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Warning: this story contains spoilers for "The Tomb" episode of Marvel's Moon Knight.Where is Marc's mind? After a trek through the long-lost tomb of Ammit in "The Tomb," Moon Knight Episode 4 ends with Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) shooting Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and claiming the ushabti holding the Egyptian deity whose wrath Harrow wishes to unleash upon the world. Inside an Easter-egg filled mental institution, Marc, his alt-identity Steven Grant, Layla (May Calamawy), and other familiar faces are patients of Putnam Psychiatric Hospital. Their doctor: psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Harrow, who tells Marc he's having trouble figuring out "what's real and what's in your head."
After freeing Steven from the inside of a sarcophagus, Marc and Steven try to escape the ward before bumping into a talking hippo goddess: Taweret, the Egyptian goddess of childbirth.
"Right from the very first week, Marvel provided us with a ton of reference material on Egyptology, and on ancient Egyptian gods and deities," head writer Jeremy Slater told Marvel.com. "One of those pieces of material was a laminated poster that had like a little kid, cartoon drawings of all the different gods — one of those gods was Taweret. I spent that entire first week of our writers' room, just staring at that. Then finally, at some point, 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?'"
For Slater, the episode-ending reveal of Taweret "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," Slater said. "This gave me my weird swing. And most importantly, it got my favorite hippo into the show."