Warning: this story contains spoilers for Wednesday’s “The Tomb” episode of Moon Knight. What the heka is going on inside the mind of Marc Spector/Steven Grant? Moon Knight Episode 4 explores the long-lost tomb of Ammit, the Egyptian deity whose wrath will doom millions of souls if she’s freed by her devoted disciple Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke). But as Marc/Steven (Oscar Isaac) grapples with his splintering mind, and the secrets that mercenary Marc has been hiding from estranged wife Layla (May Calamawy), something scary had viewers calling for their mummies: heka priests.
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“The heck’s a Heka?” asks Steven in “The Tomb.” Heka priests were the sorcerers of their time, Layla explains, and were centuries ago entombed to protect their mummified pharaoh. After discovering an ancient symbol, the Eye of Horus, the tomb raiders realize the final avatar of Ammit was a pharaoh.
In a scary sequence straight out of The Mummy, the click-click-clicking heka priests reanimate and disembowel Arthur’s disciple Billy (David Ganly) before chasing Steven and Layla through the tomb. But the zombified priests aren’t the only monsters in “The Tomb.”
Episode 4 ends with dueling identities Marc and Steven, somehow physically separated and now patients of a psychiatric ward, encountering another Egyptian deity with a surprised scream: the talking hippo god Taweret.
“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?’”
When the writers’ room burst into laughter, Slater said, “I was like, no, stop laughing. I’m very serious. We’re putting her in the show (laughs). I think that 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… This gave me my weird swing. And most importantly, it got my favorite hippo into the show.”
See the latest images from Moon Knight Episode 4 “The Tomb” and fan reactions to the episode below. New episodes of Marvel’s Moon Knight are streaming Wednesdays on Disney+.
