Your Spoiler-Filled Guide to All the Easter Eggs in Batman v Superman

Batman begins again
Snyder’s film begins with a new take on Batman’s origin, the only major adjustment being the fact that Bruce Wayne now grows up to look a lot more like Ben Affleck. As with pretty much every modern version of the Bat’s early days, the basics come straight out of Frank Miller’s 1987 story Batman: Year One. Though the details change, Miller’s expanded take on the death of Bruce’s parents, and his first year as a vigilante, has become the foundation myth for Batman in the comics, on TV, and in the movies, going all the way back to Tim Burton’s 1989 film. In particular, the bit with Martha Wayne’s pearls being scattered along the dark alley after she’s been shot is an image that stuck with Bruce and readers alike.
 

Apokolips…soon
Darkseid (not a typo) first appeared in an issue of Jimmy Olsen in 1970 (written and drawn by the great Jack Kirby); he went on to become one of the baddest bad guys in DC Comics. He’s been a prime nemesis for both Superman and the Justice League, as well as a part of a complicated cosmic mythology apart from the rest of the DC Universe. Essentially, he’s the ruler of the nightmare world of Apokalips (also not a typo), determined to subjugate the cosmos via the coveted Anti-Life Equation. That’s right: he wants to kill you with math. MATH! The equation represents some kind of proof of the meaninglessness of life, and, in the comics, Darkseid has reason to believe that it will be found on Earth. (Maybe because we watch too much TV?)
How does he factor in to Batman v Superman? The dark future Batman imagines looks an awful lot like it’s been shaped in part by an invasion of Darkseid’s minions. The winged-monkey looking aliens that flit around are called parademons: they’re the front-line soldiers in Darkseid’s army. Also note the huge omega symbol scrawled in the dirt. There’s a ton of imagery related to that last letter of the Greek alphabet associated with Darkseid: the Omega Beam, the Omega Force, Omega Energy, the Omega Sanction. It’s all about how he’s meant to represent the potential end of everything.
He looks a bit like Thanos from Marvel movies like Guardians of the Galaxy. That’s no surprise. DC’s Darkseid came first, with Thanos showing up as…let’s just say an homage a couple of years later. Though Darkseid’s earliest appearances aren’t currently in print, you can find him everywhere: he had major turns in JLA, The Legion of Super-Heroes, and Final Crisis. The most likely inspiration for his future movie appearance, however, comes from the first arc of  Geoff Johns and Jim Lee’s current Justice League book, which was also made into an animated feature called Justice League: War.
 

The Justice Lord
There’s plenty of precedent for Superman’s turn to evil in Bruce’s vision. Going back decades, potential futures and what used to be called “imaginary stories” have teased Superman’s turn to the dark side (and, occasionally, to Darkseid). There are, as it happens, a truly alarming number of reasons why the big blue boy scout will eventually go bad and crush we foolish mortals beneath his iron fist (when he’s not melting us into our component atoms with his heat vision). In Frank Miller’s seminal The Dark Knight Returns (more on that one later), the future Superman is an antagonist, if not really evil, by virtue of the naiveté that convinces him that governmental authority is always virtuous. In the (rather brilliant) Justice League TV series, the death of a hero leads the entire team to take over the earth (in the name of peace) as the Justice Lords. Batman v Superman‘s particular evil Superman seems to align with the one from an ongoing series called Injustice: Gods Among Us. In that book (a surprisingly good spin-off of the video game), the death of Lois Lane sets the Man of Steel on a course that eventually finds him ruling the world with an iron fist, opposed by Batman and friends.
 

The darkest Knight
Snyder borrowed liberally from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (as did Christopher Nolan’s series of Bat-films). The 1986 book marked a sea change in superhero comics, for better and for worse. Alongside Alan Moore’s Watchmen, it cannily deconstructed superhero tropes, bringing a new immediacy and relevance to a particular type of comic story. It also ushered in an era of often needlessly grim-n-gritty storytelling with an emphasis on anything but fun. Though that book is set a bit further into a particular future, a lot of it shows up on screen here. It’s not that Superman and Batman had never fought before, but Dark Knight took things to an entirely new level, amping up the animosity and the violence with some indelible images. In particular, the metal armored suit that Bruce dons onscreen comes from Miller’s book, as does one of the movie’s most striking visuals: the sight of a withered, deathly Superman following an encounter with a nuclear missile.
 

She’s a Wonder
Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is introduced as mystery woman Diana Prince, who kinda-sorta foils Bruce’s plan to crack into Lex Luthor’s computer. The mystery might have been more effective had we not seen her in every trailer for months, but I digress. Wonder Woman debuted in 1941, created by the very interesting William Moulton Marston just prior to the United States’entry into World War II. In Batman v Superman, we learn that she left man’s world in 1918, having become disenchanted with humanity. That would seem to confirm that her forthcoming solo movie will be set in the World War I era. There’s a bit of precedent for playing Wonder Woman as a superhero period piece: the Lynda Carter 1977 TV series spent its entire first season rattling around the Second World War, and began the second in the present, establishing that Diana had spent the intervening decades with her Amazon sisters on the island of Themyscira. Why World War I for this new Wonder Woman? It’s unclear, but we tend to think of WWI as a less noble, altogether more ambiguous struggle than WWII. That might better explain Diana’s disenchantment with mankind in Batman v Superman.
 

The League
Aquaman. The Flash. Cyborg. The “Dawn of Justice” part of the movie involves cameos from the future Justice League. We don’t know much about these iterations of the characters: Aquaman is, of course, the ocean-based hero whose powers typically involve talking to fish. This Flash is Ezra Miller, and a completely different character than appears on the CW’s Flash TV show. He’s also the one who appears to Bruce in his future vision, warning that Lois is the “key.” The scene is reminiscent of a moment in DC’s 1986 mega-crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which Flash gives a similarly murky warning to Batman via a futzy energy portal thing. Time travel is not at all uncommon in Flash stories, so that might be a hint that it isn’t all just a dream, and that Batman is actually getting a communication from the future. Cyborg is Victor Stone, the son of a brilliant but distant scientist who becomes horribly injured as a result by of dad’s experiments gone awry. He’s taken on new prominence in the comics as a founding member of the current Justice League, so it’s not a big surprise that he’d be a featured player in the movies. From the brief bit that we see in the movie, it appears that his injury is the result of tampering with a Mother Box, a powerful supercomputer that ties into the Darkseid mythology. It’s all coming together.
 

Robin Dies at Dawn
A quick one, but there’s a shot of an old Robin costume on display in the Batcave. In yellow spray paint, it reads: “Ha Ha Joke’s on You Batman.” This might well be a reference to A Death in the Family, a 1988-1989 storyline in which Joker murders the second kid to wear the Robin costume, the unpopular-with-readers Jason Todd. (In the current comics, Robin is Damian Wayne, the trained-assassin son that Bruce never knew he had.) The Joker reference is also a bit of a nod to the forthcoming Suicide Squad movie and Jared Leto’s take on the Clown Prince of Crime.
Don’t worry about Jason, by the way. Despite having been bludgeoned with a crowbar before being blown up, he came back as the anti-hero Red Hood when an alternate-universe Superman began punching the walls of reality. Because comics!
 

Doomsday
Though the origin doesn’t entirely match, Doomsday is the same creature that killed Superman in the early ’90s Death of Superman storyline, preceded by a reign of destruction and one of comics’ first major media events. Doomsday was presented as a force of nature, and only much later revealed to be an experiment in bio-engineering from ancient Krypton. As in the movie, grievous injury tends to make him stronger. In both mediums, Supes and Doomsday each give their lives to kill the other, punching their way through a mightily displeased Metropolis. In the comics, five different individuals arise in the wake of the tragedy, each with a claim to Superman’s legacy. One of them is a newly cloned Superboy, whose DNA (in an echo of the movie origin of Doomsday) is later revealed to be a combination of Luthor’s and Superman’s. Because comics! The storyline was loosely adapted as the Superman: Doomsday animated movie. One of the last shots in BvS reveals a handful of soil levitating off of Superman’s coffin—a call-back to Superman’s first flight in Man of Steel. Because something-something gravity?
 

Oh, Jimmy
Everybody knows plucky Daily Planet photographer Jimmy Olsen. Introduced in 1940 during the (kinda wonderful) radio show (which added a bunch of essential bits to the Superman mythos), Jimmy’s been a staple of Superman stories in every medium since. We didn’t see him in Man of Steel, but he finally makes his big entrance here, played by Michael Cassidy. If you didn’t catch it, that’s OK: he’s the photographer with Lois in the Middle East. The one that gets killed with a shot to the head.
It’s OK, though. Jimmy’s still alive in the form of actor Mehcad Brooks on the Supergirl TV show.
What nerdy references did you catch in Batman v Superman?