Moon Knight Review

 Moon Knight

by Akshat Agarwal

If you know me, it’s no secret that I am a huge Batman fan. So I know what I am saying when I tell you that Moon Knight did an amazing job of avoiding the Batman trap. In the comics, one of Moon Knight’s alters is Steven Grant, a wealthy businessman who finances Moon Knight’s crusade. Understandably, this makes it hard to distinguish Moon Knight from the Dark Knight. Additionally, when Moon Knight first started airing, The Batman had been in theaters for a short time and so was fresh in everyone’s memory. 

It was really a brilliant move on the Marvel Studios team to change up Steven Grant so people didn’t just take it to be Batman but wearing white. I will say, however, that my overall take on this show is a little mixed. 

I really liked the beginning. We see the story from multiple different points of view. The show catches us off guard by introducing Steven, a British museum worker. We then get to meet Mark, a taciturn, tough ex-mercenary. Unfortunately both of these guys share the same body and Mark is bonded to the psychopathic Egyptian god of the moon. The show has excellent pacing while introducing the characters and establishing the context of the story. 

It also does a decent job of creating a villain in Arthur Harrow. My biggest critique of Harrow is that he lacks that dash of sympathetic capability that characterizes all villains. I imagine the show runners were trying to portray him as a man doing what he thought was right by killing evildoers before the crime, thereby setting up a huge debate about who was right, but he honestly comes off as just being manipulative and unhinged. I would like to see Khonshu’s history as well as the history of Ennead explored and I think that telling us about Harrow through a project like that would be a good idea.  

Additionally, I think that they did a great job of creating Layla El-Faouly and May Calamawy did a great job in bringing the character to life. The character provides excellent representation. I think it was kind of weird that Marvel decided to call her the Scarlet Scarab despite her being connect to a hippo goddess (hippos are not scarabs afaik), but otherwise she was an incredibly solid character. 

My biggest issue with the show comes from the fact that it tries too much, which leads to pacing issues at the end. The show runners introduce a plot that involves Marc/Steven being in a mental asylum where Harrow is a psychiatrist and his adventures as Moon Knight are imagined. While the adaptation of a classic Moon Knight comic is not poorly done, it is unnecessary and honestly adds very little. The whole purpose of it was to symbolize Marc/Steven breaking out of their mental imprison (spoiler), but again it just feels like the subplot ate screen time for no reason. 

The finale was not poorly done, but it did feature a lot. Marc just decided to leave the Field of Reeds (Egyptian heaven) to rescue Steven who had been lost in the Duat (Egyptian underworld). It’s never really explained how he just left, because you’d think there would be safeguards against that. 

Then they have to explain why none of the other gods fight against Ammit and it’s because Harrow (Ammit’s avatar) soloes all the other avatars. That power-scaling just didn’t make sense to me since she was able to beat not only Horus’s (the famed Egyptian war god)  avatar but also Osiris’s (King of the Egyptian gods) avatar without much difficulty. 

The series did have a relatively well-crafted ending. We see Jake Lockley, the third alter, who is more amenable to working with Khonshu and still under his control (Marc/Steven bartered for their freedom) kill Harrow/Ammit after Harrow had become the prison for Ammit and was placed in a mental institution.  They had been hinting at the existence of a third, far more vicious alter throughout the series so turning Jake into a post-credit scene was pretty cool. 

If you feel like want to watch something with a well-executed plot, you’ll enjoy Moon Knight for about 5 days. 

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