The Action-Packed Moon Knight Finale Gives Us Major Battles And Lingering Questions

The sixth and final episode of "Moon Knight" is now available to watch, and woo boy — what a tonal whiplash from the emotional journey we took with Marc/Steven (Oscar Isaac and Oscar Isaac) last week!

Remember that whole Armageddon plot? We left that behind us, more or less, in the last episode to travel with Steven and Marc to the afterlife and into the memories of their past. This week, however, was an action-packed superpowered showdown that reminded us that this series is, indeed, still a Marvel endeavor.

Let's get into it. And warning! Spoilers for the "Moon Knight" finale lie ahead!

'Sometimes we need the cold light of death before we can see reality'

Harrow (Ethan Hawke) is back, and he's got some great one-liners like the one above as he works to free Ammit and kill billions. We start the episode with Harrow pulling Marc/Steven's dead body out of the water and taking Ammit's ushabti. The ushabti levels up the cane he's been carrying into a staff with a crocodile head on top, and Harrow is now strong enough to fight the other Egyptian gods and free Ammit. 

Harrow heads out, and Layla (May Calamawy) comes out of hiding, tearfully goes to Marc/Steven's dead body, and picks up the MacGuffin scarab that Harrow left on his chest. Layla is sad, of course, but she knows she needs to stop Harrow any way she can.

To that end, Layla sneaks onto Harrow's motorcade and is looking for any opportunity to stop Harrow. She thinks she has a chance when the motorcade runs into blockade and Harrow unleashes Ammit's "justice" on the officers. (Harrow has another great line here: "I don't need to show you papers. You need to show us your soul." I feel like he must have been practicing these lines in the mirror for months and was eagerly waiting to unleash them along with Ammit's wrath on the world.)

Layla is about to attack Harrow with a knife when the hippo Egyptian goddess Tawaret starts talking to her through dead bodies. She's telling Layla to hold off and wait for Marc to come back from the dead. She also urges Layla to free Khonshu and become her avatar. Layla is like, thanks, but no thanks and continues to stay with Harrow's caravan as they head to the Great Pyramid of Giza where the gods and their avatars hang out.

Your scales lack balance

At the pyramid, the other avatars are none too happy that Harrow's coming to release Ammit from her little stone statue. The avatars of the other gods put up a fight but Harrow prevails, breaks Ammit's statue, and frees her. After five episodes, we finally get to see Ammit in action — and it's no surprise that she's very big and takes the form of a bipedal crocodile. 

"To whom do I owe my gratitude?" Ammit asks, revealing that being entombed for 2,000 years hasn't stopped her from using proper grammar. Harrow takes the credit and Ammit ultimately makes him her avatar even though his scales aren't balanced.

Layla, meanwhile, frees Khonshu from his own little stone statue. Khonshu asks Layla to be his avatar and she wisely tells him to f*** off. Khonshu goes off to confront Ammit, and the two gods have a little bit of a debate before fighting each other.

Meanwhile, we finally head back to Marc, who we left last episode in the Field of Reeds. Marc is there with Tawaret, who tells him that his scales are balanced and his heart is full. Marc feels peace, but he can't leave Steven stranded on the sandsea of the Duat. And so he leaves paradise to save Steven.

It's here we get the most emotionally and poignant moment of the episode — Marc tells Steven that the only reason he survived was because of Steven, and that he wasn't going to abandon him now, given that Steven never abandoned him. "You are the only real superpower I ever had," a choked-up Marc tells Steven before he also freezes. Marc's speech apparently moved Osiris as well as this viewer, and the god's gates to the mortal realm open as Marc and Steven unfreeze.

We come as a package deal now

Marc/Steven wake up back in their body in the tomb of Alexander the Great. Back in the Great Pyramid, Khonshu senses Marc's presence and rushes off to make him his avatar once again.

Marc and Steven have become close during their time in the afterlife, however, and the two personalities shift freely in their shared body. Steven calls Khonshu a silly bird and tells the Egyptian god of the Moon that the new deal is they're done being his avatar once they stop Ammit.

Khonshu agrees (a bit too readily, I might add), and uses his moon magic to have Marc/Steven fly to the pyramid, which is pretty cool. Meanwhile, inside the pyramid, Layla agrees to be Tawaret's avatar after Osiris' dying avatar tells her they need to bind Ammit in a mortal body in order to confine her.

From here on out, it's a full-on superhero battle. Harrow goes to the top of the pyramid and gives all his followers the ability to judge/kill people. They begin to do so, and Ammit becomes larger than the pyramid itself. Khonshu and Marc are having none of it, however, and they each attack their counterparts. Khonshu is big now too, and he and Ammit face off in the Egyptian desert in Godzilla vs. Kong fashion.

Layla is now Tawaret's avatar, however, and she gets her own kick-ass outfit (replete with wings!) and helps Marc against Harrow. Layla is awesome here, and I loved the moment when one of the people she saves in Cairo asks her if she is an Egyptian superhero. She definitely is. And a better one, dare I say, than Marc.

So what, this is what reality looks like?

Harrow gets the upper hand, however, and as Marc is going down, he (and we) blackout. We cut back to pretty much everyone dead and Harrow unconscious. Marc/Steven's third personality strikes again!

Marc/Steven and Layla take Harrow back to the pyramid and cast the spell that will trap crocodile Ammit into his body. It works, and Khonshu orders Marc to kill them both. Marc, however, refuses, and Khonshu appears to accept this and fades away, apparently taking his moon powers away from Marc/Steven as he does so.

Marc/Steven pass out, and we find ourselves back in the asylum with Steven asking Harrow about the nature of reality. Was this whole season of "Moon Knight" just a delusion? (Is that why we didn't see any connections to other characters in the MCU?)

Marc asks Dr. Harrow what it means if they believe reality is something different than this doctor's office. Harrow shrugs and walks away, his shoes leaving streaks of blood — a callback to the series' cold open where he puts crushed glass in them because the pain makes him holy, or whatever.

Steven and Marc realize this asylum isn't their reality (or at least they choose to believe so) and wake up back in Steven's flat, replete with Engelbert Humperdinck's "A Man Without Love" on the soundtrack. Marc and Steven are now there together (there are even two fishes!) — they get up and then promptly fall flat on their face, forgetting they were tied to the bed.

And that's it! Except, of course, for one more sequence

This ending is unsatisfying to me, but at least we have an additional scene to at least address some of the show's lingering questions. In this final sequence, we're in another asylum tinged with yellow light. Harrow is a patient here, and a man takes him out of the facility in a wheelchair.

We know something's not on the up and up when we get a quick cut of a bloody body behind the facility's front desk. And we know things really aren't hunky-dory when Harrow gets thrown into a limousine that houses Khonshu decked out in a business suit.

Khonshu is still a total jerk and reveals to Harrow what was pretty obvious to us already — there's a third personality sharing mind=space with Marc and Steven, and this guy has no qualms about murder.

Khonshu introduces us to Jake Lockley, another one of Marc's personalities from the comics. Jake says some words in Spanish and then offs Harrow and, presumably, Ammit.

And now the show's really over, folks! And I have to admit the ending left me hanging — I wasn't ready to leave Marc/Steven/Jake and Layla.

Will there be more "Moon Knight" installments in the MCU? It's not clear yet. If there is, however, I hope they focus on where this season was the strongest — when it focused on Marc/Steven's personal journey and struggles. The interiority of this show was a different approach to storytelling than we often see in the MCU, and I hope we get to see more stories in this vein as the MCU continues to expand.

Other thoughts

  • So is there going to be another season of this show? I hope so, because I found this ending to be largely unsatisfying. Yes, Marc/Steven have a closed character arc and have now accepted each other, blah blah blah. That's something, I admit, but I still wanted more and the final sequence with Jake definitely leaves the door open for more story.
  • Speaking of Jake, I thought for sure we saw him a bit last episode when Marc was talking to Dr. Harrow in the asylum and rapidly switches from believing he had made everything up to attacking Harrow with a pyramid paperweight. Jake, however, appears to speak Spanish, though he certainly can be bilingual I suppose.
  • There were some fun fight scenes in this episode, which is a good thing I suppose since the whole episode was basically a fight scene. Special call out to Layla, however, and to Steven as Mr. Knight embracing his badassery.
  • This show had almost no connections/references to other happenings in the MCU, and I kinda liked that. 

All six episodes of "Moon Knight" are now streaming on Disney+.