There’s a Back to the Future Easter Egg in Luke Cage

Great Scott! Over the weekend, Netflix released all 13 episodes of Marvel’s Luke Cage for its streaming customers. Marvel Entertainment is known for regularly hiding fun Easter eggs in its movies and TV shows, including the slug aliens from Slither in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy and the Bluth family stair car (watch out for hop-ons!) from Arrested Development in Captain America: Civil War. And now, as io9 reports, the comic book studio is referencing Back to the Future’s Doc Brown in a very clever way.

A keen-eyed Redditor noticed a few Back to the Future keywords in a newspaper clipping in “Take It Personal,” the series' tenth episode. It’s during a scene where Detective Misty Knight is going through some microfilm to find out more about Cage’s past. The article in question appears in a single column on the right side with the headline: “Martin Brown Commended: Local Inventor Receives Civic Award,” which is a reference to a newspaper article featuring Doc Brown receiving a very similar award in Back To The Future Part II. 

Leahcimwerf via Reddit

Although the Easter egg doesn’t reference Back to the Future by name (most likely due to copyright issues), the article does call Brown’s invention a “Thrust Capacitor, a device that desalinates ocean water for repurposing,” but could also make time travel possible. It continues to say that the inventor received a lot of criticism for his experiment because he involved a high school student from Mill Valley named Mac Fly in 1985. Furthermore, Brown also stated that time travel wouldn’t be possible until “plutonium is available at every corner drugstore.” Sounds like Back to the Future to us!

This isn’t the first time Marvel has referenced Back to the Future; last year, the company released a variant cover of Cable & Deadpool with the time traveling superhero pair replicating the iconic movie poster from Back to the Future Part II.