MOON KNIGHT: Review, references and easter eggs in episode 5

And we had another episode of Moon Knight released on Disney + that finally brought the madness to its height for the series. The episode called “The Asylum” continued Marc’s “therapy session” presented in the last episode and delved deeper into very the story of Marc and Steven.

Marc's Childhood and Steven's Origin

The shape of this episode is almost as if we are following a therapy session with Marc. Additionally, the episode introduced a new goddess to the series, the Hippopotamus Goddess Taweret, which is in charge of fertility, childbirth and children.

She plays a key role in “The Asylum”, as this place is, in fact, Duat, the Egyptian underworld and Tawereth is Marc and Steven's guide. Marc, however, doesn't want to believe it and ends up opening a door that takes them to a ship.

This ship is on its way to Aaru, the Egyptian paradise; then we are thrown into the main conflict of this week's episode. Although he is on his way to paradise, he is guided by a scale that measures who will be entitled or not. To see if they are entitled, Marc and Steven go to the depths of their souls on a psychological journey that helps us understand more of their past.

In addition to telling more about Marc's childhood, here's our first glimpse into the creation of Steven's personality. He was created as an outlet for his childhood problems, based on the movie featured in the last episode, "tomb buster”, in which the protagonist is called Steve Grant.

The Tragedy of Marc Child

In this context, we also understand why it exists. I mentioned that it was like an escape valve and that's because of the great tragedy with Marc as a child.

When he was little, Marc had a younger brother. They used to play and his mother would always ask him to keep them safe. The problem is that when they enter a cave — which her mother asked not to enter in case it was raining — it floods and her younger brother unfortunately dies.

This tragedy would be enough to haunt Marc, but his mother starts to treat him badly and take out all her anger on him, blaming and hurting him, both physically and mentally. It is on this path that Marc begins to develop other personalities, with Steven being the first of them.

This caused Marc to withdraw from the family more and more, even though his father still had affection for him. The shock of the episode comes when we discover that Marc has managed to hide all the negative side of his mother and even this tragedy from Steven, turning the entire conflict of the episode into one of the best things about the series so far.

Moon Knight has finally found himself

One of the problems with the Marvel Studios series so far is that most of them feel more like a 6 hour movie cut in edit to have multiple episodes. As we could see from episode 7 and now with episode 4, this continues to happen, even if in this case it has a less worse effect than before.

From the middle of the season, things started to get more interesting and talk better with what is expected of the Moon Knight character, especially in episode 5, this week.

With this story focused entirely on Marc's psychology and his loss of sanity, the series manages to reach an excellent level of quality and finally gets excited for what follows. The big problem is that we only have 1 more episode and I have my doubts if things won't drag and if we'll have a really good conclusion to it all.

Easter eggs and references

This week was filled with very interesting references and easter eggs that served to confirm several things that until then we had only clues and some doubts as to whether or not they would be the same as the comics. they can contain SPOILERS, but in case you don't care about it or have already seen the episode, let's get to it.

The name of the asylum references an important HQ

The asylum where Marc and Steven are staying has the name “Putnam Medical Facility”. In the comics written by Jeff Lemire, we have the “Putnam Psychiatric Hospital” (Putnam Psychiatric Hospital, in direct translation). This connection of the names may indicate a little more about the source the series has been drinking from.

Randall, Marc's brother, is a supervillain in the comics.

From the ending we've had so far in the series, it's hard to say if we'll get anything like this, but in the comics, Randall Spector, growing up, becomes the supervillain Shadowknight. The character becomes one of Moon Knight's main villains and, knowing Marvel, some adaptation of this story should happen in the future.

Gus the fish has a very important meaning in the series

As the series begins to explain Marc's past, we get a glimpse of a very peculiar scene. Randall is drawing a Goldfish, but with only one fin. This connects with Gus, Steven's fish that we see in the first episode, who also only has one fin.

The interesting thing about this scene is that it takes place on the exact day that Randall dies, which makes this memory a great trauma for Marc, which makes it less painful in Steven's personality.

A classic comic book villain confirmed 

In the first episodes, especially after the appearance of layla, we had a lot of questions about the big moment when Marc was finally approached by Khonshū to serve you.

With that, we also had doubts about how the death of Layla's father happened and how was all that much mentioned massacre until then. In yet another flashback straight from Marc's mind, we're taken to this moment, which confirms Marc's involvement in Layla's father's death.

Furthermore, this scene also mentions that the mercenary behind it all was called bushman, the same one that caused all the trouble for Marc in the comics. 

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Are you enjoying Moon Knight? Do you think it will have an interesting ending? Leave your comment below and check out our review of the last episode

Source of Easter Eggs and references: ScreenRant