Doctor Strange is the one Marvel movie to explicitly tie in to the Marvel Netflix shows. When Marvel Television launched their first MCU TV series back in 2013, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the promise was that everything would be connected. The films and TV shows would be set in the same universe, and would exert a real influence upon one another.

Unfortunately, things have played out rather differently. A high profile corporate restructure in 2015 saw Marvel Studios pulled out of the wider Marvel Entertainment group, and established as a separate Disney subsidiary. From that point on, the movies have essentially blazed their own trail, and the Marvel TV series have increasingly felt separate from the rest of the MCU. That’s especially the case with Marvel’s popular Netflix shows, which have a vastly different tone and style to any other part of the shared universe.

There is, however, one subtle connection between Marvel Netflix and 2016’s Doctor Strange: Metro-General Hospital. This was introduced in the Marvel Netflix shows as the workplace of Claire Temple, a nurse who stumbled upon a wounded Matt Murdock and surreptitiously treated him for his injuries in Daredevil season 1. Claire became a recurring character in Marvel’s Netflix shows, and as a result Metro-General was visited by a range of vigilantes, including Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones; it was even subject to an attack by the Hand in Daredevil season 2.

But Metro-General isn’t just associated with these street-level heroes; it was also the old workplace of famed neurosurgeon Stephen Strange. It actually appears in the beginning of Doctor Strange. Metro-General was revisited later on when a wounded Strange teleported back to the hospital in the hopes his old flame Christine Palmer, a nurse who still worked there, would treat injuries he’d sustained during a magical battle. Metro-General is therefore the only location to be introduced in Marvel Netflix and then used in a Marvel film, making it a key piece of connective tissue between the different sides of the MCU. This link is all the more amusing given Doctor Strange was one of the more standalone movies, with few explicit ties to the rest of the films.

Appropriately enough, there are also strong links between the characters of Claire Temple and Christine Palmer. In the comics, Christine had never been associated with Doctor Strange at all; she was one of the stars of Night Nurse, a short-lived feminist comic from the late ’70s that starred three heroic nurses. Marvel Comics has never forgotten Night Nurse, and in the 2000s one of these women was brought back as a nurse who treated vigilantes. That particular character served as inspiration for Marvel Netflix’s Claire. Christine may not have adopted a similar role in Doctor Strange, but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has suggested that could happen in the future. It would be appropriate if two nurses from Metro-General wound up supporting superheroes.

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