Ke Huy Quan’s OB Is Just Data From The Goonies (In The Best Ways Possible)

To drive home the light-hearted connection with Data even further, “Loki” executive producer Kevin Wright described exactly what OB does in the show, telling Entertainment Weekly, “His job is basically every piece of tech, every computer, every thing that is running at the TVA, he either designed it, or he fixes it and keeps it running.” That sounds a lot like Data, doesn’t it?

As it turns out, OB’s help is needed fairly early on, so fans won’t have to wait long to see Quan’s affable new character. In the season 2 premiere, Loki begins experiencing a rare anomaly causing him to jump in and out of time, sending him hurtling into specific moments from the past, present, and future. The effect looks painful and hilarious at the same time, an observation Mobius points out just before they travel down a dingy elevator to pay a visit to OB in hopes of finding out a way to stop Loki from time slipping. Hilariously, OB recalls that he hasn’t seen Mobius for 400 years, also revealing that he never sleeps. He just fixes things. In that moment, Loki blips back to the past allowing him to meet OB again for the first time. 

In an ingenious bit of time-splaining exposition, OB tells Loki he must prune himself to remove himself from time which, theoretically, would free him from time slipping. For that to happen, they need a Temporal Aura Extractor (of course!), a clunky device that OB builds in the past making it instantly available to Loki and Mobius in the present. The entire exchange only lasts a few minutes, but Quan already makes OB incredibly endearing, giving the character little eccentricities like repeating himself multiple times just like Data would probably do too as an adult.