The Limitations of "Moon Knight"

All the spoilers ahead

There is way too much good TV right now for me to be spending much time thinking about "Moon Knight," but I feel like I need to get a few things off my chest about the MCU series on Disney+.  This is the first of their shows to not be explicitly tied to the rest of the cinematic universe.  It stars two of the best working actors on the planet right now - Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke.  It has all the resources of Marvel Studios at its disposal.  The series was hyped up as a major event, and I was anticipating this more than probably any other MCU series.  And good grief, "Moon Knight" is underwhelming.

This was promoted as a darker, creepier show that tackled themes of mental health.  Instead, it's a pretty kid-friendly action program that doesn't contain anything more disturbing than you'd find in the "Mummy" movies.  The story does involve the Egyptian gods, who the Moon Knight gets his powers from, so there are potentially gnarly elements like a trip to the underworld, people getting possessed to act as "avatars," and slightly bloodier violence than the MCU norm.  I stress the "slightly," because the most egregious acts of violence are always kept offscreen.  There's actually a story reason for this, which isn't handled as well as it should be, resulting in a lot of the show's action sequences feeling like an awful tease for cool scenes we don't actually get to see.  This even extends to the finale, one of the most anticlimactic things I've ever seen.

The mental health warnings slapped on various episodes are in reference to our hero suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder.  Londoner Steven Grant (Isaac) is a soft-spoken employee of the British Museum who keeps losing chunks of time, soon revealed to be the parts of his life that are being lived out by the part of him that is an American mercenary, Marc Spector.  Marc is the avatar of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu (F. Murray Abraham), who can turn into a superpowered fighter, but is also bound to help Khonshu in his war against evil forces.  The primary one is Arthur Harrow (Hawke), a cult leader who is trying to resurrect the troublesome goddess Ammit (Saba Mubarak).  As Steven learns more about Marc's life, he gets caught up in treasure hunts, spirit quests, and a lot of globetrotting alongside Marc's wife Layla (May Calamawy).  

Initially, "Moon Knight" is a little spooky and a little paranoid as Steven tries to account for a life full of unexplained blackouts and strange, looming visions of the skull-headed Khonshu and other monsters.  Two episodes later we're in the middle of a rolicking Egyptian action-adventure and Khonshu turns out to be a grumpy good guy with not as much power as we thought.  It's hard to really get invested in the conflicts here, because the show's mythology slips into comic book silliness very quickly.  The pace is so fast we're just supposed to take things like Khonshu messing with the positions of the stars, or Harrow convincing the surviving pantheon of Egyptian gods he's trustworthy, at face value.  I was constantly losing track of Harrow's schemes, and the exposition is really crammed around the edges of all the cacophonous fight sequences.  It feels like this was originally meant to be longer than six episodes.  At the same time, it also feels like two different versions of the same premise with two very different approaches, that the creators decided to cram together at the last minute.

Fundamentally, the show just isn't for me.  I think the best example of what I find so unsatisfying about "Moon Knight" is that we know that Marc and Steven have a third personality as early as the third episode, but this isn't explicitly confirmed until the mid-credits sequence of the last episode.  The show is written for ten year-olds, and as someone who has been watching "Peacemaker" and  "Invincible," I'm just not the target audience here.  However, Oscar Isaac is so good as Marc and Steven, and it's so much fun to watch him toggle between one personality and another, juggling different accents, and getting into the physical comedy and mayhem.  The fifth episode with Steven digging into Marc's past is excellent, and I wish that the creators had the guts to just keep the show smaller in scope and more character-focused in nature.  The big show-downs just keep getting increasingly tedious.

But this is an MCU series, and it's been shown time and time again that there's a formula here that Marvel's only willing to mess with so much.  And now I know not to expect more.

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