Nick Fury's Pager

Carol Danvers confiscates Nick Fury's pager and adapts it so he can summon her in an emergency situation. This is the same modified pager Fury uses in the post-credits scene of Avengers: Infinity War. The post-credits scenes reveal what happened next, as well; it seems that in the aftermath of the Battle of Wakanda, the Avengers regrouped at Avengers Compound to watch in horror as the death toll mounted. They detected an unusual signal, and traced it to the pager; somehow they knew it was connected to Fury, and decided to rig it to keep transmitting, figuring he had to be calling for help.

It's unclear how the Avengers connected the pager to Fury; it may be that they checked CCTV footage and realized Nick Fury had been there. Alternatively, it's possible that Black Widow - who herself had been a high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. operative - had seen Fury considering using that pager before. Interestingly, in a recent interview Kevin Feige suggested that Fury may well have used that pager before now. "How do we know he never pushed it before," he asked. "We’ve never seen him push it before. That doesn’t mean he never did."

RELATED: How Captain Marvel Connects To Avengers: Endgame

The Avengers Initiative

Captain Marvel reveals that Carol Danvers was the inspiration for the Avengers Initiative. Fury believed that S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't enough to protect the world from cosmic threats, and that the Earth needed another line of defense. He initially called it the Protector Initiative, but noted that Carol Danvers' callsign was "Avenger" and decided that was a better name. It's a brilliant scene, and plays with the Avengers theme swelling in the background.

Level Three

The Avengers introduced a new term into the MCU; Level Seven. In the aftermath of Loki's attack, Director Fury called Coulson back to base and told him this was a "Level Seven" event. "As of right now," he added, "We are at war." The term was undefined by the film, but Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. explained it away by revealing that S.H.I.E.L.D. had a number of levels of seniority and clearance. The series opened with a resurrected Coulson stepping out of the shadows and telling a shocked Grant Ward, "Welcome to Level Seven."

Captain Marvel confirms this interpretation of the "Level Seven" reference, albeit in a very subtle way. When Nick Fury shows his S.H.I.E.L.D. ID, it identifies him as a Level Three agent. That confirms that, while he's been at S.H.I.E.L.D. six years by the time of Captain Marvel, Fury is still pretty low down in the S.H.I.E.L.D. hierarchy.

Page 2 of 4: Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. and the Tesseract

Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S.

Nick Fury and Carol Danvers trace Dr. Lawson to Iron Man 2, which subtly revealed that Howard Stark used to work with them before his death in 1991. Captain Marvel implies that Howard was probably experimenting on the Tesseract while he was working with P.E.G.A.S.U.S..

Fury returned the Tesseract to Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. after Goose coughed it up, although he increased S.H.I.E.L.D.'s presence at the facility; it ultimately became a t S.H.I.E.L.D./NASA initiative. Fury recruited Erik Selvig into the Tesseract Project in the post-credits scene of Thor, unwittingly revealing the Tesseract's location to Loki, and the Trickster God launched his invasion of Earth by creating a wormhole into Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. at the beginning of The Avengers.

RELATED: The Tesseract Has Appeared In More Marvel Movies Than Captain America

The Tesseract

Discovered by the Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger, the Tesseract was lost in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the movie. It was retrieved by Howard Stark, who - according to Iron Man 2 - at one time worked for Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S.. Presumably, the Kree scientist Mar-Vell managed to trace the Tesseract's energy to Earth, and she infiltrated P.E.G.A.S.U.S. in order to develop faster-than-light tech and allow the Skrulls to escape. She even managed to steal the Tesseract away to her own vessel, and no doubt P.E.G.A.S.U.S. was horrified to realize the Tesseract had gone missing after Mar-Vell died in 1989.

The Quadjet

When Nick Fury and Carol Danvers break out of Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S., they steal a ship that may be rather familiar to viewers. It's the Quadjet, forerunner of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Quinjet. "It was important that people instantly know what this ship is when it's on the hangar floor," Production Designer Andy Nicholson explained in The Art of Captain Marvel. "They need to realize that it's an earlier version of the Quinjet, so you had to be careful with keeping things like the twin engines at the back and the twin fins and the basic silhouette in the cockpit arranged in the way that you access it from the back." All American test planes have a white-and-red colorscheme, so it's likely that the Quadjet was still being tested by Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. back in 1995.

The Quadjet has been carefully thought through from a design point of view, with heat-absorbent tiles on the underside that are lifted from the space shuttle. That's why the Skrulls only have to make minor modifications in order to allow the Quadjet to fly into space. In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 3 Fitz was able to modify a S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjet in the same way.

Page 3 of 4: The Skrulls, Ronan the Acc and the Starforce