“Moon Knight”: Marc and Steven, Tomb-Busters and even a Hippo were all in Episode 4.
Take a look at the twists and turns of the last episode.
Marc Spector is no longer with us, and he has died. Steven Grant is also dead. It might surprise people who are watching Marvel Studios’ Moon Knight to learn that the show killed off the main character. But Moon Knight isn’t just any other show. This is just the beginning of Marc and Steven’s journey.
Episode 4: The Tomb. At the end of the episode, Arthur Harrow shoots Marc, who is in charge of Marc’s body at the time. Marc dies in the tomb of Alexander the Great. Marc then wakes up somewhere else. As far as he knows, he’s been in a mental hospital. However, things around him look a little weird to him. Then he meets up with Steve. What comes next? At the end of Episode 4, there are only half as many weird things for people to see.
MAKING MARC AND TAWRET GO TO HELL
Any doubts about killing Marc and Steven? According to Head Writer/Executive Producer Jeremy Slater, that’s not true.
“I knew that a show like this needs big changes and to surprise the audience,” he says. When the main character is killed off, what is more shocking than that? But at least wherever Marc and Steve are, and whatever they’re doing, they’ve already made one friend along the way: a hippo.
Marc and Steven don’t know what to make of Taweret when she shows up at the end of Episode 4. What did Slater need to get done with the show? She was the only thing.
“Right from the very first week, Marvel provided us with a ton of reference material on Egyptology, and on ancient Egyptian gods and deities,” He continues. Taweret was one of those pieces of material. It was a laminated poster with pictures of all the different gods that looked like little kids. At our writers’ room, I stayed there for the whole first week and just looked. Finally, 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?’”
Yes, the writer’s room was filled with laughter. “I said, “No, stop laughing,” and then I laughed. There is no way I’m not taking this seriously! We’re putting her in the show,” Slater continues with a laugh himself. “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.”
But how she fits into the puzzle for Marc and Steven remains to be seen (if they ever stop screaming). TOMB BUSTERS
Turns out, “Steven Grant” is actually a real person — er, a real fictitious person, as he stars in the VHS of Tomb Busters. Suddenly, in Episode 4, the aspect ratio changes, and viewers are treated to a little snippet of Dr. Steven Grant and his trusty sidekick as they head off in search of treasure.
The directors of Episode 4, Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, were thrilled to try out something new while filming this little Tomb Busters interlude.
“It was so much fun, because that vignette, of course, is very deliberately completely different from everything we’d ever shot — in style, in performance, in lighting, and everything,” Moorhead tells Marvel.com. As the group was filming, “everybody had this giant smile on their faces as we were exploring, just being as silly as possible. The performers that we were able to get were having just this joyous time, that we were sad that we weren’t able to have another day with them.”
PUTNAM HOSPITAL
As if Tomb Busters and Steven Grant aren’t enough of a fun, hidden detail for you, the beginning of that following scene is chock full of references to prior episodes of the series. You’ve got a Rubik’s cube, cupcakes, chess, marshmallows, even a little Moon Knight figure…the list goes on. It was a fun challenge for the directors to try and squeeze in as many references as possible for eagle-eyed fans.
However, Benson and Moorhead didn’t direct Episodes 1 and 3 of the series; Mohamed Diab did. So, the duo called him up with a favor.
“What was fun was we had to call up Mohamed and ask, ‘Hey, what can we put in a scene that’s really recognizable from your episodes?’ All we had were the dailies of his episodes. We didn’t quite know what the other episodes looked like yet. [That scene] is all visuals. It had to be a visual cue. So what are people going to definitely remember from [his] episodes?”
Speaking of visual cues, the directors also wanted to change the look of this scene, clearly indicating Marc was now in a completely different location (and mindset).
“A lot of what we were trying to do was to visually contrast what we were doing. There’s a lot of handheld down in the tomb and then he dies and everything is very steady and it’s all dark. It’s very dark with reflections of water light and all of that. Then it goes to the brightest set you’ve ever seen that’s all white,” Morehead explains.
“We realized that it wasn’t that we’d spent 30 minutes [in Marc and Steven’s world], we’d spent three and a half hours in there. You know, we’ve got [Episodes] 1, 2 and 3 before us and so we wanted to make sure that it felt like such a gut punch that people would start questioning the reality of the entire show and which one of them is actually supposed to be the real one.” MEETING MARC AND STEVEN
To the utter shock of both Marc and Steven, the two actually meet. In what is certainly a surprising turn of events, Marc finds Steven in a closed sarcophagi and, after freeing him, finds his alter face to face with him. And they do what anyone would probably do in this situation: hug.
Calling it a moment that they’re “really proud of,” Justin and Aarron love that Marc and Steven “kind of instinctually hug.”
“It’s an interesting reaction, especially considering the relationship they’ve been having with each other, but it feels right. It feels like this breath of relief,” Moorhead continues. “But what that hug is, is it’s actually inspired by the end of the Jeff Lemire run of MOON KNIGHT. There’s this wonderful moment where he hugs himself. We were so in love with the idea of someone hugging another part of themselves and saying comforting words that we really, really wanted to get that hug moment into one of our episodes and that moment was right.”
