Moon Knight Season 1

2022, d. Mohamed Diab, and Benson & Moorhead  - Disney Plus
created by Jeremy Slater
 

Moon Knight holds a weird place in my comics fandom: there's a strange, deep-rooted affection for the character from my childhood even though I never read a single issue of the comic.  Oh, as a tot I once bought a single issue of the series, but the issue disappeared, only to be discovered, after a frantic search, in a garbage can... torn in half (my mother objecting to the comic's content).  I have a vague image in my head of what the cover of that issue looked like, but I've yet to ever actually see that cover again.  This nominal trauma cemented into my brain that I was a Moon Knight fan, only to find out some 20 years later, reading a random issue of a more recent series that I knew absolutely nothing about them.  I read some of the original run, but nothing much sticks in my memory save Bill Sienkieweicz's dramatic linework and the character's multiple personality disorder.

As such, watching the new Moon Knight Disney+ series, I was in the strange position of having no idea what to expect out of a superhero property, yet still having some expectations.  I really can't speak to the character of the comics, but my impression always was he was a brutal vigilante, falling somewhere between Daredevil and the Punisher on Marvel's scale of ruthlessness in the war on crime.  To show how little I know about the character, I had next to no awareness of Moon Knight's connection to Egyptian mythology, so the show tying itself so heavily into it came as a bit of a shock.

The series introduces us Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), a London-based museum gift shop employee who has a super-keen interest in all things Egyptian.  He's a real submissive, beta character type, showing little confidence in himself, except when it comes to his knowledge of Egyptian stuff.  He cheerful and outgoing, only awkwardly so.  He sleeps with a circle of sand around his bed and his ankle chained to his bedpost.  He calls his mom to leave voicemails regularly. You know, Steven is just your average shlub. 

The sand and ankle restraint are there because Steven thinks he sleepwalks, not realizing that, in his downtime, Marc Spectre, a different personality takes over.  Steven is completely unaware he has dissociative identity disorder, and never aware of what he's up to in his nocturnal sojourns.  Things come to a head though when he wakes up, not chained to his bed, but in a field outside a remote village in Austria.  There he encounters, face-to-face, cult leader Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) who seems to run the village. People willingly submit themselves to him and allow him to cast judgement upon them by way of a scales tattoo that, if balanced one way or the other means subservience or death.  

Steven's escape from the cult leads to the show's most engaging sequence as the intensity ratchets up. Steven continually blacks out, only to wake up in an even more intense and chaotic situation.  The effect here is highly entertaining and well orchestrated, one of the freshest action sequences in a long time, despite some choppy special effects.

Eventually Steven learn's of his other persona's existence and that Marc Spector is the Fist of Khonshu, the Egyptian moon god, and protector of travellers of the night ... and also married, as Layla (May Calamawy) comes looking for Marc after he disappeared on her some time ago, to serve him divorce papers.  The plot of the series is Khonshu's directive of stopping Harrow from freeing Ammit, who, through her vessels, will judge everyone on Earth not for their sins, but possible sins.  But the real story of the series is Steven and Marc coming to terms with who they are, two vastly different identities in one body, and the many, many secrets Marc holds that are key to understanding who, and why, they are.

Among the many things I didn't know about Moon Knight was how long it would be (6 episodes, turns out) and how tied into the MCU it would be (not at all...perhaps the first MCU product in a long time to not acknowledge its a part of a larger universe of events and heroes).  

Following the intriguing first episode, I found it to be an uneven experience.  The aspects of Steven discovering his other life is the emotional core of the series, including his relationship with Layla, but the psychological drama didn't seem to marry well with the adventure-heavy aspects of squaring off against Harrow.

The manifestation of Khonshu in their minds (voiced by F. Murray Abraham) led to revelations that there are avatars for many of the Egyptian gods, and there's a whole (underwritten) structure to their existence.  Khonshu is seen by the rest as a wild card, not to be trusted, so they do not heed his warnings of Ammit's impending escape.  Khonshu and his powers, and by proxy the powers of the Moon Knight (or Mr. Knight if Steven's in charge) are kind of whatever the script needs them to be and not well defined in the show either (like...he can fly? Khonshu can rewind the sky?) There are a few leaps here that feel awkward even in the reality of the MCU.

The fourth episode is largely an old fashioned, straightforward tomb-raiding adventure and finds its own rhythms within, forgetting almost entirely it's a superhero show.  Likewise the fifth episode finds Marc and Stephen's body near death, and they're trapped within a mind-prison that threatens to ferry them into the afterlife for good.  It's a twisty, unexpected, and emotional journey as Steven learns of his own creation, the show unflinchingly delving into Marc's abuse as a child at the hands of his mother.

The final episode sits with these revelations but puts Marc and Steven at peace with each other, and in a much better place to aide Khonshu with his mission, and then, hopefully, be free of his manipulative influence.  

In the finale of the series, it feels like a whole piece, only it leaves with one thread dangling, ready to be tugged on, which it then does in a mid-credits sequence, revealing itself to not be stand-alone.  Effectively, this is not "Moon Knight", but rather "Moon Knight Season 1".

As an MCU piece, it's shockingly singular.  Its predecessor Disney+ shows all spun out of the movies, and future series that have been announced all have connective tissue with what came before, so it's amazing that this tale of gods didn't make any effort to tie into, say, the Eternals (just to learn that a planned Eternals cameo was excised late in production).  It works well at being its own thing.

 It's also largely disinterested in superheroics.  What does their life as a vigilante look like?  We don't know, it's never examined.  The Moon Knight costume only appears in three of the show's six episodes, and not for long stretches (although it does the highly annoying Spider-Man 3  thing where it flits back and forth revealing Oscar Issac's face in case we forget who's supposed to be under there).  Isaac, for his part, is good at playing both Marc and Steven, at giving them each defining physicality and mannerisms (beyond one having an American accent and the other having a not spot-on British accent, but obviously there's reason behind that), but perhaps because Steven is our POV character, I found Marc to be a bit harder to invest in.  Hawke is good at being sage, but menacing, but it's a role that doesn't need much.

This really could have been a movie though, and old-school, self-contained, solo film.  They could have hit upon most of the main points that are here but in a much condensed fashion.  But at the same time, the weighty episode 5 would have lost much of its potency.