from a distance as his variant counterpart, Don, plays with his two sons on the lawn in front of their home. “Where you gonna go?” he asks her, only to receive a carefree shrug in response.
“You?” she asks.
“I might just wait here for a little bit,” Mobius replies. “Let time pass.”
Sylvie leaves through a Time Door and Mobius is left alone, watching the distant life that he once had. It’s a wonderfully simple moment, as Mobius stands there in blissful peace, with just a tinge of sadness knowing that the family he’s watching is not his. It’s all the more devastating as the camera zooms back out to reveal that Loki is right there watching with him, from another place, at another time, taking solace in the fact that his sacrifice was not in vain. What’s in store for either Mobius or Sylvie in the future is, for once, completely unknown. And that’s the beauty of it.
What’s Next for Loki?
For Loki, the God of Stories doesn’t exactly get a happy ending. But as he watches his friends continue on in their lives with the freedom of choice they’d never had, the episode ends with Loki looking on with a tearful smile, suggesting that it was all worth it.
After all of Loki’s dastardly deeds during his time in the MCU, the Asgardian has finally become a god whom Thor, Odin, and Frigga would be proud of—making it all the more tragic that none of them are around to see him become the person they always hoped he’d become. While Marvel has yet to announce whether there will be a third season of Loki, this certainly feels like it’s the end. Any alternative would be a mistake, for as good as the series has been. Though Season 2 had its ups and downs, it returned Loki to the pinnacle of MCU TV, rivaled only by the lone season of 2021’s WandaVision. With two tremendous season finales, though, Loki has achieved what few of Marvel Studios’ movies or TV series have ever been able to, providing satisfying conclusions to a character’s story that wasn’t whittled down by a messy CGI spectacle or outsized concerns for promoting the next project coming down the pipeline. Loki’s character arc fully realizes his journey throughout the years, and he now holds a position of power in the MCU that not only allows the Multiverse Saga to continue, but also invests it with greater meaning, knowing that the Asgardian is the force that binds it all together.
As head writer Eric Martin sees it, the story of Loki has come to an end—at least as far as this series goes. “We approached this as like two halves of a book,” Martin recently told CinemaBlend. “Season 1, first half. Season 2, we close the book on Loki and the TVA. Where it goes beyond that, I don’t know. I just wanted to tell a full and complete story across those two seasons.”
However, in an interview with Variety, executive producer Kevin Wright shared a different perspective on the character’s future, citing that “the hope” is for Marvel to one day reunite Loki with his brother Thor for the first time since 2018’s Infinity War. “The sun shining on Loki and Thor once again has always been the priority of the story we’re telling,” Wright said. “But for that meeting to really be fulfilling, we have to get Loki to a certain place emotionally. I think that’s been the goal of these two seasons.”
It’s a bit jarring to read the Loki producer saying that the “priority” of Loki is to essentially promote another MCU project, but hey, this is still Marvel Studios, after all. What’s in store for the former God of Mischief, his new responsibility to the MCU’s multiverse, and what Marvel will do about its Jonathan Majors–Kang the Conqueror situation can be dissected another day. For now, it’s time to appreciate a Marvel series that gave its title character a proper ending.
Tyson and Riley are back to recap the seventh exciting episode of Survivor Season 45! In today’s episode, they are joined by Ethan Zohn—a motivational speaker, former professional soccer player, and sole survivor of Survivor: Africa. They all give their opinions on the building of the Bruce versus Katurah situation, give their advice on choosing “bedfellows” on the island, and discuss what they believe are the main challenges of this episode: the balance of allies and knowing when to play with your gut.
Hosts: Tyson Apostol and Riley McAtee Guest: Ethan Zohn Producer: Ashleigh Smith Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
Gen V’s first six episodes are remarkably tight. The Boys’ spinoff series immediately establishes its place in the larger universe, and quickly introduces us to an entire cast of characters, a unique superhero university, and a secret conspiracy in just a few short hours. Despite its relatively large cast of characters, Gen V manages to give each one time to shine in their own storylines, letting them all have problems — both personal and superpowered — that just make for great television. All the while, all of the teen drama seamlessly filters back into the conspiracy thriller literally underneath the school, as the kids discover the mysteries of The Woods. But Gen V’s last two episodes run into a unique problem: They move too fast.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Gen V season 1.]
Gen V’s seventh and eighth episodes cover a lot of ground very quickly. After the cliffhanger twist of episode 6 (that Cate has been manipulating the group the whole time), the gang learns that Indira Shetty’s ultimate plan with The Woods is to create a virus that will kill anyone with Compound V in their system. Cate decides she’s flipping sides completely. She kills Shetty, who had been manipulating her, and frees the kids from The Woods, telling them that they’re better than humans and that humans don’t deserve to live — a message Sam gets on board with fast. For Marie, Jordan, Emma, and Andre, however, all of this is too much bloodshed to stomach, and they start fighting Cate, Sam, and the kids from The Woods. As chaos breaks out at God U, the powers that be finally call in a little assistance, and Homelander shows up to put a stop to everything.
If this all sounds a little harried, that’s because it is. What started as a carefully plotted series, full of scenes of teens working out complex (and not so complex) emotions and dealing with the moral ramifications of having powers, suddenly devolves into a massive CGI brawl. The huge fight feels out of step with everything that’s come before it. It’s exactly the kind of ending you might expect from a Marvel movie that takes a left turn into punching just as the third act begins.
Image: Prime Video
That’s not to say that Gen V’s first season shouldn’t have ended in a fight — just that it shouldn’t have ended in a fight this quickly. The fight should have been set up better, allowing the teenage characters’ emotions the space to bubble over until all they knew how to do was fight their way out. It’s a bad time for the show’s first emotional shortcut. The eight-episode season abandons the delicate pacing of the show’s fantastic early chapters to rush through plot points and motivation in the back half.
But with just a couple more episodes, which would ultimately give the season a very standard 10 episodes, it might have been much easier to swallow the way that Cate and Sam’s systematic abuse caused them to turn to wanton violence, or why their friends couldn’t talk them out of it and decided to fight them instead. Episodes 7 and 8 feel like the microwave version of Gen V. They’re still pretty good, but not nearly as great as the slow-cooked setup.
The good news for the show is that the too-quick ending doesn’t take away from how great the rest of the season was. And all things considered, there are much worse problems to have than leaving people wanting more — Gen V is the rare show that could be improved with more rather than less. Regardless of the chaotic frenzy that ended season 1, the setup for Gen V’s second season is easy to see and exciting to think about. The core of the heroes being trapped feels like great fodder for a prison break, and Cate and Sam having to figure out what to do now that they’re not under anyone’s thumb should be fascinating. Despite the season’s sudden ending, this series is still filled with fantastic characters, and the deftness of the first half of the season has earned the creative team some benefit of the doubt going forward. But let’s hope season 2 gets all the episodes it needs to do its story justice.
Last week’s episode of Loki ended with the biggest cliff-hanger of the season. After Loki and his friends at the TVA failed to repair the Temporal Loom in time, the device was torn apart, emitting a blinding light in the process that soon consumed everything in its path. In “Science/Fiction,” Loki emerges from that light to find himself alone at the TVA, with no trace of anyone else left behind. To make matters worse, he begins to slip in time again, with his body apt to disappear and reappear elsewhere at any moment.
With a little bit of help, Loki soon turns his time-slipping problem into a solution that might just save his friends and everyone else, in every timeline. “Science/Fiction” is one of the strongest episodes of the second season, a character-driven departure that slows the show’s recent frenetic pacing and gives the series a chance to reset in myriad ways ahead of next week’s finale. Loki has been moving so fast lately that some of its characters have been lost in the mix, but the penultimate episode takes stock of where they are in their journeys and even answers some questions that have lingered since the very beginning of the series. Perhaps above all else, the fans have finally gotten what they wanted: Mobius on a Jet Ski.
Screenshots via Disney+
In the fifth episode of the first season, Loki left the TVA behind to travel to the Void, introducing a strange new setting that explained the true nature of the organization’s pruning methods. This season’s fifth episode, “Science/Fiction,” transports the audience not to a bold new world, but rather to the past lives of Loki’s friends at the TVA, with Loki again serving as our guide. Mobius, for one, is revealed to be a man named Don who’s living on a branched timeline in Cleveland in 2022. He’s a single father of two children and a salesman of Jet Skis and other action sports equipment. (But mainly Jet Skis, of course.) The most important friend who Loki reunites with, though, proves to be Ouroboros, whom Loki finds on another branched timeline in Pasadena, California, in 1994.
In O.B.’s original timeline, he’s actually a struggling science-fiction writer named A.D. Doug who happens to also be a scientist teaching theoretical physics at Caltech. His love for science fiction means that he not only immediately believes Loki’s nonsensical story about time travel and the TVA, but is also able to get up to speed hilariously quickly to help Loki make sense of the perplexing situation he’s found himself in with this seemingly random time-slipping phenomenon.
“It isn’t random, because you keep ending up around exactly the people you’re looking for,” A.D. speculates. “And it’s evolving, because you’re not just slipping in time, you’re also moving around in space. It’s like you’re a better version of one of those TemPads.”
Like some sort of time-travel guru, A.D. helps Loki turn his time-slipping dilemma into an asset that can be used to their advantage. That process begins with Loki identifying the reason it’s happening to him in the first place. “With science, it’s all ‘what’ and ‘how,’” A.D. continues. “But with fiction, it’s ‘why.’ So why do you need to do this?”
“Why do I need to do this? I’ll tell you why,” Loki replies. “Because if I can’t save the TVA from being destroyed, there will be nothing to protect against what’s coming.”
This framework of “fiction” and stories proves to be the throughline for the entire episode, and the question of “why” turns out to be a crucial step in Loki eventually mastering his time slipping. But this mastery doesn’t come easily. Loki ends up slipping in time again after he gives a copy of the TVA guidebook to A.D. and then reappears at Mobius’s home (or, rather, Don’s home). As Loki struggles to explain to Don the bizarre circumstances of the threat they all face, A.D. emerges with a newly-built TemPad, the construction of which required him to make some unfortunate sacrifices:
(Ke Huy Quan continues to be a delight in this series; his comedic timing here is impeccable.)
It took 19 months, the dissolution of his marriage, and the loss of his job, but A.D. was able to build his world’s first time machine, providing Loki with the tool he needs to get the TVA band back together. Loki proceeds to recruit B-15 and Casey to the TVA’s cause, failing only when it comes to Sylvie, the one person other than Loki who actually remembers what happened at the TVA. The God of Mischief is left rudderless after having a little heart-to-heart with Sylvie at a bar in Broxton, Oklahoma, and just for a moment, Loki gives up on saving the TVA.
It isn’t until Sylvie returns from a spaghettified Broxton that Loki is vindicated in his quest to bring everyone back to the TVA. Soon, A.D.’s workshop receives the spaghetti treatment as well, and Loki finally manifests his ability to control his time slipping, reversing the catastrophic events just enough to revive his friends and explain his breakthrough. “It’s not about where, when, or why,” Loki says to the group. “It’s about who. I can rewrite the story.”
“Science/Fiction” ends with Loki slipping back in time and space to return to the TVA, before the Loom was ever destroyed. He’s given himself a second chance to save the TVA and the dying branches of the multiverse, and with this new ability at his disposal, he might be able to do it. Loki continues to play around with time loops in Season 2, with time slipping reemerging just ahead of the finale. With this discovery transforming Loki into something of a human TemPad, saving the TVA could be just the beginning of what he’s capable of changing.
Past Lives
“Science/Fiction” works so well in part because of the extra time it affords some of the key players in Season 2. As Loki gives us glimpses into the past lives of every member of Team Loki, we can see reflections of the characters they become in the TVA, even after their individual histories and idiosyncrasies are stripped away.
The first character we’re reintroduced to is Casey, in the form of a man named Frank in 1962 San Francisco who’s escaping prison. More specifically, Casey is revealed to be none other than Frank Morris, one of three real-life inmates who escaped Alcatraz in June 1962 after placing papier-mâché heads in their beds, breaking out through ventilation ducts and utility corridors, and using an inflatable raft to navigate their way off of the island. As in the Season 1 flashback that revealed Loki to be D.B. Cooper, the series puts a playful twist on a strange moment in history, adding a bit of science fiction to flesh out some of the unexplained details surrounding the story. Casey’s origins are a bit of an anomaly, in that we don’t see too much of this crafty Frank Mason character in the man we’re familiar with at the TVA, but perhaps that’s unsurprising given how recently Eugene Cordero has emerged as a more prominent member of the cast. (There is, however, a little callback to Season 1 as Frank mentions the prospect of them getting gutted like fish, an analogy that Casey couldn’t wrap his head around when Loki threatened him with it in the pilot.)
As for B-15’s past life, we learn that she was a doctor in New York City in 2012. (That’s certainly an interesting time to be living in New York in the history of the MCU, but the fact that she doesn’t seem to recognize the God of Mischief makes it seem as if the Battle of New York hasn’t happened in this timeline.) The conversations between Loki and Dr. Willis are brief, but in a scene that focuses on the doctor and one of her young patients, we see the same sort of caring and compassionate individual that B-15 has become in Season 2. She has proved to be absolutely terrible at crisis management at the TVA, but her driving motivation to save lives remains the same.
The alternate versions of Mobius and O.B. take on larger roles in “Science/Fiction” than the other supporting TVA members, and their previously-hidden histories can be seen even more clearly in their lives at the TVA. Don’s obsession with Jet Skis has obviously shown through in Mobius, but more enlightening than anything else is the sudden introduction of Don’s two sons. Earlier in the season, “Breaking Brad” teased the mystery of Mobius’s previous life on the Sacred Timeline, and in Mobius’s fierce objection to discovering his history, Loki revealed a more vulnerable side to a typically nonchalant guy who enjoys the simple pleasures of life and cares about the TVA more than anything else. Although “Science/Fiction” illuminates where Mobius’s personality traits come from, it also shows the responsibility and care that he has for his kids, who in another lifetime were everything to him.
(As for O.B., the parallels between his two selves are almost too seamless, with A.D. wasting no time in reclaiming the role as the group’s invaluable tech genius. Production designer Kasra Farahani and his team also had some fun reimagining O.B.’s workshop at the TVA as A.D.’s workspace in Pasadena, as the two locations echo each other across time and space.)
The fact that so much of these characters’ lives stays intact in the jump between realities to their new existences at the TVA complicates what we’ve thought to this point about how everything works at the TVA. Now that Loki has seen each of his companion’s histories, we have to wonder what he’ll do with this newfound information. And more importantly, how will someone like Mobius react if and when he discovers the truth about the life he’s been actively refusing to investigate?
What Makes a Loki Tick?
The driving question in Season 1 was “what makes a Loki tick?” As Mobius recruited the God of Mischief to hunt down another Loki variant, this question came up again and again, as Loki and Sylvie redefined what they were believed to be capable of. “Science/Fiction” takes some much-needed time to reevaluate where both Lokis stand in this regard, and how the latest multiversal events have impacted the people they’ve become.
In Broxton, Sylvie shows a more compassionate side of her character that’s been missing all season, as Sophia Di Martino finally gets the chance to do more than just yell about the need to destroy the TVA or He Who Remains. And for once, Loki is placed in a position where someone else helps him recognize the emotions that are blinding him to the reality of the situation, as Sylvie pushes him to uncover his true motives for bringing everyone back to the TVA. “I want my friends back,” Loki admits. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“See, we’re both selfish,” Sylvie replies. “I know this is hard, but your friends are back where they belong.”
“But without them, where do I belong?” Loki asks.
“We’re all writing our own stories now,” Sylvie says. “Go write yours.”
While Loki’s takeaway—to just give up on the mission—ultimately proves to be the wrong one, the truth of why he’s doing all of this is enlightening nonetheless. The Asgardian’s desire to be loved and accepted was one of the key developments for his character in Season 1. His continued evolution into a full-fledged hero this season has been a bit rushed, but here we see that some of his selfish nature—a character trait that has existed in him since he first appeared in Thor—is still intact, even if it’s ultimately in service of the worthy cause of defending the multiverse. Loki’s overall development seems more well-rounded as we see shadows of his former self shine through while he learns to navigate the complexities of his emotions and relationships.
With this bar conversation and a subsequent scene that depicts Sylvie’s routine of visiting the local record store in Broxton, Loki belatedly dedicates some space to further exploring how and why Sylvie has relinquished any duty to the multiverse in favor of finding peace in the freedom of choice that she’s never had. As Sylvie’s friend Lyle gets spaghettified while Sylvie vibes to the Velvet Underground, we witness the simple life she’s always dreamed of get torn apart before her eyes. It’s a heartbreaking moment reminiscent of the dusty aftermath of the snap in Avengers: Infinity War, and it serves as a reminder of how tragic a figure Sylvie has always been.
The God of Stories
Loki has been known by many names. The God of Mischief. The Trickster of Asgard. The Prince of Lies. In the comics, he also takes on a unique title that stands out from the rest of them: the God of Stories.
This transformation comes within the pages of Loki: Agent of Asgard, a series that started in 2014 and was written by Al Ewing and illustrated by Lee Garbett. In Agent of Asgard, Loki gains the very meta ability to use his magic to manipulate narratives, time, and the fabric of reality. In a very fourth-wall-breaking sort of way, he can then wield the power of stories themselves, rewriting them however he chooses.
Loki: Agent of Asgard no. 13Screenshot via Marvel Comics
These ideas emerge in a major way in “Science/Fiction,” with Loki even vowing to “rewrite the story” as he rewinds the season’s narrative back to before the TVA’s destruction. In the final moments of the episode, just as Loki discovers this new, all-powerful ability, Sylvie’s voice can be heard amid Loki’s disintegrating surroundings. “Do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki is the fact that we’re destined to lose?” she asks.
It’s a question that Sylvie raised in Season 1, and an idea that was repeated by other Loki variants whom the God of Mischief encountered in the Void. Loki has been determined to change that narrative, just as Sylvie has sacrificed just about everything in a quest for free will. And now Loki actually has the ability to control and manipulate time like never before, paving the way for him to become the God of Stories.
There are still plenty of unanswered questions leading into next week’s season finale, including the fates of Miss Minutes, Ravonna Renslayer, Victor Timely, and the rest of He Who Remains’s variants. Now that Loki has gained potentially limitless power, the series will soon test just how much the reformed villain has changed.
The Midnight Boys return to share their instant reactions to the latest episode of Loki Season 2. The guys discuss Ravonna Renslayer’s rise to main villain of the show (20:00), Loki and Sylvie’s debate of freedom vs. safety (30:00), and the death of Victor Timely (47:00).
Hosts: Charles Holmes, Van Lathan, and Jomi Adeniran Producer: Jonathan Kermah Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal and Steve Ahlman Social: Jomi Adeniran
Victor Timely’s fingerprints are all over Loki season 2, even when he isn’t. As one of the many versions of Kang the Conqueror, Timely immediately feels important to the second season, even before we know it’s his designs that inspired (nay, created?) the Time Loom. Sure, that was by He Who Remains’ design, but still! As we see from his workshop of inventions and the way Miss Minutes tries to come on to him: Timely’s got the juice!
[Ed. note: This post will now spoil the end of episode 4 in some detail, with some speculation of what’s to come. Ye be warned.]
So it’s kind of surprising when, after all the teamwork and effort and Marvel CGI that got him to the TVA with O.B. to build the magic machine that saved the day, he just… spaghetti’d. In just an instant, Timely turns into noodles, and Loki is left dumbstruck, just wondering what the hell they’re going to do without him, while the audience wonders what the heck Loki will do without him.
Still, this season folding in on itself so much has taught us one thing: This moment might have major implications for the space-time continuum. Timely getting the time-space pasta treatment might mean his existence, life, consciousness, or matter has simply been wibbly-wobblied somewhere else. As such, spaghettified Victor Timely might not be gone — or at least, the narrative might not be done with him. So what exactly could have happened to him? Here are our theories.
Theory 1: Victor Timely’s episode 4 fate creates Kang the Conqueror
Image: Marvel Studios
We know that there are seemingly endless Kangs spread across endless realities, but how did they become… you know, Kang? He comes from the future, so his advanced technology (and his supersuit) can account for many of his powers. And we know he has a genius-level intellect, as shown through Victor Timely’s less-than-timely inventions. But his ability to manipulate time and reality? It’s sometimes attributed to his suit, but I think it’s also a little left open to interpretation.
What if we just saw its origin in Loki? The man was, as many have put it before me, completely and totally spaghetti’d as he approached the Loom and the many different branches of the multiverse. Could his essence have been spread out into the multiverse through the Loom, gaining unexpected powers in the process? Or, even more directly, did this event somehow change the brain chemistry of all other variants across the timelines, due to sheer proximity to those timelines? Could this have been the event that transformed Victor Timely/Nathaniel Richards into Kang the Conqueror? It seems like the kind of thing the MCU would do — they love a grand reveal, after all, and Loki has been asked to be surprisingly load-bearing when it comes to the universe’s next Big Bad. So showing his “origin” of sorts in the series wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. —Pete Volk
Theory 2: Victor Timely is going to go somewhere else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Image: Marvel Studios
What little we know about the technobabble of the Time Loom is it’s pulling all the various timelines of the multiverse and getting clogged. But unlike an actual sewing machine, the Loom is just sitting in massive space, pulling in whatever strands get near it. So maybe when Victor turns into strands in the vast vacuum outside the TVA, his remnants just also get sucked up into the Loom, like one giant machine-like wormhole.
From there, Timely could plop out… anywhere! My guess is it doesn’t even have to be anywhere big (or certainly shouldn’t be), like the Battle of New York or the fight against Thanos. It’ll just be a quick little end-credits gag, like the original Guardians of the Galaxy tag with Howard the Duck. Hopefully he lands somewhere he can keep making his little inventions; if not, well, there’s always the next Kang. —Zosha Millman
Theory 3: Victor Timely died!
Image: Marvel Studios
I think he’s dead. Which would seemingly present a problem to the timeline: If Victor Timely is really the Kang who invented the TVA, then he’d need to have not died before he invented the TVA. Perhaps we’re about to see the fallout of that — two climactic episodes in which all TVA employees wake up in their normal lives on the timeline, because there was never a TVA to pull them out of it. Maybe Mobius would finally get to ride a Jet Ski. Maybe he’d have to choose between Jet Skis and putting the TVA back into existence somehow.
But honestly, causality only seems to exist when Loki wants it to, so who knows! If Timely is dead, there are plenty more Kangs to go around. —Susana Polo
Theory 4: Victor Timely is spaghetti now, period.
Photo: Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images
My theory is short, uncomplicated, and best summarized through the words of Polygon executive editor Matthew Patches when he’s in dad mode: pasghetti.
That’s right, Victor Timely is not He Who Remains, necessarily, but he is an equally if not even more important variant of Kang: the one who started spaghetti. Inside the walls of the TVA, far outside the bounds of regular time, all spaghetti, and possibly all European noodle shapes in general, were discovered chiefly through the disintegration of Victor Timely. Through his sacrifice, the bright divinity of his newly noodly form will slip into the loom and be dispersed throughout the multiverse, sliding right into the perfect place in each universe’s history to help someone discover the holiest form of pasta sauce delivery: the spaghetti noodle.
Of course, it’s important to remember that Victor is but one man, and his corporeal form is limited by its size, even when stretched by the unstable Loom. This means, tragically, that not every timeline will get to experience the magic of spaghetti. Some lost out on its pasta perfection, because their universe was never delivered a horrifying Cronenberg-esque noodle-shaped piece of a man. But thank God we exist in one that did. —Austen Goslin
Tuesday’s NBA season tipoff includes a historic moment for Highland Park native Che Flores.
The longtime basketball referee announced their status as nonbinary and transgender in an interview Sunday with men’s lifestyle magazine GQ. Flores is the league’s first such referee and is believed to be the first out nonbinary and transgender official in all major U.S. and Canadian sports.
Flores, who uses the pronouns they and them, was not available for comment Tuesday. But their former coach Jim Couch, who coached Flores at Burbank’s Bellarmine-Jefferson High School and Los Angeles Pierce College, said he wasn’t surprised Flores “climbed their way to the top.”
Flores “was a special player whose passion and effort led to [their] success,” Couch said. “That success is not a surprise.”
Flores, who grew up in Highland Park, is starting their second season in the NBA after working as a non-staff official during the 2021-22 season. They previously worked 10 seasons in the WNBA and nine seasons in the NBA G League, according to their National Basketball Referee Assn. profile. Flores worked both association’s finals series in 2022.
Previously, Flores spent 13 years officiating several NCAA leagues, including the Pac-12, Big 12 and Mountain West. They also worked the women’s Division I title game in 2021 and the Final Four in 2019.
Flores, 44, told GQ they weren’t seeking any spotlight with their announcement. Instead, they said, this is a way to provide visibility for queer youths.
“This is just to let young kids know that we can exist, we can be successful in all different ways,” Flores told the magazine. “For me, that is most important — to just be a face that somebody can be like, ‘Oh, OK, that person exists. I think I can do that.’ ”
A starting point guard on Bellarmine-Jefferson’s CIF Southern Section Division IV-A title team — the school’s first— Flores played with future WNBA player Jaclyn Johnson. Couch coached Flores at Bell-Jeff as the senior upped their postseason play, averaging 18 points, 8.4 assists and seven steals, topping their average of 11.9 points, 6.2 assists and 5.6 steals in the regular season.
After graduation, Flores moved on to Pierce College before transferring and playing two seasons at Cal State Northridge. There, Flores played 27 games over two years, finishing with 26 points, 18 rebounds, 19 assists and 10 steals.
Couch, who retired as Pierce College’s women’s basketball coach, last saw his former player in 2010 when they were officiating a community college women’s basketball game between Pierce and Ventura College, which the latter won by a few points, according to Couch.
“It was a game where I could have used a couple of calls, but [Flores] wasn’t having it,” Couch said with a laugh. “I think I had more calls against me.”
Flores’ announcement comes at a time when legislators and governing bodies worldwide have restricted or banned the participation of transgender athletes.
House Republicans passed a bill in April barring transgender females from participating on girls’ or women’s sports teams in federally supported schools and colleges.
World swimming’s governing body, FINA, also banned transgender women from competing in female events in 2022.
Flores told GQ that “being misgendered as she/her always just felt like a little jab in the gut.” But since the announcement, Flores said they “can go through the world, and even my job, a lot more comfortably.”
It’s time for another deep dive into Loki Season 2! Mal and Jo are back to discuss Episode 3, “1893” (13:08). They talk about some questionable decisions being made by Loki and Mobius, discuss the horny motivations of Miss Minutes, and even sprinkle in a little Midwest geography talk (33:47).
Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
Miss Minutes is back, and so is Jessica Clemons to break down the latest episode of Loki! Who is Victor Timely (01:00)? What is Sylvie doing (06:15)? Are Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes actually working together (09:40)? Find out all of that and more in Splash Page!
Host: Jessica Clemons Producers: Aleya Zenieris, Jonathan Kermah, and Jack Sanders Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal
The Neonatal Kitten Nursery, affectionately known as APA!’s Bottle Baby Program, saves some of our tiniest, most vulnerable babies — unweaned kittens. Our facility is typically closed to the public to keep the environment sterile. However once a year we open the doors for our annual Kitten Shower, which offers kittie enthusiasts an opportunity to take an inside look at the program as well as a way to support the important, life-saving work that is done there. And of course, we’ll offer the opportunity to cuddle some kittens!
Our nursery has already seen 1000+ kittens come into our care since January. The peak of kitten season, however, has just begun and will continue through about October. Support is greatly needed for these tiny furballs and the Kitten Shower is a wonderful way to provide it.
This year, the Kitten Shower takes place from 12 pm to 5 pm, Saturday, May 13th at our Tarrytown facility located at 3102 Windsor Rd., Suite D. There are three ways to support this fundraiser: gift a monetary donation, bring an item from the kitten wish list and participate in the silent auction.
Attendees are asked for a $20 entrance fee at the door, which provides items such as a can of kitten formula. The $20 fee covers a full family interested in attending. Another way to gain access to the event is to bring an item from the kitten wish list below:
KMR milk replacement, available at Petco
At least 3.5 lb bag of Royal Canin “Mother and Babycat” dry cat food
12-roll or larger case of paper towels
2 or more 100 oz. unscented laundry detergent
1 box of 800 count or larger fragrance-free baby wipes
6-pack or more of receiving blankets, which can be found at places like Target or Walmart in the baby section
In addition, there will be a silent auction that will include exciting items such as a gift certificate from Austin-favorite, Lick , a Pet Caricature Portrait by Art by HJoy, a ticket to AIA Home Tour 2023 and more. For those supporters who are unable to attend but still want to help the kittens in our nursery, please visit our Neonatal Kitten Nursery wishlist! You can have the items shipped directly to the nursery at 3102 Windsor Rd, Ste. D Austin, TX 78704.
Join us to meet some of the heroes — staff, volunteers and fosters, who give their hearts to ensure that the kittens that come into our care have a chance at life!
Sometime in the spring of 2020, after centuries, perhaps millennia, of tumultuous coexistence with humans, influenza abruptly went dark. Around the globe, documented cases of the viral infection completely cratered as the world tried to counteract SARS-CoV-2. This time last year, American experts began to fret that the flu’s unprecedented sabbatical was too bizarre to last: Perhaps the group of viruses that cause the disease would be poised for an epic comeback, slamming us with “a little more punch” than usual, Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Tennessee, told me at the time.
But those fears did not not come to pass. Flu’s winter 2021 season in the Southern Hemisphere was once again eerily silent; in the north, cases sneaked up in December—only to peter out before a lackluster reprise in the spring.
Now, as the weather once again chills in this hemisphere and the winter holidays loom, experts are nervously looking ahead. After skipping two seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, flu spent 2022 hopping across the planet’s lower half with more fervor than it’s had since the COVID crisis began. And of the three years of the pandemic that have played out so far, this one is previewing the strongest signs yet of a rough flu season ahead.
It’s still very possible that the flu will fizzle into mildness for the third year in a row, making experts’ gloomier suspicions welcomingly wrong. Then again, this year is, virologically, nothing like the last. Australia recently wrapped an unusually early and “very significant” season with flu viruses, says Kanta Subbarao, the director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute. By sheer confirmed case counts, this season was one of the country’s worst in several years. In South Africa, “it’s been a very typical flu season” by pre-pandemic standards, which is still enough to be of note, according to Cheryl Cohen, a co-head of the country’s Centre for Respiratory Disease and Meningitis at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. After a long, long hiatus, Subbarao told me, flu in the Southern Hemisphere “is certainly back.”
That does not bode terribly well for those of us up north. The same viruses that seed outbreaks in the south tend to be the ones that sprout epidemics here as the seasons do their annual flip. “I take the south as an indicator,” says Seema Lakdawala, a flu-transmission expert at Emory University. And should flu return here, too, with a vengeance, it will collide with a population that hasn’t seen its likes in years, and is already trying to marshal responses to severaldangerous pathogens at once.
The worst-case scenario won’t necessarily pan out. What goes on below the equator is never a perfect predictor for what will occur above it: Even during peacetime, “we’re pretty bad in terms of predicting what a flu season is going to look like,” Webby, of St. Jude, told me. COVID, and the world’s responses to it, have put experts’ few forecasting tools further on the fritz. But the south’s experiences can still be telling. In South Africa and Australia, for instance, many COVID-mitigation measures, such as universal masking recommendations and post-travel quarantines, lifted as winter arrived, allowing a glut of respiratory viruses to percolate through the population. The flu flood also began after two essentially flu-less years—which is a good thing at face value, but also represents many months of missed opportunities to refresh people’s anti-flu defenses, leaving them more vulnerable at the season’s start.
Some of the same factors are working against those of us north of the equator, perhaps to an even greater degree. Here, too, the population is starting at a lower defensive baseline against flu—especially young children, many of whom have never tussled with the viruses. It’s “very, very likely” that kids may end up disproportionately hit, Webby said, as they appear to have been in Australia—though Subbarao notes that this trend may have been driven by more cautious behaviors among older populations, skewing illness younger.
Interest in inoculations has also dropped during the pandemic: After more than a year of calls for booster after booster, “people have a lot of fatigue,” says Helen Chu, a physician and flu expert at the University of Washington, and that exhaustion may be driving already low interest in flu shots even further down. (During good years, flu-shot uptake in the U.S. peaks around 50 percent.) And the few protections against viruses that were still in place last winter have now almost entirely vanished. In particular, schools—a fixture of flu transmission—have loosened up enormously since last year. There’s also just “much more flu around,” all over the global map, Webby said. With international travel back in full swing, the viruses will get that many more chances to hopscotch across borders and ignite an outbreak. And should such an epidemic emerge, with its health infrastructure already under strain from simultaneous outbreaks of COVID, monkeypox, and polio, America may not handle another addition well. “Overall,” Chu told me, “we are not well prepared.”
At the same time, though, countries around the world have taken such different approaches to COVID mitigation that the pandemic may have further uncoupled their flu-season fate. Australia’s experience with the flu, for instance, started, peaked, and ended early this year; the new arrival of more relaxed travel policies likely played a role in the outbreak’s beginning, before a mid-year BA.5 surge potentially hastened the sudden drop. It’s also very unclear whether the U.S. may be better or worse off because its last flu season was wimpy, weirdly shaped, and unusually late. South Africa saw an atypical summer bump in flu activity as well; those infections may have left behind a fresh dusting of immunity and blunted the severity of the following season, Cohen told me. But it’s always hard to tell. “I was quite strong in saying that I really believed that South Africa was going to have a severe season,” she said. “And it seems that I was wrong.” The long summer tail of the Northern Hemisphere’s most recent flu season could also exacerbate the intensity of the coming winter season, says John McCauley, the director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre at the Francis Crick Institute, in London. Kept going in their off-season, the viruses may have an easier vantage point from which to reemerge this winter.
COVID’s crush has shifted flu dynamics on the whole as well. The pandemic “squeezed out” a lot of diversity from the influenza-virus population, Webby told me; some lineages may have even entirely blipped out. But others could also still be stewing and mutating, potentially in animals or unmonitored pockets of the world. That these strains—which harbor especially large pandemic potential—could emerge into the general population is “my bigger concern,” Lakdawala, of Emory, told me. And although the particular strains of flu that are circulating most avidly seem reasonably well matched to this year’s vaccines, the dominant strains that attack the north could yet shift, says Florian Krammer, a flu virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Viruses also tend to wobble and hop when they return from long vacations; it may take a season or two before the flu finds its usual rhythm.
Another epic SARS-CoV-2 variant could also quash a would-be influenza peak. Flu cases rose at the end of 2021, and the dreaded “twindemic” loomed. But then, Omicron hit—and flu “basically disappeared for one and a half months,” Krammer told me, only tiptoeing back onto the scene after COVID cases dropped. Some experts suspect that the immune system may have played a role in this tag-team act: Although co-infections or sequential infections of SARS-CoV-2 and flu viruses are possible, the aggressive spread of a new coronavirus variant may have set people’s defenses on high alert, making it that much harder for another pathogen to gain a foothold.
No matter the odds we enter flu season with, human behavior can still alter winter’s course. One of the main reasons that flu viruses have been so absent the past few years is because mitigation measures have kept them at bay. “People understand transmission more than they ever did before,” Lakdawala told me. Subbarao thinks COVID wisdom is what helped keep Australian flu deaths down, despite the gargantuan swell in cases: Older people took note of the actions that thwarted the coronavirus and applied those same lessons to flu. Perhaps populations across the Northern Hemisphere will act in similar ways. “I would hope that we’ve actually learned how to deal with infectious disease more seriously,” McCauley told me.
But Webby isn’t sure that he’s optimistic. “People have had enough hearing about viruses in general,” he told me. Flu, unfortunately, does not feel similarly about us.
Nation’s Largest AAU Youth Football and Cheer Club Cancels Fall Season Due to COVID-19 Concerns
Press Release –
updated: Jul 14, 2020
ORLANDO, Fla., July 14, 2020 (Newswire.com)
– The East Orlando Preds, the nation’s largest AAU Youth Football and Cheer Club, has always been committed to the health, safety, and the positive development of its athletes and families. For that reason, the Preds have made the very difficult decision to not participate in the 2020 Fall football and cheer season due to the negative effects of COVID-19 in its community and the country.
Since being established in 2013, the East Orlando Preds football and cheer programs have had tremendous success. The Preds football program has captured five FYFCL Super Bowl championships, including back-to-back 14U undefeated championship seasons (2018, 2019), and have played in a total of 10 FYFCL Super Bowls. In 2019, the Preds 14U football team finished 17-0, AAU National Football Champions, and were featured Super Bowl Sunday on Fox News’ Fox & Friends telecast on its South Beach Super Bowl set. Today, more than 15 Preds student-athletes are playing or entering their first year of collegiate athletics, while another 10 high school players have current collegiate sports scholarship offers.
On the cheer mat, the Preds Cheer Program has dominated youth cheer in the Central Florida region with over 50 first-place finishes, and over 100 second- and third-place finishes over the past six seasons, including being named Grand, Spirit or Arena champion over 25 times. In the past two years, the Preds cheer squads have won three UYFL National Cheer Championships at the 14U and 12U levels.
While the Preds love to compete and are committed to excellence on and off the football field and cheer mat, they have always done so with health and safety at the forefront.
“Unfortunately, COVID-19 is having a devastating and disproportional impact on multi-generational and lower-income households,” says East Orlando Preds President Shawn Seipler. “Cases of diabetes, asthma, obesity, heart disease, and hypertension exist at higher rates in these at-risk communities. Individuals with these underlying conditions have the greatest health risk to COVID-19. With so little information about the long-term impacts of the virus and the number of cases and infection rates rising among younger individuals who can carry the virus, we do not feel it is prudent to have youth football and cheer this fall. We can wait until early 2021, after proven treatments and a potential vaccine are available, to do our part to stop the spread and to keep our families safe.”
Shawn Seipler, President of the East Orlando Preds and Head Coach of the 14U football team, is also the founder and CEO of Clean the World, a global impact, social enterprise that distributes soap and provides WASH education to at-risk populations across the U.S. and worldwide. Clean the World has been a leading organization distributing soap and hygiene kits globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. Six members of the East Orlando Preds Board of Directors are Clean the World team members, including the reigning Arena Bowl Champion Head Coach Rob Keefe, who serves as the Preds football commissioner.
“When you see what the NFL, college football and other professional sports leagues are doing around the country right now in an effort to stem the spread of COVID-19 with tremendous resources at their disposal, it just did not feel right for us to proceed this year, knowing we do not have the same resources and medical experts in place to protect our families,” said Head Coach Rob Keefe. “We encourage all youth football and sports organizations to take a hard look at what they are accomplishing right now by attempting to have fall sports. It may be time for us to concentrate on delivering safe classroom education while finding healthy alternatives to mental and physical engagement for our youth that incorporates the necessary precautions to stop the spread of COVID-19.”
The East Orlando Preds, now the proud feeder program to Colonial High School, will be back and will proceed with the 2021 season when things are safe to do so.
About the East Orlando Preds:
The East Orlando Preds is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and the largest A.A.U Sports Youth Football and Cheer Club in the country. With athletes ranging in age from 5–15 years old, the Preds are designed to introduce, cultivate, and enhance players’ skill and passion for football and cheerleading. The Preds are committed to winning and excellence through positive coaching, encouragement, and youth development. We strive to ensure the success and growth of our young men and women in every facet of their lives, including in the sports arena, and to create leaders, role models, and positive contributors in our communities.
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