Cultural Allusions
Merlin's landlord "Mr. Mulligan" is an allusion to Buck Mulligan from James Joyce's Ulysses.
Merlin tells Luke that Ghostwheel's operations involve "a lot of theoretical crap involving space and time and some notions of some guys named Everett and Wheeler." The Everett-Wheeler theory of quantum mechanics proposes a "many worlds" interpretation in which the universe instantly fragments into a bundle of alternate histories each time the quantum state of any particle in the universe changes via interaction.
At the conclusion of this volume, Merlin is imprisoned in a crystal cave, just like his namesake from Arthurian legend.
Read more about this topic: Trumps Of Doom
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