‘The Gifted’ Includes An Easter Egg Referencing A Legendary X-Men Creator

Tonight’s episode of The Gifted paid tribute to the creator who is arguably most responsible for making the X-Men the perennial fan-favorite characters they are today.

SPOILERS for The Gifted episode six, “got your siX,” follow.

While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are responsible for creating the concept of the X-Men, and Len Wein and Dave Cockrum are responsible for creating many of the team’s most popular characters, writer Chris Claremont is considered to be the creator who molded that concept and those characters into the X-Men as fans know them today during his legendary 17 years writing Uncanny X-Men for Marvel Comics.

The Gifted gave Claremont a shoutout in “got your siX.” The episode sees Eclipse, Reed Strucker, and Andy Strucker set out to break into the federal building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In order to make the trip from Atlanta to Baton Rouge undetected, the group piles into a tractor-trailer.

As a cover, the trailer is made up to look like it belongs to a moving company. The company’s name is “Claremont Interstate Movers.”

The isn’t the first time that Fox’s X-Men franchise has paid tribute to Chris Claremont. He has had two cameos in two separate X-Men movies. In 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, Claremont appears, credited as “Lawnmower man,” during the opening flashback scene revealing the first time that Professor X and Magneto met Jean Grey. In 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, Claremont sat beside Len Wein as members of the Congressional committee investigating mutant affairs.

Claremont was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2015. His long run on X-Men wasn’t only contained to Uncanny X-Men, which featured the classic stories “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past.” In 1991, he wrote X-Men #1, the first issue of the spinoff series that remains the best-selling comic book of all time. Claremont also co-created spinoff series The New Mutants and Excalibur and wrote Wolverine’s first solo series.

Claremont co-created some of the X-Men’s best-known characters, including Rogue, Psylocke, Kitty Pryde, Mystique, Emma Frost, Jubilee, Sabretooth, Legion, Mister Sinister, and Gambit.

The Gifted airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on Fox.