‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ Drops ‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix’ Easter Egg

American Horror Story: Apocalypse was packed with quite a few surprises tonight in “Forbidden Fruit”, but Marvel fans the biggest may just be a clever episode to X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

Warning: spoilers for American Horror Story: Apocalypse “Forbidden Fruit” below.

Last week, FX’s horror anthology series took made an interesting play on the fact that one of the series stars, Evan Peters, also plays Quicksilver in Fox’s X-Men franchise by including Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle”, but as we saw in this week’s episode the references to the world of Marvel’s superhero movies didn’t end there.

During her one-on-one meeting with Michael Langdon (Cody Fern), Mallory (Billie Lourd) has an emotional outburst that results in flames shooting from the fireplace, not to mention Michael potentially having shown his true, demonic face. It’s an experience that rattles her so much that later, when she hears Mr. Gallant (Peters) speaking about his unusual meeting, she tries to find out if he ended up with weird powers, too. Trying to describe what happened, Mallory suggests that maybe the radiation from the nuclear blasts changed her and gave her powers, turning her into the Dark Phoenix.

In comics, the Dark Phoenix is an extremely powerful entity manifested by Jean Grey. A manifestation of the Phoenix Force, an immortal and immutable manifestation of the universal force of life and passion that is usually represented with fire. It’s that character that is central to the upcoming X-Men film, Dark Phoenix, in which Jean (Sophie Turner) will interact with a dangerous entity while on a mission in space, and it causes something terrifying to awaken inside of her, leading Jean to spiral out of control as a threat not only to the team but the world. Mallory’s mention of the Dark Phoenix is particularly noteworthy as it’s made to Peters’ character, and Peters will reprise his role as Quicksilver in the Dark Phoenix film.

X-Men fans have patiently been waiting to see another film in the proper franchise, with the last glimpse of the characters being in Deadpool 2 when the Merc with a Mouth explored Professor Xavier’s mansion. Peters appeared in the scene and, though it was brief in the finished film, teased that multiple versions of the scene were filmed, some of which fit more in line with Deadpool’s mature tone.

“We were shooting [X-Men: Dark Phoenix] and were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do a quick thing for Deadpool 2,’” Peters shared with CinemaBlend. “And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome!’ I thought it was going to be at the end of the film, in the credits, like some sort of funny Easter egg thing. And we had a lot of different versions for when they open that door and turn to us. But the one they used was pretty chill, and was in the first half of the film, which I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus, that’s kind of weird.’”

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is currently filming reshoots with a scheduled release of February 14, 2019. Earlier this year, a deal was closed between 20th Century Fox and Disney, which will allow the X-Men franchise to be fully embraced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, possibly allowing Peters to somehow be involved in that franchise as Quicksilver.

American Horror Story airs Wednesday nights on FX.