Far From Home Had A Secret Cameo That No One Picked Up On
That Quentin Beck is one tricky, tricky dude.
A sharp-eyed fan has noticed that the duplicitous Beck, portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, makes an appearance early on in Spider-Man: Far From Home wearing duds that could most accurately be described as "Dad-like." Funnily enough, the very brief, difficult-to-spot appearance was teased on Instagram by Gyllenhaal himself — although one could absolutely be forgiven for thinking said tease to be a joke.
Let's rewind just a little bit. You'll recall that in Far From Home, Beck — AKA Mysterio — was first introduced as a hero from an alternate universe, one which had been destroyed by raging, elemental beasts which were now threatening the MCU's Earth. The monsters began popping up in various European locales, and coincidence of coincidences, it just so happened that Peter Parker, the spectacular Spider-Man, was on a European vacation with his high school class at this very time.
Recruited by Nick Fury (or so it seemed) to assist Mysterio in dealing with the threat, Parker was able to help neutralize the fire elemental, which was supposedly the last one left standing (and the most powerful one of all). Feeling a kinship with Mysterio — who had somewhat filled the void left by the death of his friend and mentor, Tony Stark — Parker made a fateful decision. He turned over to Beck the last great gift that Stark had left for him: a pair of really sharp glasses which happened to be equipped with an artificial intelligence called E.D.I.T.H. (Which, of course, stood for "Even Dead, I'm The Hero.")
This had been Beck's plan all along, as the AI granted the user access to an insane amount of technology and firepower (including seemingly hundreds of missile-equipped drones) which could be deployed all over the world at a moments' notice. It turned out that Beck was no hero, nor was he from another universe — he was a disgruntled Stark employee who was using tech co-opted by the late Iron Man (and repurposed for the B.A.R.F. system seen in Captain America: Civil War) to conjure illusions of the towering, elemental baddies.
These illusions were capable of causing real damage thanks to swarms of obscured, armed drones, and Beck meant to make himself out to be a great hero — the next Iron Man, in fact — by defeating he "monsters." His plan was eventually foiled by Spider-Man, and Beck was killed by his own drones. But even in death (maybe), Beck had the last laugh; in the flick's mid-credits scene, we discover that one of his many cohorts released doctored footage which made Spidey appear responsible for the elemental attacks, and just for good measure, this footage also featured Beck loudly proclaiming the wall-crawler's secret identity to the world.
Beck's status as a villain was a closely-guarded secret leading up to Far From Home's release (although Spidey fans didn't have much trouble parsing it out, since Mysterio has never been anything other than a manipulative scoundrel in the comics). Around the time of the film's release, Gyllenhall posted the below image to his Instagram:
It was captioned, "This isn't just a sexy dad outfit. It's my favorite look from Spider-Man: FFH [Look] closer."
One fan did just that: Twitter user @stupefyspidey, who somehow managed to spot what literally everyone else missed. Near the beginning of the movie, when Parker is buying the necklace for MJ in Venice, Beck can be seen in the background wearing this exact getup — giving away the fact that he didn't arrive from another universe, but perhaps from a mall somewhere in Florida.
What are the chances Mysterio is still alive?
It's fair to say that one of the major themes of Far From Home is deception. Beck managed to fool everybody into thinking him a hero, even the famously mistrustful Fury. Oh, but wait — the flick's post-credits sequence revealed that that wasn't actually Fury and Maria Hill we'd been watching Beck run circles around, but the Skrulls Talos and Soren, who had taken the place of the super-spies at the request of the actual Fury, who was busy supervising some mysterious operation aboard a Skrull spaceship.
Of course, Parker is also forced to go to great lengths to hide his heroic identity from his entire class (although MJ figures it out), only to have his efforts spoiled by Beck, who posthumously deceives the world into thinking Spidey is a villain. With all of this deception going on, it's worth wondering: is Beck actually still alive?
Well, he is a master of illusion, and he certainly executed his plan to launch the elemental attacks, get Parker involved, secure E.D.I.T.H., and beef up his drone fleet to massive proportions quite well. It seems pretty likely that he would have had a contingency plan for making sure the world would see him as a hero in the event of his defeat, and that this plan wouldn't require him to die.
What if his death, then, was just another illusion? Sure, he tried the trick once — with a hologram of his injured, dying self which Parker caught onto thanks to his "Peter tingle" — but since he was well-prepared enough to have that illusion in place, is it so much of a stretch to think that he wouldn't have had another failsafe just in case?
Consider Parker's last question to E.D.I.T.H. once the dust had settled: he asked if all of the holograms had been disengaged, and the AI responded in the affirmative. What he didn't think to ask was whether Beck still had a pulse.
In the end, Parker could have been fooled by a mere squib, just like the kind they use to fake gunshot wounds in the movies. Of course, this is all pure speculation on our part — unless and until someone spots beck in the far background of that mid-credits scene, wearing a Hawaiian print shirt and a big floppy hat, looking on and smiling as his "dying" self blabs Parker's secret to all of New York.