The penultimate episode of Moon Knight hits the brakes on its main narrative and delves into the minds of Marc and Steven in an emotional story that stands as the darkest of MCU storytelling.
It’s hard not to mention every week just how amazing Oscar Isaac is in this series, but the man is truly a breathtaking performer and a joy to watch. He completely immerses you in his characters with the most incredible distinction between his two roles. With both characters going through frequent traumatic and emotional scenes in this episode, it really speaks to his talent as an actor that they all land so well.Â
Early concerns regarding this show were brought up about how the MCU might handle various important aspects of the character’s comic book origin: his Judaism, childhood trauma and mental health issues with DID. It’s hard to talk about how well these ended up being handled from the perspective of someone who is neither Jewish nor suffers from DID but I felt both aspects were reasonably well tied into the story.
While his religion was so minimally addressed, I think the episode established fairly well his relationship with it is fragmented and temperamental due to its inherent ties to his family. It’s clearly something he still holds close and can’t fully abandon (as revealed previously he still wears a Star of David), but he clearly can’t maintain full commitment to it.
His DID felt similarly handled well; a mental health condition that is often routed deeply in trauma and develops as a coping mechanism. Concerns were fairly held that there would be some sort of superhero element tied to his condition, but it was handled with care and attention to the real-life struggles of people with such conditions in my opinion. But again, these aren’t things I have personally experienced so I fully acknowledge I cannot speak to this as well as people with relevant experience.
This episode was a stunning display of brutal honesty and fantastic storytelling surrounding abuse, mental illness, and trauma. These are themes that have been tackled in the MCU before, but never to such a level of dark realism and full exploration.
As a family-friendly franchise ultimately built to fill seats, the MCU has often felt limited by a lack of full commitment to relevant and interesting themes. Recent projects have been much more willing to do this and Moon Knight is the best example of this, we would never have seen this kind of commitment to such mature themes in earlier projects.
My only complaint of this episode would simply be the continued missing presence of Jake Lockley. The comic book version of Moon Knight has another alter-ego called Jake Lockley, a cab driver who serves as Moon Knight’s main source of info on current activity around the city in earlier comic runs. There have already been teases about Lockley being around. Episode three saw Marc waking to dead bodies that his body had clearly killed, yet Steven claimed it wasn’t him. Then episode four showed a shaking sarcophagus shortly after Marc freed Steven from his.Â
The teases definitely imply the existence of other alters but a lack of appearance so far does raise concerns on how well they could handle the introduction of another character with only one episodes to go. Perhaps it will be used as a cliffhanger rather than a major plot element.
I don’t know how much my viewing experience is being affected by my familiarity with the source material, but it’s hard to look at something objectively with preconceived notions of its source material. With the teases scattered throughout the show, it does seem like we are due payoff in the finale.
Moon Knight continues to be one of the leading projects in the MCU with its gripping storytelling and captivating lead characters, Oscar Isaac constantly shines and the world of Egyptian mythology lends itself to stunning backdrops for a brilliant story. How the series wraps all this up is yet to be seen but this episode will hold up as the very best of Marvel.
