The Black Panther Reference You Likely Missed In Moon Knight Episode 5
Contains spoilers for "Moon Knight" Season 1, Episode 5
Episode 4 of Disney's "Moon Knight" left viewers with a lot of questions. Like, why are Marc and Steven (Oscar Isaac) stuck in a psychiatric hospital? Why are they in separate bodies? And who the heck is this talking hippo? Thankfully, Episode 5 sees the hippo and Steven, with their combined mythological know-how, answering these questions for both audiences and Marc.
The hippo, if anyone remembers Steven's brief lesson from Episode 1, is the Egyptian goddess Taweret (Antonia Salib), and she is there to guide Marc and Steven to the Egyptian afterlife because, surprise, surprise, they died when Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) shot them in Episode 4. The hospital is simply how Marc and Steven's human mind perceives the unknowable realm of the Duat, the Egyptian Underworld.
This, understandably, creates more questions than answers for Marc and Steven, the former of whom isn't even sure all of this is real. Taweret tries to answer some of their questions but is cut short when Marc exits the "hospital," discovering something truly mind-blowing. In fact, what he sees (the true form of the boat carrying them to the afterlife) is so shocking that you likely missed the "Black Panther" reference that Taweret dropped in the middle of it all.
Taweret name-drops the Black Panther afterlife
Right before Marc manages to flip the entire afterlife conversation on its head by leaving the hospital, he sarcastically asks Taweret if they're really in the afterlife. She confirms that they are but also adds that they are simply in one afterlife. In reality, there are a number of planes and realms where souls go once their consciousness has been detached from their bodies. She names only one of these, and it just so happens to be the only other afterlife we've seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far: the Ancestral Plane.
For those who don't remember much of "Black Panther," the Ancestral Plane is where Wakandans go once they die and where Black Panthers briefly go to commune with their ancestors after taking the Heart-Shaped Herb. When T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) takes it, he has a conversation with his deceased father on the plains of Africa. When Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) takes it, he communes with his own deceased father in their old apartment in Oakland, California.
From this, we can gather that the Ancestral Plane, like the Duat, appears as whatever the visitor perceives it as. This means that while the various afterlives can be attributed to different gods, they all share some similar rules. Though exactly what all of those rules are still remains a mystery.