If you look closely at the trailer, or if you caught the clips shown to Ballroom 20 at San Diego Comic-Con last month, you might have seen an Easter Egg or two hidden within the early Inhumans footage. But there’s one that you probably didn’t catch, revealed exclusively to FANDOM by Inhumans director and executive producer Roel Reine. And the Easter Egg in question is related to the series’ main protagonist, Black Bolt – King of the Inhumans, who has a voice so destructive he communicates only through sign language.
“One that is in the trailer is in Black Bolt’s costume in the comics,” says Reine. “He has a little thing above his head, it’s this little fork thing. When you see the trailer, you’re going to see that he has a ring on, a marital band – and it has that iconography.”
He also revealed that this symbol also features in Medusa’s ring. Medusa is married to Black Bolt: “Medusa has the same thing but hers is upside down – like [the symbols for] a woman and a man. Those things I love.”
The Dutch director helmed the first two Inhumans episodes which are due to premiere on Imax screens worldwide ahead of the show’s autumn TV release.
Reine also spoke about another Easter Egg he sneaked into production, and it references the Kree.
“The Kree are kind of the gods of the Marvel characters and the Kree have a very specific language,” he explains. “When you see the scenes in the throne room, you see the iconography of the Kree language on the walls. These kind of hieroglyphs [are] what I asked the production designer to put in. For me, there’s a lot of connections and tie-ins [throughout] but they’re very secret.”
His love of Easter Eggs is something he shared during a Q&A which followed a screening of Inhumans footage in the UK this week: “I put in a lot of Easter Eggs in my two episode because I love this kind of stuff.”
While he wouldn’t say much about where Inhumans sits in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he did refer to the connection between this show and another Marvel series, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
“The Terrigenesis process and the Mist… I looked at the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes where they did the same thing,” he says. “So, we copied the process of how it visually looks.”
And if you’re wondering what on earth the Terrigenesis process is, Reine explains in his own words: “The Kree have these crystals … when they vaporize, there’s this Terrigen Mist. And this mist – there’s a ritual when you are a certain age as an Inhuman where you go into a chamber and [undergo] this process. It’s kind of a bar mitzvah for Inhumans. So they [go through] this process, and then they [find] out what their Inhuman power is; what their superpower is.”
“Some of them are very lucky. They get a really good superpower, [and] they cannot speak the rest of their lives because they will destroy worlds with their voice. And the other ones will have a claw and they have to dig in the mines in the Attilan city.”
“The result is there’s a caste system in the Inhumans’ world, and when you have a good superpower you are at the top of the caste and if you have a bad superpower you are in the lower caste. This makes this world not really good.”
Somehow, we doubt that Terrigen Mist will be the only obvious connection to the wider Marvel universe.
You can experience the first chapter of Marvel’s Inhumans exclusively in IMAX from September 1. Follow the entire series on TV and other devices soon after.