Almost 27 minutes into the episode, we see Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) slapping himself mercilessly because he doesn’t want to revisit a particular memory. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that throughout the penultimate episode of Marvel’s Moon Knight, the audiences feel like doing the same. Moon Knight opened a pandora’s box in their last episode and left many viewers scratching their heads. It ended with Marc and Steven Grant (both played by Isaac), two different people now, escaping a mental institution and crashing into the Egpytian Hippo God. The fifth episode opened on an as chaotic note as the last one ended and gave us a back story of Marc/Steven.
And if you thought the penultimate episode would answer all the questions of the fourth episode, you are in for a wild ride.
The episode opened with a small boy shouting for help and the scene quickly cuts to a woman looking at the camera and saying, “It is all your fault.” Her words are seamlessly cut with the Hippo screaming on seeing Marc and Steven, which again swiftly cuts to a doctor’s chamber where Marc is being counselled. The psychiatrist who was revealed to be Arthur Harrow tells Marc that he has created a fantasy world of his own and keeps oscillating between reality and his fantasies and stories where he is a superhero.
He seems to be understanding Harrow’s words who tells him that the imaginary Hippo he described seeing can break the wall between him and Steven but he soon gets triggered and is made unconscious by the workers in the institute. As he loses consciousness, we again go back to the scene where Marc and Steven are screaming at the Hippo.
It is revealed that she is the Egyptian Goddess Taweret, who tells the men that they are indeed dead and have entered the realm of the Duat. Steven explains to Marc that Duat is the Egyptian underworld or the realm of the dead and Tawaret is guiding them through their journey to the afterlife.
They are revealed to be on a giant ship, sailing through a mystical place. Taweret takes out their hearts and places them on the scales of justice. The scales need to be balanced for them to move to the afterlife but their hearts are incomplete. She advises them to confront each other and not hide anything from each other.
Hence, Steven takes a dive into Marc’s past and with it, we get to witness the heartbreaking, traumatic past of them that even the former did not know existed. Marc Spector, who had a perfect family as a kid, loses everything when he mistakenly gets his brother killed. (Remember the voice of the kid asking for help?) His mother resents him, blames him for the death and is even violent with him.
And that is when Steven Grant takes birth. He is revealed to be a figment of Marc’s imagination, his escape mechanism when things got thought. Steven, like the audience, considered him to be his original version and Marc to be someone leeching onto him, but turns out, it is quite the opposite.
Heartbroken, he confronts Marc who explains that the purpose of Steven’s existence is to be happy and let Marc forget about the things he has gone through. He also tells him that their mother is dead and the conversations he had with her were again imagination.
The story moves back and forth from Taweret’s ship to Marc’s childhood to the psych ward. Doctor Harrow advises Marc and Steven to break the wall between them, similar to the lines of what the Egyptian Goddess asked them to do. We are also shown how Khonshu found an injured Marc and chose him as his avatar and he rose as the Moon Knight.
Back at Taweret’s ship, unjudged souls are being deposited in the afterlife, which hints that Arthur Harrow’s plan of delivering Ammit’s justice is working. Marc and Steven request her to let them go back but she says that their scales need to balance for their body to heal otherwise they would go back into a body with a bullet.
Meanwhile, zombie-like creatures try to them bring down as their scales are still not balanced. Marc and Stevan fight them off side by side but Steven’s personality falls down from the ship into the sea of sand and freezes while Marc screams at it the sight disbelief. Their scales finally match and he finds himself in a field of wheat, with the sun shining on his face.
The fifth episode of Marvel’s Moon Knight, hands down, is one of the studio’s best offerings and can compete with some of their feature films with ease. Oscar Isaac once again shows his calibre as he switches between an American and a British, a mercenary and a meek person. To have a superhero series navigate through the topic of mental illness with so much intricacy is another thing that sets the series apart. Whether Marc is really a superhero is not the important question but the fact that his trauma gave birth to another person altogether and he uses him as his escape mechanism is so real to relate to.
However, there was a slight disappointment in the episode. Not enough to dampen the mood and the craziness o the story but in the 4th episode, we saw a sarcophagus which led us to think that it might contain Marc’s third personality- Jake Lockey. Five episodes went by without his mention which makes us pin all our hopes on the last one.
Moon Knight, directed by Mohamed Diab is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
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