10 Best Easter Eggs in TV History (VIDEO)
Creators have been hiding Easter eggs in media for at least half a century now. You might recall that video game designers hid secret outcomes in early computer games like 1973’s Moonlander and 1980’s Adventure.
In fact, it’s former Atari software director Steve Wright who gets credit for calling such secrets “Easter eggs.” Other Atari bosses were angry that Adventure designer Warren Robinett hid his name in a level of the game, but not Wright. “I said, ‘No, this is great! It’s an Easter egg in the game, and the kids love finding it. We should encourage all of the game programmers to add Easter eggs to all their games,’” Wright later recalled, per Paste.
Easter eggs are all over television, too. Sometimes they hint at future plot twists. Sometimes they seem like throwaway details until years later. Sometimes they connect disparate-seeming stories into a shared universe. And sometimes they’re just for laughs. Here are our 10 favorite — so far, at least.
10. The number 83 in How I Met Your Mother
Ted (Josh Radnor) points out that Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) always uses “83 percent” when making up statistics, but Barney utters the number 83 — or the consecutive digits 8 and 3 — in many more contexts in How I Met Your Mother. “Never in the history of New York City nightclubs has there been a shortage of dudes, not even during the Great Dude Shortage of 1883,” he tells Ted at one point.
9. The Bad Place clues in The Good Place
If fans of The Good Place rewatch Season 1, they’ll see clues that foreshadow the season-finale reveal that the Good Place shown so far on the comedy series was actually the Bad Place all along. For example, Jason (Manny Jacinto) voices a suspicion that he’s living in a prank show, Chidi (William Jackson Harper) wonders why he still gets stomaches in a perfect utopia, and both Chidi and Eleanor (Kristen Bell) still have to do chores in this supposed heaven (including taking out the trash with less-than-magical trash bags).
8. The letter A in The Walking Dead
For years, The Walking Dead viewers scratched their head over the many onscreen appearances of the letter A. They spotted the letter on a train car, on the sides of buildings, on a stamp with which Sam Anderson (Major Dodson) marks Rick Grimes (Anne), and on the storage container in which Anne a.k.a. Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) traps Rick, and various other places.
Fans finally got a possible explanation in the first episode of the spinoff series The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, as Rick and Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt) talk with Civic Republic Military officer Donald Okafor (Craig Tate). “The CRM designates people they find as A’s and B’s. A’s have a strength. A’s will die for what they believe in. People follow A’s,” Okafor tells them. “The people we cross in the world, the few we bring in, they’re classified as B’s. Everyday people who are just trying to survive. B’s get in. A’s are sent away and killed, except you two.”
7. “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” in Black Mirror
After Jessica Brown Findlay’s character sang Irma Thomas’ 1964 single “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” in Black Mirror’s first-season episode “Fifteen Million Merits,” the same song popped up in Season 2’s “White Christmas,” Season 3’s “Men Against Fire,” Season 4’s “Crocodile,” Season 5’s “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” and Season 6’s “Joan Is Awful.”
Co-showrunner Annabel Jones told TheWrap in 2018 that Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker “has loved [the song] for a long time” and “liked the idea of nesting all the episodes together in an artistic universe of sorts.”
6. The White Bear symbol in Black Mirror
Symbol seen in White Bear episode of Black Mirror is also a main focus of Bandersnatch, wonder if they are relevant to eachother? #Bandersnatch pic.twitter.com/XjS0FWfsyw
— Louis (@ItvLouis) December 28, 2018
In another recurring Black Mirror Easter egg, the same three-pronged symbol that haunts Victoria (Lenora Crichlow) in the Season 2 episode “White Bear” pops up again and again in the series, especially in the interactive special, “Bandersnatch.”
“Well, that was a happy accident, in that, in the early stages of discussing how we do this — when we were mapping it out in the very early stages — we were drawing a flowchart on the white board and I noticed the drawings to the path splitting into two separate things,” Brooker explained to TheWrap in 2019. “So we thought, Oh, my God! That’s the symbol of ‘White Bear’! So we gotta use that. And then we leaned heavily into that.”
5. The number 47 in Alias
The number 47 was shown or cited dozens of times in the espionage series Alias. In one of the most significant appearances, double agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is shocked to see her own visage depicted on page 47 of the Rambaldi manuscript, implicating her in a centuries-old prophecy. (“Unless prevented, at vulgar cost, this woman will render the greatest power unto utter desolation,” Rambaldi warned.)
4. The glyphs in Fringe
A code was hidden in the glyphs that appeared on screen before each commercial break of this sci-fi series, another J.J. Abrams creation. By the end of the first season, an Ars Technica editor had identified the code as a substitution cipher, finding that the images each referred to a different letter of the alphabet, based what object appears in the glyph, the position of that object, and the position of a glowing yellow dot hovering nearby. In the video above, for instance, the glyphs from the Season 2 episode “The Bishop Revival” spell out the word “father,” a word significant to that episode’s plot.
3. The numbers in Lost
Numbers played a big role in this Abrams show, too — 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 made frequent appearances. Hurley (Jorge Garcia) thought the numbers were cursed after using them to win the lottery, but they had an even more mythological meaning. Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) used them as identifiers for candidates for his successor as protector of the Island, all of whom were passengers on the doomed Oceanic Flight 815. (Oops, there are the 8 and 15 again.)
2. The Blurryman in The Twilight Zone
In the first-season finale of Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone series, a fictional writer for the same show, played by Zazie Beetz, encounters a “Blurryman” who has purportedly appeared in previous episodes. That Blurryman figure turns out to be a recreation of original Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, and his dapper figure did indeed appear in each episode of that season.
1. Lalo and Nacho in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul
When Walt (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse (Aaron Paul) kidnap Saul (Bob Odenkirk) in an episode of Breaking Bad Season 2, Saul assumes they’re working for someone named Lalo and claims that it’s someone named Ignacio who’s not an “amigo del cartel.”
Viewers didn’t meet Ignacio a.k.a. Nacho (Michael Mando) until the first season of Better Call Saul years later, and they didn’t meet Lalo (Tony Dalton) — or understand Lalo’s beef with Saul — until years after that.
