Warning: This review contains spoilers for episode 4 of Moon Knight.
Four weeks in, Moon Knight is past the midpoint of its run and well on the way to its finale. This is usually where Marvel’s Disney+ shows start to stumble as they juggle too many disparate storylines and struggle to bring them all together. The fourth episode of Moon Knight, “The Tomb,” avoids that problem by unifying all the plot threads before throwing into question everything that’s happened in the series so far with a bombshell twist.
“The Tomb” gets off to a slow start as a pretty standard episode with plenty of expository dialogue and a smattering of straightforward action scenes, but it takes a bold turn and becomes the show’s craziest episode yet around the last 20 minutes. The wildly unexpected turn that the show takes about two-thirds into this episode redeems all the slow-paced storytelling up to that point. After a lot of wandering through the desert, exploring caverns, and shining flashlights on ancient artifacts, “The Tomb” becomes the most mind-blowing installment of the series to date. The final twist completely changes the game – fans have no idea what to expect in the next two episodes.
In the opening scenes of “The Tomb,” Marc/Steven and Layla embark on a quest to find the long-lost tomb of Alexander the Great. These two characters (or three, technically) make up the most interesting Marvel romance since Loki and his female self. Layla is on an adventure with a stranger who lives in her husband’s body. She shares romantic tension with both Marc and Steven in different ways. This unique dynamic is bolstered by the terrific on-screen chemistry between Oscar Isaac and May Calamawy. There’s a fun genre cocktail at work in these scenes with a Romancing the Stone-style adventure romance complementing the psychological horror – and there are a few seriously effective jump scares along the way, like a monster lunging out of the darkness and yanking Layla into the shadows.
Moon Knight Without Moon Knight
As much fun as the Steven/Layla romance is, the most compelling dynamic in the show is still Steven’s back-and-forth with his other self. Isaac plays both characters side-by-side in the episode’s game-changing final act, rounding out one of the all-time best examples of an actor performing opposite himself and creating a tangible relationship between the two characters. After sharing a contentious rapport in the first half of the series’ run, Marc and Steven are starting to warm to one another. Ethan Hawke’s performance as the villainous cult leader Arthur Harrow is another highlight of the show. He gets a couple more scenery-chewing monologues in “The Tomb” – including one in a whole new guise.
One drawback of the episode is that it’s very dimly lit. There are some beautiful shots of actors silhouetted against the desert sky, but the cinematography mostly blends dark foregrounds into dark backgrounds, making it impossible to tell what’s going on. Andrew Droz Palermo, the director of photography who worked on “The Tomb” (and previously shot the second episode, “Summon the Suit”) makes up for this dull lighting with a gorgeous orange glow when Harrow confronts Marc toward the end of the second act.
In this scene, fans finally get to see a glimpse of what Marc gets up to between Steven blacking out and then coming to covered in blood. In a few glorious seconds of rapid-paced bloodshed, Marc brings a knife to a gunfight and wins (sort of). He effortlessly slices and dices Harrow’s goons before Harrow seemingly shoots and kills him – and that’s when the episode delivers its biggest bombshell: maybe none of this is really happening and all the events of the series so far have been figments of a mental patient’s imagination.
How Much Of The Show Is Real?
After being shot and killed and plunging into a computer-generated moon, Marc wakes up in a mental institution with his ankle strapped to a wheelchair just like Steven’s ankle was strapped to his bed. All the familiar images from the series – Layla, Harrow, the Moon Knight costume, the goldfish, the mountain village where Steven briefly found himself – are dotted around this psychiatric hospital, suggesting that all of Marc’s superhero adventures have taken place inside his mind.
The hammy acting, lo-fi effects, and 4:3 framing of Tomb Buster, the goofy action-adventure B-movie from which Marc took the name “Steven Grant,” provided the most delightfully bonkers transition between the supposed death of the lead character and the rug-pull at the mental institution. It’s unlikely that Marvel will stick to the narrative that Moon Knight truly doesn’t exist and the entire show has been happening inside a deeply disturbed mind, but it’s a daring idea to explore. Moon Knight started off as Marvel’s riff on Fight Club, but it’s quickly turning into Marvel’s riff on Shutter Island.