In the opening scene of Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four: First Steps , Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) discovers she’s pregnant and breaks the news to her husband, fellow superhero Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal). Reed is freaked out by the usual parenting stuff, like keeping a child safe in their retro-futuristic home/HQ, the Baxter Building. But he’s also worried about the possibility that the cosmic rays that gave him and Sue their superpowers could cause abnormalities in the child.

While Reed causes some discord in the family by spending more time developing ultrasound technology for prenatal screenings than building nursery furniture, he has every reason to be concerned. Franklin is a very special baby with a long history in Marvel comics, and his birth has huge implications for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Like the other mutants in the Fantastic Four, Franklin Richards was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s. However, while his parents have fairly conventional powers—Reed can stretch his body, Sue can turn invisible and create force fields—Franklin is a reality-bending mutant. He is one of the most powerful mutants in all of Marvel Comics, surpassing even Jean Grey and Magneto’s Omega-level mutant classification. His powers are considered comparable to the Celestials featured in Eternals and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. While most mutants don’t manifest their powers until puberty, the comic book version of Franklin began to manifest his powers as a child. In a 1973 Fantastic Four issue by Gerry Conway, Annihilus—a Fantastic Four villain from the antimatter Negative Zone universe—kidnapped young Franklin and used a machine to unleash his full potential. Franklin’s powers proved too great for the child to control, and Reed had to put him in a coma. He awoke 10 issues later to fight Ultron, which stabilized his powers.

In a 1982 story by John Byrne, Franklin becomes frustrated trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube and uses his powers to transform himself into an adult, despite the fact that he cannot mature emotionally. He eventually reverts to a child, placing restrictions on himself so that he can have a normal childhood.

Annihilus isn’t the only villain to kidnap Franklin. The super-child is also kidnapped by his time-traveling grandfather and the psychic entity Onslaught. In Fantastic Four: First Steps, Galactus is the one who wants to steal the child.

Galactus and Franklin have a deep connection in the comics. Franklin actually became a planet-eating cosmic entity in Jim Krueger and John Paul Leon’s 1999 Earth X series. In Jonathan Hickman’s 2012 Fantastic Four, Franklin resurrected Galactus so he could fight a group of Celestials who were trying to conquer the multiverse using the same Bridge technology Reed experimented with in the film. In Fantastic Four: First Steps, Galactus sees Franklin as a potential successor, able to absorb Galactus’s endless hunger and take over as planet-eating. Galactus’ reasoning is that Franklin also possesses the Power Cosmic, a source of limitless power that Galactus and the Silver Surfer possess. While the MCU has teased the idea that the film’s setting could include mutants (and outright bring them into other multiverse settings), it seems Marvel is aiming for a different explanation for Franklin’s powers. That might also explain the baby’s most important moment in the film.

To save their world, Earth-828, Reed and Sue use their own child as bait to lure Galactus into a trap and teleport him somewhere far away. Sue uses a huge amount of power to push Galactus into position, then seemingly dies of exhaustion. But while everyone mourns the Invisible Woman, Franklin reaches out to his mother and glows for a moment, and Sue comes back to life.

In Marvel Comics, there are a group of mutants who possess the ability to resurrect the dead, but Franklin is not one of them. His powers mainly manifest through telepathy, precognition, and energy blasts. His ability to resurrect his mother is likely due to the fact that she died from the exhaustion of all the energy she had gained from being exposed to cosmic rays, which are a weaker form of the Power Cosmic. Franklin may have been able to revive her, like using an electric shock to restart a stopped heart, but it’s unlikely he could have revived someone who wasn’t dead in the same circumstances.

The Fantastic Four’s controversial decision to publicly reveal that Galactus wanted their child probably left Doctor Doom quite curious about what made the child so special. It’s unclear what he really wanted from Franklin – maybe to have his face healed, since he had to take off his mask in front of the child? But we’ll probably have to wait until Avengers: Doomsday to find out.