Daredevil season 3 didn’t feature any appearances from the rest of the Defenders or the Punisher, but it’s still full of fun easter eggs to the likes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Spider-Man (two of them) which remind us that it’s part of the MCU. What you might have missed, though, was a connection to the Fox-owned X-Men universe. Specifically, the season has a link to the one and only Wolverine.
In a scene from the finale, Benjamin Pointdexter’s receiving surgery on his spinal chord after Wilson Fisk paralyzed him during their climactic fight by slamming him into a wall. The surgeon operating on him is a Doctor Oyama, who’s used Pointdexter as a guinea pig for his dangerous new practice of mending his broken back with cognium steel.
This is a neat callback to the time in the comics when Bullseye was likewise left paralyzed until his spine was bonded with metal, giving him increased endurance to pain. On the page, though, it wasn’t the original creation of cognium but Adamantium, the same stuff Wolverine has inside of him. The reason is because Dr. Oyama is actually Lord Dark Wind, the father of Logan’s longtime foe Lady Deathstrike.
Naturally, all the explicit ties into the X-Men universe have been removed, but it’s interesting that the MCU has just given us a very loose adaptation of a Wolverine villain here. Then again, some characters are able to fall through the cracks between the corporate divide – most famously, Quicksilver, due to his connection to both the X-Men and the Avengers.
What’s interesting about Oyama’s Daredevil cameo though is the timing. As we know, Disney’s buyout of Fox is likely only just a few more months away from completion, which means that Marvel Studios could start the process of filtering in the X-Men and the Fantastic Four into the MCU in 2019. Maybe by the time Daredevil season 4 rolls around, they can be free to mention adamantium and give us a cheeky Wolverine name-check. Hey, we can always dream, right?