Moon Knight's Power Origin Secretly Continues 1 Perfect Phase 4 Trend
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Moon Knight episode 5.
Marvel's Moon Knight has finally revealed the moment where Khonshu chose Marc Spector to be his avatar, continuing a perfect trend seen throughout the MCU Phase 4. Rather than fully adapting the source material, MCU films and series usually take inspiration from the comics and effectively remix them into their own stories. This has been the case for Moon Knight, with some new directions and avenues for the origins of Marc Spector and his alternate identities. However, some of the visuals seen in Phase 4 have been directly ripped from the pages of Marvel comics, and Moon Knight just followed suit in a very satisfying way.
In Moon Knight episode 5's many mysteries, it was revealed that the psych ward Marc Spector woke up in was not real; he had actually died and entered the Egyptian afterlife known as the Duat. As it turns out, Marc had created the familiar psych ward in his mind as his manifestation of the afterlife. Finding his alter, Steven Grant, the duo was greeted by the hippo goddess Tawaret, whose job was to guide them through the Duat and to the Field of Reeds. However, she first had to balance their souls with Anubis' Scales of Justice. To do so, Marc and Steven had to look through their shared past with Marc having to be honest about the things he'd been keeping from Steven and making peace with his past traumas.
This led to the reveal where Khonshu chose a dying Marc Spector to be his Fist of Justice. Bleeding out on the steps in the Temple of Khonshu, the moment is ripped straight from the pages of the comics. It specifically evokes the artwork from Alessandro Cappuccio from 2021's Moon Knight #1, complete with Marc's mercenary clothes (like his scarf) as well as the glowing white eyes once Marc agrees to serve the Egyptian moon god. The visual accuracy from the comics to the TV screen is impressive, and it's something that's been seen more and more across different Phase 4 projects.
To give some examples, the new Thor: Love and Thunder trailer revealed a comics-accurate recreation of Gorr the God Butcher's murder of Falligar, mirroring Esad Ribic's stunning artwork on Jason Aaron's 2012 series Thor: God of Thunder. Likewise, Loki featured a President Loki variant who looked exactly like the God of Mischief's look in Marvel's Vote Loki miniseries, while WandaVision's Scarlet Witch found the remains of Vision dismantled, recreating a moment from West Coast Avengers where he, too, was rebuilt as White Vision. Hawkeye's credits sequences were inspired by David Aja's artwork from Matt Fraction's acclaimed Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon series and the trailer for the MCU's upcoming Ms. Marvel series ended with Kamala Kahn sitting on a lampost, homaging the iconic cover for 2014's Ms. Marvel #5 from artist Adrian Alphona. While these are just a few visually comic-accurate moments among several in Phase 4, it's very cool to see Moon Knight join this number.
Rather than the MCU's narratives being completely comic-accurate (which ultimately isn't feasible and wouldn't be all that valuable), peppering in iconic visual representations from the comics is a lot of fun and are typically received very well. They reward comic readers without punishing those who haven't (like a vocal or written reference could). At any rate, Marc Spector being chosen by Khonshu in Moon Knight just as he was in the comics is very satisfying to see, even if the surrounding story of his origins has been altered and remixed for his MCU Phase 4 adaptation.
New episodes of Moon Knight release Wednesdays on Disney+.