The Cloverfield Paradox has been released for almost three weeks now, giving fans plenty of opportunities to pick apart and analyze the film. And apparently, that discovering a few homages to one of J.J. Abrams’ previous works.
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Several Reddit users have pointed out references and Easter eggs to the hit TV show Lost within Paradox. One of the easiest-to-spot homages is in the name of the film’s Shepherd particle accelerator, which shares a name (albeit, with different spelling) with Lost protagonist Jack Shepherd.
From there, quite a few Lost homages can be found within the events of the film – namely, in the ways that several members of the Shepherd crew die. Mundy (Chris O’Dowd) is ultimately killed after his magnetic foam goes haywire and suffocates him against a wall, something that honestly wouldn’t feel out of place with Lost‘s frequent focus on electromagnetism.
And Tam (Ziyi Zhang) is killed through a freak accident while repairing the station, with the crew rushing to her aid as she suffocates from the space air outside. In that moment, Tam put her hand up to the window – something that fans saw as a clear homage to Lost‘s “Not Penny’s Boat” scene.
Aside from that, both properties certainly have a general DNA between the two of them, dealing with time travel, alternate meetings, and the like.
If you believe the “Slushoverse” theory (that is, that almost every J.J. Abrams-related project exists within a grand shared universe, these subtle parallels between Lost and Paradox are sure to make you happy. But as it turns out, they might not have been initially planned in the film’s first draft.
“Originally, it was written by Oren Uziel, who wrote a draft that was its own thing, and was around for a while,” Abrams revealed about Paradox during a recent interview. “We started to think, ‘What are ways that this might fit into the world?’ But when we started shooting the movie, it was still something we were thinking about. Because the idea for the Cloverfield series was not so much that it be this narrative throughline, but more that they be these really fun sort of thrill rides. Like, if you imagine an amusement park, that’s a Cloverfield amusement park, and every ride has a different purpose, but they all connect in some way or another.”
“While we were shooting, we were making adjustments,” Abrams added. “This was a movie that went through many different iterations as it went along.”
That being said, Paradox definitely still does have ties to the previous films in its franchise, ranging from delightful cameos to spine-chilling visual connections.
The Cloverfield Paradox is now streaming on Netflix.
