Cloak And Dagger Episode Confirmed MCU Connection With Luke Cage

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Mild spoilers for the latest episode of Marvel's Cloak and Dagger.

Marvel TV headed south for Cloak & Dagger, which is set in New Orleans, and it wasn't immediately obvious how the show could possibly cross over with the rest of the MCU scattered across the country. So eagle-eared viewers were presumably surprised to hear when Cloak & Dagger's most recent episode, "Princeton Offense," made a reference directly connecting this series to Netflix's Luke Cage. And it was an extremely timely reference, considering C&D tied into the recently released second season of the Harlem-set drama.

Here's how it happened. In the Cloak & Dagger episode, Emma Lahana's Detective Brigid O'Reilly dropped the reveal that she had moved down to New Orleans from New York, specifically from Harlem. Clearly, that line wouldn't mean anything too substantial all on its own, since it could be completely coincidental. But it wasn't on its own at all.

In Luke Cage's Season 2 installment titled "If It Ain't Rough, It Ain't Right," there's a moment where Simone Missick's Misty Knight is talking about former detectives with another colleague, and she stated the intriguing words, "Callahan is in Maui, and O'Reilly moved to New Orleans." That line came off as a semi-non sequitur in the midst of Luke Cage's city-wide mayhem, and not even the general knowledge of Cloak & Dagger's O'Reilly could have proven Misty was talking about the same woman. But now that the Freeform series came full circle with its explanation, Brigid O'Reilly is one of the first concrete connections between the various TV universes.

Though it seemed like the MCU would be rife with crossovers back in its early days, production logistics have largely rendered film-to-TV crossovers non-existent, and the same mostly goes for TV mash-ups outside of Netflix's Defenders-based team-ups. There are obviously no guarantees that anything will ever come of this reveal, in the sense of Detective O'Reilly showing up in a Luke Cage flashback or anything like that, but the extremely close timing of the dual references seemingly implies how intentional it all was. So there's hope that Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb has figured out a way to make multi-network crossovers happen without gumming up the works.

Now, we're putting a lot of hyperbolic theorizing into who the Callahan is that Misty was talking about, and how Maui will come into play in the future. (We know it won't be through Inhumans' Hawaiian treks, in any case.)

Cloak & Dagger has already been doing really well for Freeform, so we can hopefully plan on watching the two young heroes for years to come...and maybe with some more Luke Cage characters getting name-dropped. You can watch it Thursday nights on Freeform at 8:00 p.m. ET. Head to our summer premiere schedule to see all the other new and returning shows debuting soon.