‘Moon Knight’ Takes Its Weirdest Turn Yet In Episode 4 With Hippos, Asylums And Tombs

Moon Knight only has two episodes left to either end the character’s arc for good, set it up for season 2, or fling Marc and Steven to a new corner of the Marvel universe. I have no idea what the plan here is, but I do know that thing are getting more and more insane as time goes on.

The last 15 minutes of Moon Knight episode 4 today go off the deep end in a way we haven’t seen before. Spoilers follow.

In the tomb of Alexander the Great (long story), Marc is shot in the chest by Harrow, and presumably dies. Then, he wakes up in a mental institution which briefly leaves the audience to believe maybe he imagined all this, given that Layla shows up as a fellow patient, Harrow is his therapist and Steven is a character from an Indiana Jones knock-off he likes to watch on TV.

Naturally, this would make little sense as a genuine development in the show, and I believe it’s meant to echo a comic arc that once upon a time imagined whether Marc was insane or the Egyptian gods he claimed to serve were actually real. We know how that turned out.

Thankfully, the show does not seem to feel the need to keep up the façade for very long, and we quickly learn this is not reality and instead some sort of…what, exactly? Mindscape? Egyptian purgatory?

Marc lets Steven out of a coffin and the two try to begin an escape. They come across a second coffin waiting to be unlocked, but they ignore it, the implication being that this is the mystery, violent third personality that they keep teasing, and it seems we only have two weeks left to meet Jake Lockley, the answer to that question.

Finally, Marc and Steven run into a CGI hippo goddess who seems friendly enough. This goddess is Taweret, a god of childbirth and fertility. We have little idea what exactly she’s doing here, but her presence seems to indicate that perhaps some of the lesser Egyptian gods are rallying to help Marc and Steven and prevent them from actually dying. At the beginning of the episode, we saw Khonshu trapped in a little statue with a bunch of other trapped gods, so I’m wondering if this is where all the trapped gods hang out. But we’ll find out next week, I suppose.

It’s a little difficult to believe all of this will be wrapped up for good in two more episodes, so I have to assume the plan is for Moon Knight to return for season 2, but that doesn’t seem to be confirmed one way or the other yet. I believe the series was originally pitched as a miniseries, but who knows. I’m pretty sure Loki was too at one point, but that’s getting a second season.

Things are getting deeply weird in this corner of the Marvel universe, and we’ll see how we come out of this soon enough, and if we’re building to something larger and relevant for the overall MCU. I hear a certain god butcher is the main villain of Thor Love and Thunder, after all…

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.