'The Gifted' May Have Just Made a Dazzler Reference

Tonight's episode of The Gifted included what seems to be a sly Easter egg reference to classic X-Men character Alison Blaire, aka Dazzler.

Spoilers for The Gifted episode seven, "eXtreme measures," follow.

In the episode, Reed Strucker and the mutant Sage worked on cracking the encryption on a pair of computer hard drives that the Mutant Underground stole from the office of a judge in Baton Rouge who is involved with Sentinel Services and Roderick Campbell. One drive is heavily encrypted, but the other cracks more easily.

In the cracked drive, Sage and Reed discover a collection of files on wanted mutants. Specifically, Reed believes that these mutants are on a wish list for mutant powers that Roderick Campbell would like to use for his Hound program.

Among the files is a wanted poster for an unidentified mutant. The mutant is around 18 years old, female, and blonde, and she has the power to manipulate photons, which essentially means she can control light.

This sounds like a pretty accurate description of Dazzler, a mutant who has yet to appear in any of the X-Men live-action movies, though she did get an Easter egg reference in the mall scene of X-Men: Apocalypse.

Dazzler has an interesting history in the Marvel Comics universe because she's a mutant who was not originally created for the X-Men. She did make her first appearance in an X-Men comic book, Uncanny X-Men #130 in 1980, but she was created by Marvel Comics as part of a synergistic deal with Casablanca Records to make a character who could be used in comics, music, and movies.

Those multimedia plans fell through. Instead, Dazzler – a mutant disco singer with the power to convert sound into light – debuted during an early issue of "The Dark Phoenix Saga" before going on to headline her own solo comic book series for 40 issues.

The closest Dazzler ever came to getting that movie was a Marvel Graphic Novel titled Dazzler: The Movie. She also had a four-issue miniseries titled Beauty and the Beast, in which she was paired with the Beast, Hank McCoy.

Eventually, as all mutants seem to eventually, Dazzler joined up with the X-Men and was a part of the team during the "outback era," when the group was believed dead and operated out of an abandoned town in Australia.

Since then, Dazzler has come and gone from the X-Men's ranks and briefly joined up with the European spinoff team Excalibur. More recently she was a member of the all-female Avengers team called A-Force.

Whether Dazzler ever actually appears on The Gifted, or if she's destined to be featured in the movie X-Men: Dark Phoenix as some rumors have suggested, remains to be seen.

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