‘Defenders’ Easter Eggs: 12 Things You May Have Missed

The first episode of Defenders is essentially four mini-installments of the titular quartet’s individual series. And, just like in the Luke Cage series, Mike Colter’s quarter of the story is packed with music. It even includes an Easter egg to one of Luke Cage’s most talked about music scenes. Episode five of Cage kicked off with a performance of “Long Live the Chief” from the nattily dressed rapper Jidenna.

In Defenders, you can see a poster of the “Long Live the Chief” single art hanging on the wall in Cole’s Harlem apartment in episode one.

Episode two of Defenders features an encounter that Marvel fans have been waiting years, possibly even decades to see on-screen. Danny Rand, a.k.a. the Immortal Iron Fist, and Colleen Wing find a group of Hand lackeys disposing of bodies. Rand and Wing intervene, and the fight spills out into an alleyway. That’s where it’s revealed that one of the lackeys is Cole, the Jidenna fan. And that’s why Luke Cage, the hero of Harlem that’s been keeping an eye on Cole, gets involved.

Iron Fist and Luke Cage throw down, with only Danny’s namesake super fist budging the unbreakable Cage. But this isn’t just the meeting of two of Netflix’s Defenders; it’s also the first encounter between two characters whose fates have been intertwined in the comics since Power Man #48 in 1977. Power Man, BTW, is Luke Cage’s old comic book codename.

Power Man and Iron Fist ran from 1977 to 1986, and the two characters have also rarely been apart in the following 30 years. In addition to stints together on the Avengers, the two have starred in more recent Power Man and Iron Fist series (the most recent one concluded this year). Luke and Danny are so close that Luke and Jessica Jones even named their daughter Danielle. Whether or not Finn Jones and Colter will get to explore their chemistry more on the small screen remains unknown, but there’s an exciting and extensive precedent for it.

Things don’t go so well for Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) in episode two. Not only does she stumble upon on a hotel room filled with explosives, she gets the brains of a Hand-employed architect splattered all over her apartment. All of this leads to Detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick) bringing Jess in for questioning about, like, a lot of things.

And just as things are getting heated, that’s when Matt Murdock (a.k.a. Daredevil, a.k.a. Charlie Cox) busts in and proclaims that he’s Jessica’s lawyer. That moment actually occurred in the comics, way way early in Jessica Jones’ story. The scene pretty much plays out the same way in 2002’s Alias #3, although it’s a much different case and Misty Knight isn’t involved. Still, this is a direct homage to the comics, one that Alias fans have been waiting to see for a while.

Marvel Comics writer/editor/creator/spokesman/mascot/legend Stan Lee appears in pretty much every single Marvel Studios property, be it a film or a television series. While Lee makes physical cameos in the Marvel movies, usually with a line of dialogue, he appears in the Netflix shows in a photograph of NYPD police captain Irving Forbush. That photo of Lee as Captain Forbush pops up in every police precinct seen in the Netflix shows, or in advertisements placed throughout Marvel’s New York City. That’s what happens in Defenders, in episode three. As Matt sneakily follows Jessica through the city, they both pass a big ad featuring the oft repeated photo.

Similar to Luke Cage and Iron Fist’s first encounter in episode two, episode five features another major meeting–this time between Misty Knight and Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick). In the comics, these two have been partners since 1975’s Marvel Premiere #21, an issue that came out just a few months after both Knight and Wing debuted independently of each other. These two have been crime-fighting partners and best friends from basically the beginning. In the comics, the pair run a detective agency called Knightwing Restorations, and the duo is also known as the Daughters of the Dragon (sidenote: when Colleen became a cage fighter in Netflix’s Iron Fist, she used the name Daughter of the Dragon). The two first meet in episode five of Defenders, when Colleen is brought into Misty’s precinct for protection against the Hand; the two are also together in the final episode during the battle against Bakuto, which pushed Misty closer to becoming a superhero. These two will be reunited onscreen, too, as it’s been revealed that Missick is joining the cast of Iron Fist Season Two.

In what could be a subtle nod to the classic Luke Cage comics of the ’70s and ’80s, the Defenders hole up in what looks like an abandoned theater for the middle chunk of the season. In the comics, Luke Cage made a theater just outside of Times Square named the Gem Theater his base of operations. Cage rented an office above the theater, and that served as the HQ for his Heroes For Hire operation until the place was wrecked by supervillains. The theater was rebuilt and, more recently, housed Luke’s family and his team of street-level Avengers.

Elektra and the Hand go together like a hand and glove. Just like in The Defenders, Elektra was brought back from the dead by the ancient ninja organization in the comics. And just like in the comics, Elodie Yung’s live-action Elektra eventually rose through the ranks to become their leader.

Of course it got a lot more complicated in the comics. In that storyline, the Elektra that took control of the Hand and led them in a fight against Luke Cage and the New Avengers was revealed to be a shapeshifting alien imposter. In reality, Elektra had been kidnapped by the aliens (the Skrulls) and her lookalike assumed command of the evil organization. That isn’t what happened in The Defenders, and definitely don’t read too much into it (the Skrulls are gonna be a Marvel movie thing and the movies and Netflix shows don’t interact), but it’s an interesting fact nonetheless.

As alluded to above, Misty Knight’s well on her way to becoming a superhero thanks to that serious injury she suffers in the season finale. The badass detective got her arm sliced off by Bakuto while saving Claire Temple’s (Rosario Dawson) life, and wakes up in the hospital feeling not quite whole. This is a truly upsetting development for Misty, but fans of the comics know that Knight’s had a super strong and super high tech bionic arm since her first appearance. This injury puts her one step closer to becoming the superhero she’s been in the comics (not that TV Misty isn’t already a force to be reckoned with).

There’s also another Easter egg in Misty’s hospital room, and you can see it right over Colleen’s shoulder. The patient care board reveals that Misty’s being looked after by a Nurse Linda Carter, a character known as Night Nurse in the comics. And here’s where it gets confusing!

If “Night Nurse” sounds familiar, that’s because its what fans have been calling Claire Temple (Dawson’s character) for the past two years. But Claire Temple has actually never been Night Nurse in the comics; that title was originally held by a character named Linda Carter, who debuted in a 1961 proto-Marvel teen comic called Linda Carter, Student Nurse. Claire Temple, a nurse character that was a cast member in the ’70s and ’80s Power Man and Iron Fist, was put into the Night Nurse role when she was cast in the Netflix shows (although she’s never been called that).

To make matters even more confusing, there’s another Night Nurse–Christine Palmer–that was played by Rachel McAdams in Doctor Strange. She was never called Night Nurse in that movie and, brace yourself for more confusion, it was actually the Linda Carter character that hooked up with Doctor Strange in the comics.

So anyway, Linda Carter, Christine Palmer, and Claire Temple are all nurses in the Marvel Universe. Two of them have been Night Nurses (Carter and Palmer), two have hooked up with Doctor Strange (Carter in the comics, Palmer in the movie), and two have live-action counterparts (Palmer and Temple), and none of them have actually been called Night Nurse in a Marvel movie or TV show.

Additionally, the patient care board features the name “Dr. E. Wirtham,” which is a reference to the Spider-Man comic book villain Cardiac, a surgeon whose real name is Elias Wirtham. And also on the board are the names of Misty Knight’s two creators, writer Tony Isabella and artist Arvell Jones.

After working together to stop the Hand, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones finally have a quiet heart-to-heart in the final episode. These ex-lovers had a lot to talk about, considering the last time they saw each other Cage had just learned that Jones killed his girlfriend Reva while under the control of the villain Kilgrave. Murder, even done under mind control, is a big hurdle in any relationship.

But Luke and Jess have an honest talk, and they end on good terms with Luke telling the private eye that she always has a friend in Harlem. And then Jess says “maybe we’ll grab a coffee sometime or something.” Did you catch the double entendre?

In Luke Cage, “coffee”–as in, “come up for coffee” or “let’s go get coffee”–is basically a stand-in for going to the bone zone. Is Jessica using it in that way? Maybe? The word choice definitely registers with Luke, though. And this is a big moment because Luke and Jessica are a power couple in the comics and, as writer Brian Michael Bendis told us, they’re the rare fictional couple that’s built to last. Is that in the cards for Ritter and Colter? We’ll have to wait and see if these two ever do get a cup of coffee…

In the last scene of The Defenders, a battered and bandaged Matt Murdock wakes up in the care of nuns. Where is he? How long has he been out? How did he survive having a skyscraper dropped on him? These are questions for another time. What we do know, though, is that he’s in the care of someone named “Maggie.”

In the comics, Daredevil’s mother is a nun named Maggie.

Daredevil was raised by a single father, the boxer Jack Murdock. We saw him in flashbacks in Season One, and we saw his sad fate after running afoul of the mob. Matt’s mom has been M.I.A., and the show hasn’t really explained her absence. It looks like Daredevil Season Three might get into that, possibly as part of an even bigger–and more dangerous–storyline.

While the Punisher didn’t show up during the course of The Defenders, he still got involved in a rather roundabout way. If you stuck around through the credits of the final episode, even as Netflix urged you to stream something else, you were treated to a teaser for the upcoming Punisher TV series. This first look at the show featured little in the way of plot, instead focusing on a montage of intense scenes from Frank Castle’s past and present. Netflix officially released the teaser on its own on Monday, and you can see it below.

Where to stream Marvel's the Defenders