Marc’s Past Is Revealed in a Heartbreaking ‘Moon Knight’ (RECAP)

Moon Knight

Asylum

Season 1 • Episode 5

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[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Moon Knight episode 5, “Asylum.”]

Going into Episode 5, Moon Knight had left plenty of questions unanswered. Was Marc (Oscar Isaac) really dead? What on Earth was that talking hippo? What’s going to happen with Layla (May Calamawy) and Arthur (Ethan Hawke)? Will the show incorporate Moon Knight’s third alter, Jake Lockley?

In a move similar to WandaVision’s “Previously On,” “Asylum” takes a detour to give viewers some answers. It serves as a backstory episode for Marc framed by exploring rooms in an asylum, as well as a near-complete pause in the larger “Ammit and Arthur vs. Khonshu and Marc and Steven and Layla” story. From Taweret (voiced by Antonia Salib), the goddess of women and children — and the talking hippo from last episode — Marc and Steven learn that they’re dead and in the Egyptian underworld, awaiting judgment. On a boat, she rips out their hearts (!) and places them on a scale, balancing them with a feather. If the scales balance, they’ll be sent to the Field of Reeds (the happy afterlife), if not… they’ll be consumed by the undead. Pleasant!

As with Ammit’s justice, the scales don’t balance. Taweret says this is because their hearts are incomplete. Is this a reference to Marc’s third alter? No — it’s a reference to the fact that Steven doesn’t know anything about Marc, really, and the following sequences are dedicated to him learning.

By entering different rooms in the hospital, Steven steps into memories that show him truths about Marc. One, filled with bodies, is a group of all the people he killed while dispensing Khonshu’s (voiced by F. Murray Abraham) justice. Another shows how Marc’s younger brother drowned when they were kids, a tragedy for which Marc’s mother blamed him. “You were supposed to protect him!” she yells, later on asserting that Marc was jealous of his brother and she “should’ve known [he’d] do something like this.” Steven also sees Marc leaving his family, breaking his father’s heart.

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

Marc pulls Steven from those memories before he can see them fully, and they wind up re-experiencing the night Layla’s father died. Marc explains that after being discharged from the military for “going AWOL in a fugue state” he went work-for-hire, but when a job changed and suddenly called for no witnesses, he couldn’t live with it. He tried to get the innocent people out, but they all died anyway, and those innocent people included Layla’s father.

Inside the pyramid in the memory, a dying Marc presses a gun to his head… and hears the voice of Khonshu. He offers him to be his avatar, and Marc becomes Moon Knight. Suddenly they’re back on the boat with Taweret, who says souls above are being judged before their time, sending the underworld into chaos. Marc and Steven want to help, so Taweret offers to get them to Osiris’ gates.

But the scales still aren’t balanced, and Steven thinks that’s because Marc wouldn’t show him a memory from his childhood involving a certain room at the top of the stairs. Marc offers to explain everything, but that’s not good enough for Steven. Unintentionally echoing their mother, he tells Marc that if everyone dies, it’ll be “all your fault!” This sends Marc spiraling into a breakdown, and he winds up in Dr. Harrow’s office again.

Dr. Harrow tells him he has to open up to Steven and he ends up seeing that memory, which is stomach-churningly traumatizing. In it, Marc’s mother pounds on the door and screams at him to open it, and Marc becomes Steven — whom he based on a fictional archaeologist — for the first time. Steven opens the door, his mother grabs a belt, and… Marc pulls Steven from the memory. Steven’s appalled and distraught, saying Marc kept the truth from him. Marc argues that was the whole point: That Steven would get to have a happy life, free of the memories of their abusive mother. Oh, and that abusive mother? Marc accidentally lets it slip that she’s dead, which spins Steven’s world off its axis since he’d been calling her daily.

In a meeting with Dr. Harrow, Steven finally accepts that his mother really is gone, and he also sees Marc outside her funeral, drunk and refusing to enter. Sobbing in the middle of the street, he unintentionally gives Steven control, and we see him “call” their mother and say he’s lost. “That was when our lives started bleeding into each other,” Marc explains. Steven tells him what happened to his brother wasn’t his fault… and the whole world quakes.

The boat has stopped. They’re at the gates of Osiris, but as Taweret explains, the scales aren’t balanced and so their souls must be consumed by the undead. She evaporates, leaving Steven and Marc to fend for themselves. They almost make it. Thanks to some heroics from Steven, Marc survives, but Steven falls out of the boat and seems to be consumed by the underworld. As a result, the scales balance and Marc enters… the Field of Reeds? How the heck is all of this going to be resolved in one episode?! We’ll have to wait until next week to find out.

Moon Knight, Wednesdays, Disney+