The Lost Easter Egg You Probably Missed In Futurama

"Futurama" premiered in 1999, a time when the nerds were just starting to take over television. Before social media, before streaming, and before it became common practice to pause mid-frame in search of deep cuts or inside jokes, "Futurama" was extremely meta. Maybe it was thanks to all the goodwill already built up by "The Simpsons," or perhaps it was just because an animated sitcom set a thousand years in the future could do pretty much whatever it wanted, but Matt Groening and the rest of the writers' room managed to get away with it too.

Then, five years later, came "Lost." Similarly ahead of its time, it went weird the way no network drama had since "Twin Peaks." You still know all the markers: smoke monsters, polar bears on tropical islands, jumps in time, and secretive scientific initiatives that had all of us looking up what the word "heuristic" means. As with Groening, it didn't take long for J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber to figure out that they had created a world where conventional writing rules don't apply.

We know that Groening and company are fans of J.J. Abrams and his lens flares. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the writers of "Futurama" would be watching "Lost." Almost as inevitable would be their decision to put a little "Lost" Easter egg in one of their headiest episodes.

At the r/lost subreddit, a now-deleted user posted a screenshot from Season 6, Episode 15, "Möbius Dick." Sure enough, floating amidst all the space debris is the severed back half of Oceanic Airlines plane, presumably Flight 815.

"Möbius Dick" is, as the title implies, a strong riff on that American literary classic and dense symbolist tome "Moby Dick," in which the Planet Express crew, seeking to save time, take a shortcut through the Bermuda Tetrahedron. Here, Leela becomes obsessed, Ahab-style, with taking revenge on a giant white space-whale. While the show was still on the air, many fans of "Lost" speculated that the island the survivors are stranded on was, in fact, in the notorious Bermuda Triangle (via ABC News), so the reference is fairly on the nose.

There does seem to be, further down on the thread, a bit of confusion about which episode number this actually is. Another deleted Reddit user says it is Season 8, Episode 2. Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that this was, significantly, the first episodic season of "Futurama" in quite some time. The previous season, Season 5, the first on Comedy Central after being canceled by Fox, was basically four re-tooled full-length movies. Add in Season 6's division into two parts, which might be misconstrued as a different season altogether, and you can see where confusion steps in. What seems much more certain is that with the nerds now firmly in control, "Futurama" has received yet another revival, and the Easter eggs shall once again flourish.