Moon Knight Episode 4 Ending Egyptian God Explained By Writer
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Moon Knight episode 4
Moon Knight writer Jeremy Slater explains episode 4's twist ending and its surprise hippo figure. Since premiering on March 30, Marvel's latest series on Disney+ has followed Oscar Isaac as a man suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). One of his alters is Steven Grant, a mild-mannered museum gift shop employee who speaks with a strange British accent, while the other is Marc Spector, a former mercenary who becomes an avatar for the Egyptian moon god Khonshu and has the ability to "summon the suit," and become the titular Moon Knight.
This week's Moon Knight episode 4, titled "The Tomb," changed the game for the series with a few surprising twists and turns. Inside the titular tomb, Ethan Hawke's soft-spoken villain Arthur Harrow arrives and shoots Marc twice in the chest and leaves him die. For a second, it appears Moon Knight might have killed off its main character. However, Marc then wakes up in a psychiatric hospital. There, his previously established love interest Layla (May Calamawy) is a fellow patient and Harrow is his doctor. Marc soon finds Steven trapped inside a sarcophagus and the two embrace one another before being taken aback by a hippopotamus-headed figure.
Now, the Marvel show's head writer and executive producer, Slater, is addressing the events of episode 4. Slater discussed "killing off" the show's main character, which he didn't hesitate in doing as he felt it was necessary to keep audiences on their toes. Slater also discussed Marc and Steven's new friend, the towering high-pitched hippo who makes a grand appearance at the end of the episode. Read Slater's comments below:
"I knew a show like this needs big swings and it needs to take the audience by surprise ... Right from the very first week, Marvel provided us with a ton of reference material on Egyptology, and on ancient Egyptian gods and deities. One of those pieces of material was a laminated poster that had like a little kid, cartoon drawings of all the different gods — one of those gods was Taweret. I spent that entire first week of our writers' room, just staring at that. Then finally, at some point, I couldn't take any more. I interrupted whatever we were talking about and I was like, ‘Guys, we have something much more important, which is, how do I get this hippo into the show? ... I was like, no, stop laughing. I'm very serious. We're putting her in the show. I think that was the first moment everyone realized, oh, we have permission to get weird, here. We have permission to do some things you wouldn't necessarily get to do if you weren't working at a place like Marvel Studios… This gave me my weird swing. And most importantly, it got my favorite hippo into the show."
Moon Knight episode 4 doesn't kill off its main character in the traditional sense, as Marc and Steven both later appear to be alive in the hospital with memories of their past, but somehow in separate bodies. However, the twist Moon Knight ending does suggest that the globe-trotting events seen in the previous episodes did not actually happen, but were instead projections of Marc's mind inspired by a VHS of an Indiana Jones film ripoff called Tomb Busters.
It is interesting to hear Slater discuss the surprise arrival of the mysterious hippo in Moon Knight episode 4, and that it was inspired in the writer's very first week at Marvel. The figure is actually named Taweret and has roots in Egyptian history as the goddess of protection, childbirth, and fertility. Slater being adamant about including Taweret in the show from such an early stage, and the fact she is introduced this late at four episodes in, suggests the hippo figure will play a significant role in the two remaining episodes of Moon Knight on Disney+ after a shocking debut. Perhaps Taweret's purpose is to play peacemaker between Khonshu, Ammit, and the other gods. More will be revealed in the penultimate Moon Knight episode 5.
Source: Marvel