Black Panther Review: 10 Best Moments

6. The 1992 Flashback

The film opens with a flashback to California in 1992, where T'Chaka's younger brother N'Jobu (Sterling K. Brown) has stolen some Vibranium, and ends up being confronted by T'Chaka in his apartment, having been ratted out by his associate, who was a Wakandan spy all along.

We return to this scene later in the movie, where it's revealed that the Wakandan spy was Zuri, and after falling in love with a woman in California, N'Jobu saw the economic hardships and abundance of black suffering in the U.S., which motivated him to steal the Vibranium.

T'Chaka confronts him, but this time we see the final outcome: N'Jobu fires his gun, causing T'Chaka to stab him through the chest with his Black Panther claws. T'Chaka and Zuri quickly flee the scene, leaving N'Jobu's young son without a father, and of course, that boy is revealed to be Erik himself.

T'Chaka left Erik alone in order to "maintain the lie" and keep Wakanda obscured from the rest of the world, which later becomes a major point of contention when T'Challa revisits his father on the ancestral plane.

It's a fantastic sequence because it gives Killmonger extremely compelling motives for wanting to claim Wakanda for himself, and the added moral ambiguity of T'Chaka killing his own brother speaks for itself.