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Moon Knight Episode 5 Retconned Marc's Reason for Having DID


Warning! This article contains spoilers for Moon Knight! Read at your own risk!

When it was announced that Moon Knight will be having a rating of TV-14, many fans were worried on how the show would portray the character and the story considering that the material it would be based on is full of violence. However, Episode 5 just proved to everyone that the narrative can be softened but it is more tragic. They just retconned the reason of Marc having dissociative identity disorder.

Moon Knight Episode 5 Retconned Marc's Reason for Having DID

Moon Knight Episode 5 Retconned Marc's Reason for Having DID
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Credit: Marvel Studios
Moon Knight Episode 5 Retconned Marc's Reason for Having DID

In the comics, Marc Spector developed symptoms of dissociative identity disorder because of the violence he has seen when he was young. At a young age, Khonshu, an entity in the Othervoid, had interest in Marc believing that the child has a “weak mind.” With Khonshu not able to leave the Othervoid, a realm beyond time and space, he created psychic connections with Marc and chose him to be his avatar one day.

Marc’s father is a rabbi who survived the Nazi oppression. They have a close family friend, another Rabbi, Yitz Perlman, who Marc encountered by chance, it turns out, Perlman was a Nazi named Ernst who poses as a Rabbi to target and kill Jews. As Marc fought Perlman and escaped, the latter disappeared. With the violence he experienced, it brought trauma to Marc.

Such trauma led him show symptoms of dissociative identity disorder. Marc believes that he met another kid named Steven Grant whom Khonshu promised to heal the mind one day not knowing that such boy is him, then, as a teenager, Jake Lockley arrived and he was the violent one that led his parents to send Marc to the Putnam Psychiatric Hospital. The rest is history.

However, for the series of Moon Knight, this was not the case. In the show, the reason why Marc had dissociative identity disorder is that his mother blamed him for the death of his brother and beaten him up because of it. To cope with how painful the situation is, he created Steven, a persona who loves his mother and never had any memory of such traumatic childhood.

Related: Moon Knight Episode 6 Release Date and Time, Countdown for the Finale

Perfectly delivered by the show, the traumatic past of Marc Spector gave rise to his alter, Steven, without having to resort to violence. More than that, they accurately portrayed what is it like for someone who has dissociative identity disorder where there are times their alters are seemingly watching from the inside and sometimes, they are completely absent, hence, Steven not remembering any of the beatings he had from his mother.

Another turning point on Marc and Steven’s consciousness starting to bleed out on each other, coinciding in the most unexpected ways, is when Marc’s mother died and he chose not to attend her shiva. Revisiting this memory was painful for Marc but for Steven, it is his chance to tell to Marc that the death of his brother was not, at all, his fault because he was also just a kid then.

The show really had its way of fitting the narrative into the rating it has been given and it turns out to be a more dramatic approach as to why Marc created Steven in the first place. Surely, tears streamed down the cheeks of many viewers because of this and it is closer to reality than what happened in the comics. The series definitely committed into addressing the mental health issue of the titular character in a way that it would not resort to violence.

Moon Knight Episode 5 is now streaming on Disney Plus.

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