One of Loki’s New Characters Is Based on a Real Person

The first season of Loki included a somewhat heartbreaking revelation about the TVA. All of the agency’s employees are themselves variants, each with no memory of the real identities and lives they lived on the timeline. It’s a revelation that meant that each of the people that Loki (Tom Hiddleston) had grown close to all had their own unexplored stories and this week’s Season 2 episode of Loki, Episode 5 “Science/Fiction”, offered a glimpse into those lives thanks to the collapse of the Temporal Loom and as it turns out, the true identity of one of Loki’s friends is actually based on a real person — and one of American history’s more interesting mysteries.

Warning: spoilers for the fifth episode of Loki‘s second season beyond this point.

After the Temporal Loom’s explosion, Loki finds himself timeslipping again and one of the first places he timeslips to is a branched timeline at Alcatraz in 1962 San Francisco where he finds Casey (Eugene Cordero). It turns out that in his real life, Casey’s real identity was that of Frank who is orchestrating a prison break with two other men. They begin their escape by boat, but Loki timeslips away.

Frank is based on the real-life Frank Morris who had been sent to Alcatraz in 1960 for burglary and larceny and the two men with him are brothers John and Clarence Anglin (played by Loki directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson). In real life, the trio carried out an escape just as what was portrayed in the episode. The real story has become something of legend with the three men building fake heads using sheets, soap, paint, and even human hair and using them to trick the guards into believing that they were still in bed. The Anglins used spoons and a drill that they build from a vacuum cleaner and, along with another man named Allen West slowly cut their way through the concrete walls of their cells under the cover of Morris’s evening accordion practice which hit the noise. Eventually, on June 11/12, 1962, Morris and the Anglins made a break for it — West couldn’t get out of his cell in time to join them. The trio set off in a boat made from raincoats and a resin that they learned to make from articles from the prison library.

While the trio’s escape was pretty ingenious, it’s also one of modern American history’s more unusual unanswered questions. While the men appear to have made it off of the island, there is also no actual evidence the made it to the shore. The raft was later found with some of their personal effects in a plastic bag and there are plenty of theories about what actually happened to them, but many believe they didn’t make it to shore and drowned. The FBI officially declared them dead in 1979.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that Loki has taken on one of American history’s more fascinating crime mysteries. The Season 1 premiere of Loki revealed that the loveable trickster is actually D.B. Cooper, the notorious perpetrator of the 1971 plane hijacking that remains unsolved to this day. If course, in Loki’s case, he didn’t have a forgotten life as a hijacker; Loki only carried out the infamous crime because he lost a bet with his brother Thor.

Did you catch this Easter Egg in this week’s Loki? Let us know in the comment section!