Moon Knight directors explain shocking twist at the end of episode four

The directors of Moon Knight have opened up about the shocking twist at the end of episode four.

Disney Plus’s Marvel adaptation, which stars Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke, stunned viewers on Wednesday (20 April) with a reveal that drastically alters the reality of the series.

Spoilers follow for the first four episodes of Moon Knight…

Near the end of episode four, Marc Spector (Isaac) is shot. He then wakes up in a psychiatric hospital – leaving viewers unsure whether everything we have seen up until this point had been a delusion.

Adding to the confusion is the presence of several characters Marc had previously encountered over the course of the series – shown here to be patients, doctors or other people around the facility.

However, some fans have speculated that the hospital could itself be a distortion of reality, inflicted upon Marc by the gods.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead spoke at length about the episode.

“The end of episode four is actually a gift of the script. It came from wanting to do the least expected thing and completely disorient the audience, while also being completely true to the character that we’ve built over four episodes,” said Moorhead.

“We have a general philosophy in scenes where we’re trying to unsettle or fill people with dread: Slow is creepy, fast is exciting. Obviously, what is more exciting than being creeped out?” said Benson.

“We’ve talked about this scene feeling like it’s underwater, not just because he’s been sedated, but because the entire audience has just been subjected to an entire worldview shift of what this show is,” added Moorhead. “Why is there a weird Indiana Jones knockoff movie right in the middle of Moon Knight?”

According to the pair, the series has drawn direct inspiration from one of the Moon Knight comic’s best-loved runs: issues one to 14 of the 2016 series by writer Jeff Lemire and artist Greg Smallwood.

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The comic saw Marc realise that he was being held against his will in a false reality by the ancient Egyptian gods, while the real New York City was in peril.

“Connecting it back to the Lemire run, there are so many iconic single panels within that run,” said Benson. “But there’s one sequence in particular where our hero has been trying to escape from a mental health facility. He finally gets out. He jumps out, but it turns out he was on an airplane, and he’s free-falling.

“Obviously, that doesn’t happen in this show, but we really feel like what we did captures the spirit of that distilled image into something that is not literally that but has the same feeling.”

New episodes of Moon Knight are released on Disney Plus on Wednesdays.