A three-year-old scene of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki hiding among his own shadow doubles is back at the top of Marvel’s YouTube channel. Marvel Entertainment uploaded the 4-minute, 24-second chase, labeled “It’s Not a Fair Fight,” in 4K on Tuesday, October 27, and by Wednesday evening it had passed 1.2 million views.
There is no new season behind it. The footage comes from “Breaking Brad,” the second episode of Loki’s second season, which first streamed on Disney+ on October 12, 2023. The upload’s description simply points viewers back to the show on Disney+, and Marvel has filed it in a running playlist of remastered clips from across its film and TV catalog.
The timing still says plenty. Hiddleston is in the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, which opens in UK cinemas on December 16 and in more than 4,000 US theaters on December 18, and he has said the Disney+ series was his starting point for the film.
Why a 2023 chase is suddenly useful again
Marvel spent the autumn reminding audiences who matters before Doomsday. The September re-release of Avengers: Endgame, branded Avengers Endgame: Encore, added scenes shot during the new film’s production. Owen Wilson’s Mobius, Ke Huy Quan’s Ouroboros, Eugene Cordero’s Casey and Tara Strong’s Miss Minutes all turned up in that extra footage, and all are expected back in December.
That makes this scene a tidy refresher. It pairs Loki with Mobius, the Time Variance Authority agent who became the show’s heart, and it shows the trickster version of the character that Hiddleston carried from the films into the series.
We counted the pace. The clip went live at 7:00 a.m. Pacific on October 27 and showed 1,223,457 views when we checked about 27 hours later, which works out to roughly 45,000 views an hour (1,223,457 divided by 27). It had 9,669 likes at the same moment. As of October 28, Doomsday is 51 days from its US opening, and a catalog upload doing those numbers tells Marvel the Loki audience is still awake.
Where this scene sits in the Loki timeline
- October 12, 2023: “Breaking Brad” streams on Disney+, and a short sneak peek of the chase goes out the same day.
- Week of October 9-15, 2023: Loki ranks fourth among original streaming series in the US, with 588 million minutes watched.
- March 2025: Hiddleston is among 26 Doomsday cast members Marvel announces.
- September 2026: Avengers Endgame: Encore brings Mobius and other TVA characters back in new scenes.
- October 27, 2026: Marvel posts the full chase in 4K.
- December 18, 2026: Avengers: Doomsday opens in the US.
The clip itself: what works and what does not
In the episode, Loki and Mobius go hunting for Hunter X-5, a rogue TVA agent played by Rafael Casal. They find him in London in 1977, where he has slipped back into his old life on the Sacred Timeline as a film star called Brad Wolfe. Wolfe bolts, gets past Hunter B-15 and knocks Mobius down, and Loki ends the pursuit with magic.
The fun is in how he does it. Casal’s character keeps swinging at Lokis who dissolve into shadow, then complains, “You quit with the magic and fight fair!” Hiddleston answers with the line that gives the clip its title: “It’s not a fair fight!” Mobius, arriving late, asks, “A little over the top, don’t you think? All the shadow play?” The real Loki steps out to reply, “I thought it was spot-on.”
That shadow play almost did not exist. Director Dan DeLeeuw, a longtime Marvel visual effects supervisor, has explained that an early script had a car chase here, which he felt “didn’t make a lot of sense” for Loki. He steered the sequence toward the darker, more theatrical Loki of the early films, building gags around the horned silhouette. The episode also carries added film grain so its 1970s and 1980s settings read as period footage, a texture that survives nicely in the 4K version.
Now the fair critique. The episode drew warm notices in 2023 for its visuals, DeLeeuw’s direction and the three central performances, with Casal singled out for holding his own against Hiddleston and Wilson. The same reviews faulted its storytelling, and the chase is a good example: it is a slick set piece that pauses the plot rather than moving it. Out of context it plays better than it did mid-season, which may be exactly why Marvel picked it.
Viewers expecting a hint about Loki’s role in Doomsday will also come away empty-handed. Not one frame is new; it is a sharper copy of something that has streamed since 2023, and the upload makes no claim otherwise.
The next official Marvel recap lands sooner than the film. The Countdown to Avengers: Doomsday podcast returns with six weekly episodes on the Multiverse Saga starting November 5.
Further reading
Image: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
