One of the key elements linking together Marvel’s Netflix series “Luke Cage” to the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe is one key event that everyone knows about, but nobody talks about in detail.
That event is known as The Incident, and it informs a ton of elements in the MCU. It popped up in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” and has been mentioned repeatedly in “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones” and “The Defenders.” Everybody in the MCU knows about it and remembers it, and it serves as the beginning point for a lot of stories about Marvel characters — it’s sort of the point that everyone realized superheroes were a real thing.
So what is The Incident? Put simply, it’s the climax of “The Avengers” that took place in New York City.
Specifically, The Incident is the moment when Loki (Tom Hiddleston) opened a portal over New York that allowed alien invaders known as Chitauri to invade. The Avengers showed up to fight the invaders in a massive battle that wrecked huge portions of New York City. The Battle of New York, as the event was called, left much of New York in ruins and alien wreckage all over the place.
The aftermath of the battle has informed a bunch of events in the MCU. Artifacts from the alien army factored into episodes of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” and were probably part of the creation of the Judas bullet, that thing that nearly killed Luke Cage (Mike Colter) back in Season 1. The reality is that everyone in New York, if not the world, was affected by The Incident.
Watching the Avengers show up to save the city from aliens fundamentally changed the MCU, and in a big way, it paved the way for the Netflix superheroes. While characters like Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage might have had super abilities unrelated to The Incident, it was the Avengers arriving on the scene that showed most of the other characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that being a superhero is both possible, and sometimes, necessary.