Has The Final Guardians Of The Galaxy Easter Egg Been Discovered?
It took six years, but someone may have discovered the final and most elaborate Easter egg in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 — emphasis on the "may."
Released in 2014, James Gunn's first movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a basket full of Easter eggs. It features several hidden messages, MCU references, and even a bit of in-franchise foreshadowing. Since the home video release of Guardians Vol. 1, fans have been scouring footage for one Easter egg in particular — the mysterious one that's gone undiscovered for the better part of a decade. It's apparently so deeply buried, in fact, that some fans have thought it's all been elaborate ruse; that accusation pushed Gunn to tease that he'd pony up $100,000 if viewers didn't end up finding anything and could prove him wrong.
The writer-director has confirmed other winking nods in Guardians Vol. 1 and has spent plenty of time talking about behind-the-scenes and hidden nuggets of Vol. 2, but the one he identified as the biggest Easter egg of them all continues to elude Marvel fans. Now, a tweet from Gunn appears to confirm that it has been found. But is that really what's happening here? Let's discuss.
The situation started when New Rockstars uploaded to YouTube a 21-minute video in which host and programming director Erik Voss breaks down the hidden details in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, gives praise to the film's colorful aesthetics and craft soundtrack, and touches on some previously discovered Easter eggs. The Twitter account for New Rockstars promoted that YouTube video – tagging Gunn's personal Twitter in the tweet and mentioning that the video provides "an update on that infamous still-missing Easter egg." That caught Gunn's attention, and he proceeded to retweet the post, adding in the caption, "Haha amazing work."
This prompted many Marvel fans online to come to the conclusion that the New Rockstars team had discovered the seemingly undiscoverable Easter egg. When a fan on Twitter asked Gunn if New Rockstars found the Easter egg, the writer-director replied, "They have found a big piece of it, yes."
It's the belief of New Rockstars' Erik Voss that the long-hidden Easter egg is a wide-spanning one that amounts to the truth behind Meredith Quill's "true" identity. Voss argues that the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 soundtrack is a link — or, perhaps more correctly, conversation — between Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and his mother that documents the journey and love of his parents. But Voss further theorizes that the deceased Meredith Quill (Laura Haddock) is doing more than posthumously talking to her son through the movie's mixtapes. While Nova Prime identified Meredith as a human — a "Terran" — Voss posits that Peter's deceased mother is a cosmic being, and that the big Easter egg is actually a web of them "proving" Meredith's cosmic identity.
Is Peter Quill's mom a cosmic being who helped craft the Infinity Stones?
There are several moving parts to this idea. The first is that when Peter grabs hold of the Power Stone at the end of Guardians Vol. 1 — an act he's capable of doing thanks to his half-Celestial identity, which he got from his father, Ego the Living Planet (Kurt Russell) — and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) cries out for him to take her hand, Peter suddenly sees his mother as she appeared in the hospital bed while she was dying of cancer. In his vision, Mama Quill repeats, "Take my hand, Peter." When that moment happened in real time while Peter was still a boy, he refused Meredith's hand; he's been using music to try to connect with her ever since.
The other part aims to offer another possible reason for Peter's ability to hold the Power Stone, explain the further significance of seeing his mother in visions, and detail how that connects to a quartet of cosmic entities. Voss theorizes that the reason why Peter can grasp the Stone is because his dearly departed mom might be a powerful cosmic entity herself — one who once took the human form of Meredith Quill. In an attempt to prove this, Voss points to a piece of artwork on the Temple Vault wall on Morag that depicts four entities – Death, Entropy, Eternity, and Infinity — seemingly forging the six Infinity Stones. Peter is present during this moment in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 – and actually mentions one of the entities, Eternity, in Guardians Vol. 2, during a scene with Ego. When Peter learns of his abilities as a Celestial's son and "opens" his eyes to the universe in the sequel, bright light emerges from his starry-eyed gaze and he says, "I see it. I see Eternity."
If Peter had seen his mother in a vision during a pivotal moment in Guardians Vol. 1, could seeing Eternity during a similar time in Guardians Vol. 2 signal that Meredith Quill is Eternity — one of the beings who created the Infinity Stones?
It's compelling to believe Meredith Quill could be a cosmic entity, but fans should remain skeptical
It's certainly a juicy morsel upon which to chew, and there's an additional tidbit in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 that could support this idea.
When Peter has a vision of her, Meredith is set against a cosmic background that's slowly piecing itself together. The colors of her backdrop resemble Knowhere, the place where the Collector (Benicio del Toro) has headquartered his operation in a Celestial skull. Back in 2017, YouTuber MasterTainment guessed that the coordinates under Guardians Vol. 1's location intertitles could be translated. Since then, Marvelites have managed to decode the messages of several locations, claiming that the message beneath Knowhere spells out "Meredith Quill X." There's been no confirmation of this from Gunn, though he did note that a list of four intertitle translations that included "Meredith Quill X" was about 70 percent correct. It's unclear which of the four fan translations are fully or partially accurate. It's also worth nothing that the fan who presented the "Meredith Quill X" translation to Gunn has now changed it to "Meredith Quill ABBA," a guess to which Gunn hasn't responded.
It goes without saying that it would be incredibly cool for this all to amount to the mysterious Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 Easter egg, but the truth of the matter is that nothing has been officially confirmed. Gunn's "amazing work" comment could have been in reference to any number of the topics discussed in the video, or could have been a blanket statement about the quality of the video as a whole. His note that Voss and the New Rockstars team uncovered "a big piece" of the highly-sought-for Easter egg doesn't definitively quantify accuracy in any way; a "big piece" to Gunn could be half, or three-quarters, or 90 percent. There's no way to know unless someone asks, and even then, that wouldn't reveal what specific parts of the ideas presented in the video are correct — only how much of the whole thing is accurate.
Additionally, there's the fact that this kind of surprise parental reveal has already been done before. Marvel pulled the same trick with Peter's Celestial dad, and while the studio isn't immune to revisiting certain themes and even giving into some tropes, doing the exact same thing twice to one character feels like it'd be a cheap shot. Plus, that Eternity in the Marvel comics has never had a secret identity as Meredith Quill also doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this is what's actually going on.
Peter Quill's mom being a cosmic entity who had a hand in creating the Infinity Stones would serve as a huge retroactive bombshell on the Marvel Cinematic Universe — connecting her to the Avengers franchise in particular in a major way, given that the final Avengers flick was focused on the heroes obtaining the Stones from points in the past to power an Infinity Gauntlet in the present — and would probably have significant impacts on where the MCU is headed next. Marvel isn't the type of company to make willy-nilly decisions without careful forethought, however, so in the unlikely event that this does end up being the truth, fans should expect a detailed breakdown of Meredith's "real" identity in a future film. Just don't hold your breath waiting for that day to come.