Moon Knight: The Secret of Jake Lockley

Director Mohamed Diab explains the ending of Moon Knight and what may be next for Marvel’s weirdest superhero.

Oscar Isaac in Moon Knight
Photo: Marvel Studios

This article contains major Moon Knight spoilers.

Now that Moon Knight has ended its premiere season (with no word yet on whether there will be a second one), the show finished off with a mid-credits sequence that introduced a personality long awaited by diehard fans of the comics on which the show is based: Jake Lockley, the hidden third personality (also played, of course, by Oscar Isaac) that shares the body of Marc Spector along with Spector himself and Steven Grant.

A taxicab driver in the comics, Lockley appears to be repurposed here as a ruthless killer who is – unbeknownst to Spector and Grant – still bonded with the Egyptian god Khonshu at the end of the show. There were teases of Lockley’s presence throughout the season’s six episodes, most notably in instances when Spector and Grant both “blacked out” while Lockley hijacked Spector’s body to commit acts of extreme violence.

Moon Knight director and executive producer Mohamed Diab tells Den of Geek that the show’s creative team — including him, series creator Jeremy Slater, the writers and of course the Marvel brain trust – experimented with bringing Lockley into the story earlier.

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“We tried at one draft to make him more present,” he reveals. “But I think the decision by the writers from the beginning, with Jeremy, was that we needed to focus on Mark and Steven so we could give them the time that they need on camera. When we tried Jake with them, it was overwhelming. I liked that we end with Jake, so we open the doors for a story that is probably going to be centered around Jake, in my opinion, if it happens one day.”

Even though Lockley was almost a shadow presence throughout the series, Diab adds that he was pleased with the attention and speculation surrounding the character’s arrival.

“I love that he was the most famous character and always trending on Twitter without showing up even once,” says Diab. “And I love that it’s not a gimmick, the blackouts and stuff, because that’s a lot like the real way that people who live with DID (dissociative identity disorder) feel — blacking out and waking up in places that they don’t know or not remembering when they turned to another identity.”

Jake Lockley’s debut at the very end of the show — in which he kidnaps Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) from the psychiatric hospital where he’s a patient, shoves him in the back of a limo and summarily executes him with Khonshu sitting there watching – is certainly a cliffhanger of sorts and paves the way for a whole new storyline should a Season 2 come to pass.

Diab admits, however, that he’s “kept in the dark” just like the fans about whether Spector, Lockley, Grant, and Khonshu will return for a second season. “I have the feeling that people love the character,” he says. “Oscar loves the character…I don’t want to speak for him, but I think he would love to expand on it. He told me today it’s the thing that he’s most proud of in his career.”

But Diab also says that Marvel is “not traditional” when it comes to setting out future plans for its heroes, adding, “If you succeed, it doesn’t mean you get a Season 2. It might be a film. It might be a partnership with another superhero. But what I know for a fact is he’s too interesting to ignore. So if I were Marvel, I would keep him and keep Layla (May Calamawy). The two of them are super interesting.”

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Should the many personalities of Moon Knight come back for a second season, or should they begin interacting with the rest of the MCU in other shows or on the big screen? Marvel may have its plans, but like Jake Lockley himself, for now they remain carefully hidden away.

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