Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Easter Eggs and Marvel Comics References in “The Only Light In the Darkness”

This week’s episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a bit of a return to form for the show; while the last few weeks have been chock full of more Marvel Comics references than you can count, this week’s was pretty nominal — and mostly front-loaded to the first act.Once the action got rolling, there wasn’t a lot of time for them. That didn’t stop the fact that this is one of the rare episodes to actually revolve around a Marvel Comics villain, though, and that while “the cellist” wasn’t exactly a comic book character first, she’s certainly a part of the mythology of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and somebody fans have been eager to meet.And on that note, we’ll start our regular rundown of the Easter eggs and Marvel Comics references we noticed by ripping off the Band-Aid and getting the really big ones out of the way:

“The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She’s exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She’s exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her “flaws” are obviously meant to be endearing.”

Once they explained what it was that powered blackout, fans might have recognized “Darkforce” as the name given to a negative energy drawn from a dimension near our own. A number of Marvel Comics characters can tap into it, sometimes as part of their standard power set and sometimes through magic. In addition to sapping the energy of others as seen in this episode, it allows people and objects to be moved from place to place in our dimension rapidly by using the Darkforce dimension to seemingly teleport.“Steve Rogers here…How do you convince a guy who wants to be a Howling Commando to do your bidding? Impugn his courage and masculinity by holding him up to the standard of Captain America.