This post contains spoilers for episode 4 of Marvel’s Moon Knight.
To say things get weird in episode 4 of Moon Knight would be an understatement. Sure, seeing Steven Grant/Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) reach into the mouth of Alexander the Great’s corpse is bizarre, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the sheer strangeness of the episode’s final act.
To recap: Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) catches up to Marc, and in the ensuing encounter Marc gets shot. When he wakes back up, he finds himself not in Egypt, but in a psychiatric hospital, where he and Layla (May Calamawy) are patients. Harrow is the head doctor, his henchpeople are orderlies, and Steven Grant is just the main character of an adventure movie Marc likes watching. Even weirder is the fact that Marc is clutching a Moon Knight action figure, suggesting Moon Knight is another pop-cultural figure Marc enjoys. In the show’s biggest twist so far, Harrow explains to Marc that he was never Moon Knight and that everything we saw in the past three episodes was an elaborate fantasy.
This “it was all in your head” explanation would be fishy, even if Harrow wasn’t a sinister cult leader. Marc rightfully gets the hell out of there. Along the way, he lets a terrified Steven out of a sarcophagus, sees (but doesn’t open) a much creepier sarcophagus, and runs into an Egyptian goddess with a hippo head. Definitely not your average day in the MCU.
Credit: Marvel Studios 2022
Episode 4’s final moments mark a pretty sizable tonal shift in Moon Knight, which has already played with genres like action-adventure, psychological thriller, and horror. Here, we move squarely into the realm of the surreal — something that proved necessary when adapting Moon Knight.
“If Moon Knight popped out of the comic book and watched this TV show, and it didn’t have any surreal flourishes in it, I’m going to assume he would break that TV,” Justin Benson told Mashable in a video call. Benson directed episodes 2 and 4 of Moon Knight alongside longtime helming partner Aaron Moorhead.
If Moon Knight popped out of the comic book and watched this TV show, and it didn’t have any surreal flourishes in it, I’m going to assume he would break that TV.
“The surrealness comes from the subjective experience that Marc/Steven is having at the time,” Benson continued. “It feels motivated, but it also brings the best of the spirit of the source material into it.”
“What’s really fun about Moon Knight is that we are charged with delivering something that’s very unexpected. We love that he’s an unpredictable character, no matter what,” said Moorhead in the shared call. “Of course, that lets our story be incredibly unpredictable. So when there’s these gigantic shifts in the story, especially the one in episode 4 — which is so much fun — we try to deliver a whole lot of visual and tonal contrast really quickly all at once.”
For this episode, that means moving from a darkened tomb with a grittier adventure feel to an extremely sterile hospital environment. Benson and Moorhead switched up the cinematography in order to fully drive home the contrast between the two settings. “There’s just an enormous amount of light in one part and darkness in the other,” Moorhead said, “A more handheld, vérité approach in one and then a more still, smoother approach on the other.”
As exciting as this switch is, it leaves us with a ton of questions and theories we’re excited to figure out as the show enters its final two episodes.
Were the first three episodes of Moon Knight really all in Marc’s head?
Credit: Marvel Studios 2022
Is there any truth at all to what Dr. Harrow told Marc? Probably not. After all, Harrow is not a good dude, and manipulation is a pretty common play in the not-good-dude handbook.
There is a comic book precedent for Marc being in a psychiatric hospital. Jeff Lemire’s 2016 run of Moon Knight begins with Marc waking up in one, where he’s told that Moon Knight never existed. It soon turns out that nothing is as it seems (when is it, with Moon Knight?) and that the Egyptian gods, especially Khonshu, are involved.
With Khonshu currently out of commission in the show, Moon Knight may be taking a different approach to Lemire’s comics. Perhaps Harrow and his patron Ammit are using the illusion of a mental hospital to keep an injured Marc/Steven out of commission.
Who was the hippo-headed goddess at the very end of the episode?
The hippo-headed goddess we briefly see in episode 4 is likely Taweret, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. Antonia Salib has been cast in the role. Since we haven’t met her in the first three episodes, it seems like now would be the perfect time to introduce a new key character.
Now that the “who” is out of the way, why is Taweret in this psychiatric hospital? Is she here to help Marc Or is she in cahoots with Harrow? Fingers crossed we’ll find out in episode 5.
Who was in that other sarcophagus?
Credit: Marvel Studios 2022
When Marc and Steven are trying to escape, they catch sight of a second sarcophagus: one whose contents are threatening to burst out in a truly menacing fashion. While we don’t see who’s inside, the fact that Marc found Steven in a sarcophagus suggests that this one contains another personality sharing their body. If this theory is true, the comics give us a pretty good idea of who it could be: Jake Lockley.
Jake is another one of Marc’s personalities, portrayed in the comics as a cab driver with connections in the seedy criminal underworld. Moon Knight has made significant changes to the character of Steven Grant. For instance, in the comics, he’s a billionaire. So, it’s possible that the version of Jake we might get will be quite different from the source material.
Moon Knight has already hinted at a third personality living in Marc/Steven’s body. In episode 3, Marc is knocked unconscious during a fight with Harrow’s men. When he comes to, he finds that he’s killed two of them. Neither Marc nor Steven own up to the murders, so all signs point to the killer being some third persona that we have yet to meet. If this is Jake, it seems like he’s more violent than Marc. He’s stayed hidden this long for a reason — perhaps in episodes 5 and 6 we’ll find out why.
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Moon Knight is now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes every Wednesday.
