The MCU show on Disney Plus takes its powerless hero on a strange ride, and the last surprise in episode 4 may leave you confused.
Episode 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe series Moon Knight came out on Disney Plus. The heroes were running around an Egyptian tomb, which made it feel like Indiana Jones or The Mummy with a touch of Alien. Khonshu, the moon god/mean bird skeleton (F. Murray Abraham), has been locked up by his fellow gods. Without his Moon Knight powers, Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) must fight cult leader Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke).
Marc is still a badass, and he’s not working by himself. He is working with his other self, Egyptian mythology expert Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac with a London accent), and his estranged wife Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy) to stop Harrow from letting the trapped death goddess Ammit loose on the world.
Let’s have a party like it’s 1999 and talk about SPOILERS for episode 4 of The Mummy. After the events of Avengers: Endgame, this show takes place.
Marc and Steven Meet
After Marc fights with Harrow’s goons, the bad guy shoots Marc and is then free to take the ushabti, which is an ancient Egyptian statue that holds Ammit prisoner. Marc sinks into darkness, and the movie “Tomb Buster,” starring one Dr. Steven Grant, is a very bad spoof of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” This was a movie Marc watched when he was a kid, and it’s likely that it gave him the idea for his charming other self.
We find Marc in a mental hospital where characters from the show are both patients and staff. For example, Steven’s mean museum boss is a patient, the human statue guy is the bingo host, and Harrow’s police goons are orderlies. This place is also full of Easter eggs from the show, like cupcakes, a cuddly scarab, a Moon Knight action figure, and a painting of a beautiful European town.
Harrow is Marc’s therapist. With his mustache and sweater vest, he looks a little more put together, but Marc runs away from his sweet words. He finds a scared Steven trapped in a sarcophagus, and the two of them meet face to face (double Oscar Isaac, we should all be happy!). They hug like brothers, and they both remember that Harrow shot them.
All of this is probably happening in Marc’s head, and the Easter eggs are pieces of his memories.
Who’s that Hippo?
In the very end, Marc and Steven run into a humanoid hippo dressed in ancient Egyptian ceremonial clothes.
“Hi!” she says in a sweet voice, making Marc and Steven scream at the same time.
This is Taweret, the ancient Egyptian goddess of childbirth and fertility, also known as Antonia Salib. She protects mothers and children. Unlike some of the other gods we’ve met on this show, she isn’t based on a comic book character. This makes her a rare MCU original.
Since she doesn’t have a clear comic counterpart, it’s hard to guess what her role is, but she could have come to help bring Marc’s broken mind back together and free Khonshu. Once the moon god is no longer stuck in a statue, Marc will be able to use the suit’s healing powers to fix those bullet wounds.
Enlightening Layla
In this episode, a lot of heavy information is dumped on Layla. Steven says that Marc pushed her away so she wouldn’t become Khonshu’s next avatar, and Layla gives him a kiss for being honest (then Marc makes him punch himself in the face).
This episode also proves that Layla is the MCU version of Marlene Alraune, Marc’s wife and sometimes a partner in Moon Knight’s vigilante work in the comics. Harrow tells Layla that Marc was part of the mercenary group that killed her father and the archaeologists who worked with him.
Marc says, “My partner got greedy, and he killed everyone at the dig site.” He adds that he was killed when he tried to stop the killings. Even though he doesn’t say it, it’s likely that Khonshu saved him in exchange for him becoming the moon god’s avatar. This is how he got his start in the comics.
In the comics, Marc’s partner was the cruel Raoul Bushman, who was Moon Knight’s main enemy. In March, head writer Jeremy Slater said in a tweet that he wasn’t in the show because the people who made it thought he was too much like Black Panther villain Erik Killmonger.
Observations and Easter Eggs
- At the beginning of the episode, you can see a bunch of ushabtis that hold other imprisoned gods. This shows that the Ennead has been busy over the years.
- It would be cool to see Harrow as Khonshu’s avatar as a younger man in a flashback.
- It’s possible that Marc’s mental illness, which hasn’t been named on the show yet, gets worse because he feels bad about lying to Layla. In the comics, he has dissociative identity disorder because of something bad that happened to him as a child.
- Ammit’s ushabti has a crocodile’s head, which is how she is often shown in ancient Egyptian art. We’ll hopefully get to see what she looks like in the last two episodes.
- When Dr. Steven Grant is mentioned, we hear a piece of music that could have come straight from John Williams’s score for Indiana Jones.
- People probably couldn’t find Ammit’s ushabti because of the scary monster guardians who were in the tomb. Excellent job.
- The scene in the mental hospital reminds me of Legion, a great Marvel show that aired from 2017 to 2019. It’s not part of the MCU, but you can watch it on Hulu. Since it’s about mental illness, it could be a good match for Moon Knight.
- After Marc gets Steven out of the sarcophagus, he and Steven run by another that is violently shaking. It’s likely that this is another one of Marc’s personalities. It could be Jake Lockley, who almost certainly stabbed a bunch of Harrow’s goons in episode 3.
