You Probably Missed This X-Men Easter Egg in 'Wolverine: The Long Night'

Marvel’s excellent new murder-mystery podcast about Wolverine feels totally familiar yet marvelously fresh, and even though Logan seems like perhaps the only mutant we’ll meet on the show, the second episode might’ve included a pretty big Easter egg for comics fans.

On Monday, Marvel and Stitcher released the first two episodes of Wolverine: The Long Night, a dramatic podcast series set in Alaska that follows two Special Agents investigating a string of grisly murders. Naturally, Logan becomes a suspect. While this Wolverine story feels familiar with it’s setting in the far northern reaches of North America, the plot itself borrows very little from comics. But there’s one cameo of a sort that pops up in Episode 2.

Spoilers follow for Wolverine: The Long Night and, surprisingly enough, Old Man Logan.

We don’t meet Logan or even hear his voice until the very end of Episode 2, when the two detectives read a letter he wrote explaining why he retreated to live by himself in the Alaskan wilderness.

As it turns out, Logan’s on the run from the Weapon X program, which means he already has adamantium but probably hasn’t met the X-Men just yet — if they even exist. He writes something of a goodbye letter to a woman named “Maureen.” They were living together in New Orleans and Logan was at a bar when a gunman opened fire in the French Quarter. So what did he do? In a fit of rage, Logan rushed up to the man and beheaded him, all while cameras were watching.

So Logan had to run because he didn’t want to attract more violence and hurt the people closest to him. This is the definitive version of the character at his most fundamental.

Just listen to the visceral intensity of this monologue read by Richard Armitage as Logan, which is his unsent letter to Maureen as explanation:

“I came back home and found you asleep. … You know what my mind did? I saw … I saw every organ, every vertebra, every nerve, every artery, every bone, every way to hurt you. That’s how I look at everybody, you know. It doesn’t matter if it’s a shooter in the French Quarter or a kid eating ice cream on a park bench … or even you, Maureen. That’s how I understand people best: as things that scream and bleed, things that can be taken apart.”

The thing is, Maureen is actually Logan’s wife in several comics storylines, including Old Man Logan:

50 years in the future, Logan returned to the Weapon X facility where he was infused with adamantium, where Maureen and a number of other people had taken refuge. Eventually the two of them married and had two children — Jade and Scotty Logan — on a farm in California.

It’s just too bad that the Hulk’s children “got bored” while Logan was away and killed all three of them.

Hugh Jackman’s last venture in the role of Wolverine in Logan very loosely adapted from the Old Man Logan story, so it’s interesting that the next-most-recent story featuring the character also has a loose tie to that story.

So far Wolverine: The Long Night doesn’t bear even a striking resemblance to anything from Old Man Logan, but the inclusion of a woman named Maureen as a love interest to Logan is too significant to be just a coincidence.

New episodes of Wolverine: The Long Night come out every Monday on Stitcher Premium.