6 Easter Eggs In Popular TV Shows That Change Everything

At the end of the Game of Thrones season 4 episode "Oathkeeper," an undead White Walker carries off a human child and brings it to its boss, who touches the baby's cheek and transforms it into a snow zombie.

HBO
Pictured: a horny old guy turning a child.

That scene actually caused quite a bit of stir in the Game of Th-sorry, A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, because it doesn't appear anywhere in the books. Of course many things in the show aren't found in the books, like Podrick's magical cock, but this scene is different as it answers a lot of important questions about the White Walkers. For example, it tells us that the creatures used to be humans. But where this gets into spoiler territory involves what was probably a simple screw-up on the part of some HBO employee.

Some Reddit users caught an HBO synopsis (that was later deleted) that identified the horned White Walker as "the Night's King." Even if you haven't read the books, you may still know who that is if you've watch the season 2 DVD extra titled "The Night's Watch History." The extra tells of a legend about the 13th commander of the Night's Watch, the guys tasked with killing White Walkers, who failed spectacularly at his job by falling in love with a female Walker, losing his soul in the process, going crazy, and declaring himself ... "Night's King." That's right, the boss of the White Walkers used to be a "crow," which technically makes him Jon Snow's "brother."

HBO
*Cue soap opera music*

But wait, if the scene isn't in the books, how do we know that it will be? What, can the producers of the show see into the future? In a way, yes, because George R.R. Martin has told them how the series will end, in case he dies before being able to complete it (you know, like if he gets in a jet ski accident after a wild cocaine orgy). This effectively makes the synopsis a spoiler that you can use to punish those book fans who tried to ruin your masturbation by pointing out that, in the novels, Drogo knocked Daenerys up when she was only 13.

In fiction, this sort of thing is called a "retcon" ("retroactive continuity") and it's what happens when writers get drunk, miss deadlines, and make up a bullshit story on the spot that alters established facts within their fictional universe. That's obviously what happened with Futurama. We mean, if you rewatch the pilot episode, it's clear that Nibbler wasn't anywhere near Fry during his fall into the freezer.

20th Century Fox Television
That had to be a hell of a party horn to have that kind of recoil.

Hold on, FREEZE FRAME! What was that?!

20th Century Fox Television
AN OWL! IT ALL FITS!

Well, don't we look stupid right now because that is clearly Nibbler's shadow (notice the characteristic eyestalk), putting him and Fry together more than four years before the events of "The Why of Fry." And, no, that's not something they added in later for the DVD release. According to the Futurama staff, they always meant for Nibbler to be the key to the truth behind Fry ... and also Leela, Fry's one-eyed, "alien" love interest who in season 4 is revealed to actually be a human mutant.

20th Century Fox Television
Bullshit. Where's her ninja weapon and headband?

In the season 2 opener, Bender flushes Nibbler down the toilet, and the Planet Express crew goes looking for him in the sewers where we are introduced to the mutants, a race of deformed folks who are banished from the surface world because, shit, look at them:

20th Century Fox Television
Although the dude playing the guitar looks suspiciously like the dude that was always playing guitar at parties.

But now look at the people in the top left corner.

20th Century Fox Television
Is that eyeball dude in the middle a mutant, or a highly evolved descendant of Professor Frink?

Two cyclopses, just like Leela, and that's because, as the show's creators explain, the two mutants are Leela's parents, making a sneaky cameo almost three years before the show officially revealed that if you are attracted to Leela, you might have a disability fetish.

Friends was a simple but wildly successful series about a group of likeable 20/30-somethings dealing with love, employment, and life. Well, maybe not exactly "employment" because, by our rough estimate, the cast spent 99 percent of their fictional days at the Central Perk coffee shop -- sitting around a big table and the now-iconic couch and armchairs -- without ever losing their jobs.

Warner Bros. Television
For our younger readers: "Jobs" are things that people in the '90s used to have.

But now that we mention it, those were some really awesome seats. How did the gang always manage to score that tasty piece of cafe real-estate? Because, as Tanya Ghahremani from Bustle first pointed out, they had the seats on permanent reserve as if they were Clapton at the Hard Rock. In many episodes, you can just about make out the teeny-weeny "Reserved" sign sitting on the table.

Warner Bros. Television
Warner Bros. Television
They had to keep it inconspicuous to not anger the commoners.

Before you ask, no, it isn't likely that the gang called ahead each time to book their seats. Most of the Friends characters live near the cafe, which is why their get-togethers are usually spontaneous affairs. That would not be possible without staking a claim to their own Central Perk parcel because it's not like there haven't been any takers for the couch spot. In all the photos above, the cafe is packed to the brim ... presumably with people wanting to fatally scald the Friends gang with their own coffees, because of this:

Warner Bros. Television
Fun fact: That couch is bigger than the apartment a chef and waitress in Manhattan could actually afford.

That couch is huge. Those people aren't occupying some dingy corner table but rather half the goddamned place that they want permanently roped off from the plebs. At least no one can say anymore that the show wasn't an accurate depiction of life in New York.

Fans of Firefly might not need to be told who Inara Serra is (but they desperately need to be told to move on, for Christ's sake.) For everyone else, though, here's a crash course in the character: Imagine if Princess Leia became a prostitute.

20th Century Fox Television
"So, my Tuesday wank fantasy, then?"

Well, that's pretty much Inara: a sophisticated, ass-kicking woman of grace, who happens to have sex with strangers for money. She's also tooootally in love with Han Solo (renamed to "Malcolm Reynolds" in Firefly) even if she herself refused to admit it ... maybe because she was tooootally dying.

That revelation was actually foreshadowed on the show, though for only two seconds. In the first episode of the series, the Firefly crew runs into Reavers, a group of space cannibal-rapists. As their ship approaches, Inara, fearing that they'll be boarded and killed, goes to her quarters and looks at a mysterious box ...

20th Century Fox Television
WHAT'S IN THE BO- ... oh, it's a syringe.

We're kind of led to believe that this is a suicide kit due to the fact that Reavers tend to fuck their victims to death. But according to Morena Baccarin (the actress playing Inara), the truth is that the box contained Inara's medicine. Why would she need medicine? Because Inara was dying from a terminal illness that she kept at bay with the daily space insulin injections. So in that scene, she was actually thinking about skipping the shot in order to die with some dignity.

This presumably would have been explored later on but, as you know, Firefly was canceled, which might have been for the best. We can't exactly envision a non-horrific conclusion to Inara's illness arc from a deranged director who once planned to have her brutally gang-raped.

Some, in fact, would speculate that the plane crash bit was just a cheap cop-out the writers came up with at the last moment, when they decided it would be too hard to write their way out of a middle-aged cancer victim getting engulfed in a chemical explosion's fireball. But not if you paid attention to the titles of the flash-forward episodes ... and did a little code-breaking.

First, you have the episode "Seven Thirty-Seven," which in context was how many thousands of dollars Walter claimed he needed in order to provide for his family after he was gone. The next episode is called "Down," which references the characters' struggles, like Walter's deteriorating marriage and Jesse's homelessness. Then, we have the episode "Over" when things start to slightly look up for Walter. Finally, there's the episode "ABQ," but we weren't able to crack the meaning of that title.

AMC
Maybe we'll never know.

So the titles make sense in the context of their episodes, but put them together and you get:

Seven Thirty-Seven Down Over ABQ

If you're still not seeing it, the number is a reference to a Boeing 737, one of the two airliners that crash over Albuquerque. (ABQ! We just got it!) So the second season finale of Breaking Bad was actually telegraphed quite obviously through four episode titles, just as you would expect from a brilliant show that cleverly foreshadowed its series finale with one fucking song.

Ed and Aaron would like to thank Amanda Mannen for the Friends entry.

For more amazing easter eggs, check out 7 Insane Easter Eggs Hidden in Movies and TV Shows and 6 Insane Easter Eggs Buried in Famous TV Shows.

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