For some fans, hunting for hidden Easter eggs in movies and television shows is a badge of honor; they like to see how many they can find on repeat viewings compared to friends (or journalists).
While the Marvel Cinematic Universe usually puts most of its Easter eggs in movies on the big screen, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is no slouch when it comes to sharing the love for its source material and other Marvel properties.
Over the course of four seasons, there have been tons of Disney and Marvel comic book references, nods to the MCU’s movies, and even connections to the Netflix shows. We can’t list them all for you as this list would then include hundreds of items, but we’ve got a selection from all 88 episodes that have aired so far -- plus a few from the season five premiere.
You won’t find the big ones, like Bucky Barnes on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy’s Wall of Valor, here, but we’ve tried to find ones that might have escaped even the most diehard of fans’ notice, or moments early in the series that foreshadowed some major events.
Here are the 25 Things You Completely Missed In Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Foreshadowing
The first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was full of some surprising foreshadowing.
In the very first episode, not only did Mike Peterson (who became Deathlok) tell his boss that he couldn’t use people like they were pieces of machinery, but Coulson remarked that they “didn’t cut the head off the centipede” in reference to helping save Mike. CENTIPEDE was later revealed to be part of Hydra where if you “cut off one head, two more take its place.”
The episode also had Skye (now Daisy) ask May if piloting an alien spaceship was on her bucket list. Promotional footage of season five shows May doing just that.
In other heartbreaking foreshadowing, Ward asks Fitz how long he can hold his breath underwater when the two are captured on a mission together. Fitz found out when Ward threw him and Simmons into the middle of the ocean at season’s end.
That’s just a small sampling of how creative the writers were with foreshadowing later events.
Skrulls
Some comic book fans found it interesting that “embrace the change” was an often used bit of dialogue in the first season of the show as it was also a common phrase in the Secret Invasion comics, which involved an alien race called the Skrulls taking the place of many heroes and villains. Really, they should have been paying attention to writing on the wall as well.
In both “Eye-Spy” and “Beginning of the End”, fans got a tease of what they would later find out was the Kree writing for a map of an ancient city. The original equations and writing seen in the first appearance also featured the use of the Skrull alphabet though.
This is particularly interesting since fans now know the among the heroes the whole time?
The Judas Bullet
Just as audiences were getting to know S.H.I.E.L.D.’s new director Jeffrey Mace in season four, he was almost taken out by a sniper. This sniper didn’t have regular bullets, though, but special exploding bullets that first appeared in the first season of Luke Cage.
The Judas bullet, so named because, “if you need to kill Jesus, this is what you use,” were created from Chitauri metal salvaged from the Battle of New York that occurred during The Avengers.
They were developed by HAMMER Industries, a company that made its debut in the Iron Man movies, but found their way to the streets when Justin Hammer was in prison. The bullet was first used to pierce Luke Cage’s unbreakable skin in his solo series before another version was made for the police.
Like the Marvel producers like to remind us, it’s all connected.
Season Five Gets Cheeky
Superhero shows tend to love their meta humor -- referencing fan reactions and real world criticisms -- and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. got to do a little of that with its season five premiere.
Marvel shared the first act of the season five premiere at New York Comic Con, and then released it online right before the premiere to get fans hyped for the new season. The clip, which involves most of the main characters meeting new people (and alien creatures) on what looks like a space station featured a couple of nods to some of Marvel’s other cosmic properties.
Elena remarked that she was sure S.H.I.E.L.D. had a division called S.P.E.A.R. in outer space, or even a base on the moon. The former is a nod to fans constantly asking the showrunner’s if S.H.I.E.L.D.’s space division, S.W.O.R.D., from the comics will make it into the show, while the latter is a nod to the Inhumans having a hidden city on the moon.
R2-D2
The show’s writers have made no secret of their love for the Star Wars franchises with Mockingbird sporting Star Wars tees and Koenig having logoed bed sheets. They even went so far as to have Coulson equate Maveth with Tatooine, but VFX Supervisor Mark Coulson snuck in a really hidden gem.
Kolpack enjoys interacting with fans on twitter, and informed them that he hid an Easter egg in the season four finale that would be difficult for them to spot. After a lot of searching, a few fans pointed it out to him on the social media site -- R2-D2.
In the close of the season four finale, Coulson is seen looking out on a field of space debris. One of those pieces of debris? Not just a chunk of rock. Kolpack designed it to look like R2-D2.
Roxxon Oil
Comic book fans know that Roxxon Oil’s owners and employees have done their fair share of bad deeds on the page, but so far, they’ve mostly been given Easter egg status in the MCU.
The company appeared in its early days (with an antagonistic owner) during ABC’s short lived Agent Carter series, and the company has either had signs in the skyline or been namechecked in other corners, but on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it’s been the company behind a gas station.
In the season one episode “Repairs”, it’s a Roxxon gas station where the sales person blames his customer for the death of a friend. As it turns out that customer is being “haunted” by someone who is caught between two different dimensions, and when items start flying around, it’s not her causing it, but his “ghost.”
Singing To D.W.A.R.F.s
If there’s one thing an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. likes, it’s a good acronym. In the pilot episode of the show, the audience is introduced to the Drones Wirelessly Automated to Receive Forensics, or D.W.A.R.F.s, and that name is no accident.
Each of the drones has a specified function when it comes to gathering data, and all seven are named after Snow White’s dwarves that provide her shelter from the evil queen in her fairy tale.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Walt Disney’s first animated major motion picture with a world-wide marketing blitz, so it’s fitting that it got a shout out in the pilot episode as Fitz sang “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work you go” to his machines.
The D.W.A.R.F.s have appeared less as the show has gone on, so fans hoping for more Snow White references will have to look elsewhere. They only appeared in a single episode in season two and again in season three.
The Thunderstick
The season one episode “0-8-4” isn’t looked upon as favorably as the pilot, but it does have that hallmark snappy Whedon dialogue and the fostering of teamwork. Long time Whedon fans might also recognize one specific weapon.
As the S.H.I.E.L.D. team struggles to escape a firefight in an ancient temple in Peru, Agent Ward pulls out a metal stick, ejecting the top, and sending out a kind of shockwave to knock their enemies down. Known as a thunderstick, it’s got roots in another Whedon project.
A different version of the weapon was used in the movie Serenity in a similar situation as Simon rescued his sister from a government facility, which predated the television series by a few years. Joss Whedon, of course, was an executive producer and writer for both.
The thunderstick has only appeared in season one of the show. Of course, with someone like Daisy Johnson learning to quake, the agents don’t really need it in later seasons.
Rocky Mountain Office Supply
It might have seemed innocent enough in the season one episode “The Asset”, but the Rocky Mountain Office Supply truck that opened the episode was actually hiding Dr. Franklin Hall, and it was a nod to his comic book backstory.
Dr. Hall invented Gravitonium, which turned gravity on its head. At the end of his appearance, he ended up sucked inside his own invention, and hasn’t been seen again. That all happened in Morocco, but in the comics, the accident happened somewhere else.
In the comics, he was working in a laboratory in the Canadian Rockies, hence the name of the show’s supply truck, when he made a mistake while working with a teleportation device and ended up fusing his own molecules with graviton particles.
He went on to become the villain Graviton, something we haven’t yet seen paid off in the MCU, but it could still happen since the Gravitonium that houses him was given to the villain Ian Quinn.
A Familiar Barn
It’s no secret that television shows reuse the same sets and locations. It’s an easy way for the production team to save on expenses. There’s less location scouting and preparation involved if you’ve already been there once. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has redressed one barn that might look familiar.
In the episode “Repairs”, the barn where Agent May and Hannah Hutchins confront the man caught between dimensions is the same barn where the body of a firefighter was found floating in “F.Z.Z.T.” With the events of one episode set in the middle of the night and one in the middle of the day, it’s easy to make them look different for the audience.
The same barn was originally built for Big Top Pee-Wee.