‘Moon Knight’ EPs Answer Our 6 Burning Finale Questions
Spoiler Alert
[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Moon Knight Season 1, Episode 6, “Gods and Monsters.”]
At this point, Marvel fans know there will always be lingering questions at the end of any given MCU series, but its latest drama Moon Knight really left us hanging. In the mid-credits scene, we finally come face-to-face with the third personality in the Marc Spector/Steven Grant dissociative identity disorder triangle — Jake Lockley (Oscar Isaac). And, in perhaps the most exciting development, Marc’s wife Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy) is now a superhero as well — Marvel’s first Egyptian hero. And they can’t let that gorgeous Wonder Woman-esque costume go to waste, right?
Below, we unpack our most lingering questions with director/executive producer Mohamed Diab and executive producer Grant Curtis.
Why does Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) leave the scarab behind?
Early on in Episode 6, Harrow leaves the scarab on Marc’s dead body before departing with Ammit (voiced by Saba Mubarak). Sure, the scarab was just a device for him to find Ammit’s idol, and he doesn’t necessarily need it any longer, but why leave behind such a useful tool on the body of your enemy? Was it pure overconfidence, or did he want to be pursued? “I think he was thinking it has done its job to get him to Ammit and get him out,” notes Diab. “And he’d killed Mark, so what else could happen?”
©Marvel Studios
Layla, of course, scoops the scarab up, but we don’t actually see her use it. She just hops in Harrow’s caravan of followers instead. “[The scarab] wasn’t one of the things that came and bit [Harrow] in the butt in the end,” Diab adds. “Layla went with him through the journey. Her carrying it was an emotional thing, not a plot thing.”
Is Layla the Scarlet Scarab?
Though the original comic character Scarlet Scarab (who fought for Egypt’s freedom when it was still a British colony and possessed powers of super strength and flight) has little in common with Layla after becoming Tarawet’s avatar, “I’m calling her the Scarlet Scarab,” confirms Curtis. “Yes, May plays the Scarlet Scarab, and there’s not a better actress to introduce Egypt’s first superhero than May Calamawy.”
And while the series itself left her moniker a bit more open-ended, Diab is just happy to see the representation — Scarlet Scarab or not. “It’s just such an important moment,” he says. “I know that my daughter, who when she was three was saying, ‘Please I want to straighten my hair,’ because she never saw a role model that looks like her. So, I know this is going to affect a lot of people, and it’s going to inspire a lot of people to dream and think that they can be anything.”
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And hey, though Layla doesn’t really match the Scarlet Scarab character quite yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen down the line. “Right now, she didn’t get her superpowers through the scarab, maybe in the future she’s going to be more strong because of the scarab, and maybe she’s going to continue to be Tarawet’s avatar, but it’s all up for grabs,” Diab says.
What the heck was with the psychiatric hospital?
One of the season’s most confusing threads to follow was the psychiatric hospital that Marc and Steven — as well as a host of other characters — inhabit. Was it real? Was it all in his head? And how did Harrow wind up inside it in the end (and was he inside the whole time as the Doctor treating Marc and Steven)? As you can see, we have lots of questions. But there aren’t a ton of answers. “I keep watching the show and I think you can jump at it from every angle,” Diab teases. “But it’s also not just a mind game we’re playing with the audience. It’s portraying how people with DID live, and that was such an important thing for us to do.”
Disney+
The trippy setting was also prevalent in the original Marvel comics, but one part was new — adding in Harrow as Marc/Steven’s doctor. Or was it Harrow? “He didn’t [have Harrow’s scales tattoo], but he was limping and he looked the same,” Diab notes. “And in his room, everything that we saw through the story was there. There were three layers — the doctor, the afterlife, and the real life. It makes us think, but also understand more about what DID could do to someone.”
Who is Jake Lockley? And why did we have to wait until the end to see him?
The third identity alongside Marc and Steven was teased throughout the series in unexplained blackout moments that couldn’t be attributed to either Marc or Steven, as well as a rattling sarcophagus seen in the asylum. Jake, a comic character that many fans were expecting, drives a taxi and extracts helpful info for missions from the people he drives in the comic series.
In the show though, he’s driving the recently re-released moon god Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham) around in a limo, breaks Harrow out of the asylum, and (supposedly) shoots him dead. He’s also the violent identity that has taken a few of the series fights a bit too far. And it seems he’s still linked to Khonshu as his avatar, even after Marc and Steven made a deal to break free from the overbearing god. “I still get the willies when I watch that scene and Oscar turns around and looks you in the eye,” Curtis admits. “Jake is unnerving.”
“I don’t know what Jake does, but I know it’s brutal and he’s definitely the strongest of them, the angriest,” Diab adds. “I can’t imagine what’s going to happen next with the three of them, with one of them again under the spell of Konshu while the other two are ignorant of that.”
As far as why they added Jake in at the very end, as opposed to showing his character throughout, it was just what worked best for the story, according to Curtis. “Jake is peppered throughout, but it wasn’t a conscious effort of when we were physically going to show him in a tangible form,” he says. “It was just the best narrative journey that brought the whole show to completion”
Anything that didn’t make the final cut?
“There’s one thing,” teases Diab. “My favorite scene in the whole show. Everything that got cut was a very good choice, but there was one scene with Oscar that was his best performance in the whole show. He’s a genius in everything, but this was his best. He was in a white void confronting his mom, and he was [shifting] between Marc and Steven. That’s the only scene, not because of the plot or because it made any sense, but because of Oscar’s performance.”
If that doesn’t sound like it would emotionally gut any fan of this series, go back and watch Episode 5. Marc revealing his familial trauma to Steven and how his mother iced him out of her life after the accidental death of his little brother is heartbreaking, and we would’ve loved to have seen some more closure there.
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Will there be a Season 2 or continuation of these characters?
“I would love to be a part of anything that happens in the future, but I want to tell you, I’m just as in the dark as you,” Diab says. “That’s one of the best things that Marvel does, keeping secrets very dear to their hearts. What I can tell you is, I have a feeling that this character is very interesting, so it’s going to be hard to just end here.” Fingers crossed, people!
Moon Knight, Season 1, Now Streaming, Disney+
