Ep 4. propels Moon Knight to new, delightfully weird and scary heights.
And I attempt to explain that ending.
The Short Take:
Forget any of the criticisms I leveled last week. This episode makes up for it and then some, not only in its dazzling use of ancient history and riveting tomb raiding, but in its trippy, twisty cliffhanger.
Image Credit: Den of Geek
[MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT: This one will have big plot twist spoilers right at the top. Everyone watching the show is going to be buzzing about this, so get on it!]
The Long Take:
What. An. Ending. I know that anyone reading this will be chomping at the bit for an explanation of it, so I won’t make you wait.
What happened exactly? There are two possibilities.
Everything we see right after Harrow shoots Marc in the chest certainly seems like the show’s attempt to make us question reality and think that maybe this was all in Marc’s head all along. (I just want to pause for a second to acknowledge that Harrow shooting Marc in the chest is NOT in fact the headlining plot point here. That’s saying something.) Many people, objects, and images from the first three episodes pop up in what appears to be a psychiatric hospital, implying that Marc has created an elaborate fantasy world, recasting and remixing elements from his everyday life into what we mistakenly thought was Moon Knight.
Harrow’s muscle appear as orderlies. Layla is a fellow patient, more interested in Marc’s bingo card than Marc himself. A tray of cupcakes identical to the ones in the truck sit on the table. Marc recognizes the vista of the Alps featured in Episode 1 in an oil painting on the wall. Steven Grant is a fictional character in an old movie called Tomb Buster. Egyptian gods appear as office decor. Harrow sits behind a desk as Marc’s therapist, a slightly different version of his judge-y cane resting nearby. The Moon Knight suit is nothing more than a plastic action figure that slips from his hands and falls to the ground.
The other explanation for what we see is that Marc and Steven have entered the Egyptian afterlife — or, more accurately some kind of purgatory — and they need to use some Twin Peaks-esque dream logic to escape and return to our world. This will involve a hippo, apparently. (More on that later.) The events of Episodes 1-3 were in fact real, but Marc and Steven are now trapped in this otherworldly realm that has fractured their reality, translating memories, fears, and unresolved issues into an alternative spatial representation.
I refuse to believe what we’re seeing at the end of the episode is option #1. If this were the finale of what we knew to be a limited series, then sure. But this is episode 4 of a series introducing a new Marvel character to live action. I seriously doubt they’re going to “undo” the show thus far just for a twist. Plus, this is a part of the MCU, which means that anything that real-world cultures might label as supernatural — gods or magic — will be characterized as galactic or inter-dimensional. And we are in Phase 4, the age of the multiverse, after all.
Would option #1 be more meaningful for this show as a story about mental health? Absolutely. If all this existed to figuratively represent Marc’s struggle with his dissociative identities and show how he learns to live with his disorder, that would be a powerful and meaningful story. But that’s not this story. This is a superhero story.
We have to, at the end of the day, root for Marc, Steven, Jake(?), and Moon Knight to team up, enlist the help of some cast out Egyptian gods, reunite with Khonshu, and then get right back to that tomb to beat Harrow. Or, to make it finale-worthy, beat Harrow AND Ammit, who will likely have been released by the time Marc and Steven make their way back to the earthly realm. Nearly every Marvel/Disney+ series has ended with some kind of epic battle, and in the context of what we’ve seen so far, a Moon Knight/Khonshu v. Harrow/Ammit showdown makes the most sense.
The camerawork at the end of this episode makes me more confident that Marc has actually entered another dimension rather than retreated into his own mind. It reminds me a lot of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, when Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus, dies and rejoins his family in the Elysian Fields. In Gladiator, the camera holds directly over Maximus’ head and then very strangely tracks with him as he seemingly floats above the ground. The camera then cuts to his family in a field and we see him walking, brushing his fingers against the wheat. These fields, otherwise known as Elysium, served as the afterlife in Greek and Roman mythology.
Image Credit: AndersonVision, but you can see the clip by Screen Bites on Youtube.
The shot of Marc as he falls backwards into the pool of water holds at the same angle (though rotated 90 degrees), hovering directly above his face. This seems disembodied or other-worldly in the same way the one in Gladiator does. The serene yet haunting music also resembles Hans Zimmer’s iconic track, literally titled “Elysium.” A lone, ethereal female vocalist sings in no discernible language in both scenes. I’m not saying this was a conscientious homage, but I think both films use the same visual and musical language to convey the transition from earth to an afterlife realm.
Moon Knight includes an additional, possibly more jarring contrast between the two worlds. Immediately after the floating overhead shot (featured above), we cut to a longer shot of Marc’s body as he dies, which is a lot more realist, as if to represent what’s happening on earth. Once the camera cuts away from Marc’s dead body, the surrealist (or maybe just anti-realist) camerawork resumes as he floats down far deeper than the shallow water pool (puddle) that appeared in the previous shot. To me, this indicates that he has passed into some other world while his corpse remains in ours.
While the ancient Greeks and Romans had the Elysian Fields, the ancient Egyptians had the Field of Reeds or A’auru. Death was not the end of life, but rather only the expiration of a body. According to The World History Encyclopedia, the Field of Reeds is “a mirror image of one’s life on earth.” This mirror concept seems very fitting considering how much Moon Knight relies on reflections to stage conversations between Marc and Steven.
But, more importantly, it can explain the psychiatric hospital setting and the recasting of people and things from Marc’s life into that context. It’s a mirror image of his life on earth in all its component parts, but reformatted to reflect how Marc views himself. Harrow’s final words to him, “I can’t save anyone who won’t save themselves,” seem to set up Marc’s next mission: saving himself, by fighting his way back from the underworld and confronting his Dissociative Identity Disorder in the process.
Even though the characters we have come to know in previous episodes appear to be completely different people, the new versions of them still maintain the same relationships with Marc and/or Steven. He still has to worry about the orderlies coming after him to imprison him. Harrow may be using the language of psychology, but he still employs the same manipulative techniques. His cult leader version tries to derail Layla by revealing that Marc murdered Layla’s father (or, as Marc later clarifies, witnessed/aided and abetted his murder, depending on how you view it) and tries to distract Marc from his mission by playing up the resentment they both, as avatars, might feel towards Khonshu. The therapist version of Harrow arguably does the same by gaslighting Marc with a series of seemingly well-intended questions, trying to distract him from trying to escape.
Layla’s interaction with a sedated Marc is the most ripe for (over)interpretation because it reminds me of tension in their relationship. Hospital Layla straightens some photos and drawings on a board — they appear to be locations we’ve been to in the show or Egyptian iconography. But as she’s sifting through “clues” from their adventure in the first three episodes, she’s telling Marc that they had to change the movie playing because they’ve watched it too many times: “I changed the movie, okay? It’s been five times this week. It’s a lot.” This might be a stretch, but her words may speak to how she’s growing weary of Marc’s shenanigans. She’s tired of him pushing her away and trying to be a “lone wolf.”
She then takes his bingo card from him and the ever-changing pronouns she uses in her lines of dialogue are very telling. She starts out by saying, “You won.” Then she says, “We won.” Finally, when she addresses the person running the bingo game (who I think is the living statue performer from Episode 1), she says “I won.” This could refer to the shifting sands (sorry) of their relationship, where sometimes they’re on the same team and other times they’re fighting. Layla has her own baggage with her father’s murder (and now her knowledge that Marc played a part in it) and her own personal interest in Ammit’s tomb. Should she actually be the hero of this adventure? As she runs off to collect the prize, she says, “I’ll share it with you this time, I swear.” This implies that she’s taken his bingo winnings before but not shared them with him. That could refer to their recurring relationship problems. Or to their adventurer hero rivalry?
In a lot of ways the main focus of the episode leading up to this surreal, mysterious shift at the end is to push on the strained relationship between Marc and Layla by way of establishing more of an overt love triangle between Marc, Layla, and Steven. Marc actually accuses Steven of being in love with Layla, and Layla tries to kiss Steven, but he stops her to reveal that Mark has been pushing Layla away to try to protect her from Khonshu,. He then goes in for the kiss anyway. I thought May Calamawy played this scene perfectly because she looks so conflicted, especially during the kiss.
My favorite part of the scene, though, is Steven’s decision to defend Marc. I saw this as a conscience-clearing move, to level the playing field; if Layla knows that Marc still loves her and had a good reason for leaving her AND she still wants to kiss him, then he may feel like that’s fairer in love and war. This, of course, all blows up in all of their faces when Layla has to process the knowledge bomb that Harrow drops on her. I get the sense that she may not be able to look at Marc or Steven the same way again knowing that he (they? Steven seems in the clear here, though) contributed, even indirectly, to her father’s death.
Regardless of whether or not what we’re seeing is in Marc’s mind or a new realm in the MCU, I suspect that to get out of the situation, all of Marc’s identities need to work together to begin a healing process to figure out how they can all coexist in the same body in a healthy manner. We’ve already seen that process begin, I think. Marc hears Steven screaming and finds him trapped inside a sarcophagus. I found the hug they share and relief they both exhibit when they see each other to be very moving since throughout the show — especially this episode — they have been at odds with one another, fighting over the body and Layla’s affections. They also pass by another sarcophagus, which clearly has to be the mystery third identity I discussed last week. They don’t stop to open it here, but I’d say it’s highly likely that they have to go back to open it at some point in the next episode, possibly to help them escape.
The hippo goddess, Tawaret, which hilariously causes Marc and Steven to scream, will likely join the team as well. We’ve actually seen her before, as a plushie in the museum gift shop. (Disney, why have you not made this merch available?! I need it in my life.) According to some light Googling and reading the work others have other done on this, she’s a goddess of childbirth and fertility, but also, during some periods in Egyptian history, has served as a funeral deity, representing rebirth. So it makes sense that she would be in whatever afterlife, purgatory, or underworld we see at the end of the episode.
In Egyptian myth, there were two ways to get to the underworld: by boat/water or through the sarcophagus itself. Steven and Marc’s body falling backwards into the water and then sinking endlessly down signals that he may have traveled to the underworld underwater. Tawaret also has associations with water, sometimes being called “She Who Removes Water” or “Mistress of Pure Water.” This is unsurprising considering how much time real-life hippos spend in the water, but I think in Moon Knight it might mean that she will be crucial to Marc and Steven’s escape.
Image Credit: Twitter
But who knows! Everything I’ve said up until this point could be wrong.
I fear that I have focused too much on the crazy ending of this episode and don’t mean to ignore all the great tomb-raiding archeology adventure goodness we get in the earlier parts of it. I was genuinely not expecting Ammit’s tomb to be this creepy. A lot of critics have said that Marvel/Disney+ may have mis-marketed what the show was, saying it was darker and more violent than other shows when the first few episodes really weren’t. But I feel like they might have been referring to this episode and not the first three. We get fast zombie tomb guards actively performing mummification on Harrow’s people. That raises the stakes of Steven and Layla traversing the tomb in a way I enjoyed. It also plays up the fascination modern society has with the ancient Egyptians’ macabre rituals, essentially converting them into horror. The zombie mummy hand reaching out for Layla! Her stabbing of the mummy zombie’s eye with a flare! I loved all of this, actively gasping and holding my fingers loosely in front of my face.
This kind of light horror is, of course, a staple of the genre upon which Moon Knight riffs. Last week I compared recent episodes of the show to the Indiana Jones films, so you can imagine how overjoyed I was to notice what I think are references to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in this week’s episode. That cavern long shot with the narrow crack going up and down the entire frame calls back to the exteriors leading up to where Indy and Henry Jones, Sr. discover the Holy Grail. Later on in the episode, we see Layla navigate the crumbling ledges and bridges in a manner evocative of the “the name of god is Jehovah” riddle scene. No riddle for Layla to solve, unfortunately, but we can’t have everything.
Image Credit: Indiana Jones Wiki
I would have been perfectly content with an Indiana Jones-inspired narrative. I am, of course, ecstatic that the show has pushed beyond that to a whole other Lost-like mystery box level. What do you think is going on? What do you think will happen next? Share your thoughts and theories with me; I beg you.