Review: Moon Knight, "Gods and Monsters" | Season 1, Episode 6

The latest MCU TV show lacked ties to the MCU *and* TV, if we're being honest

Photo: Marvel

It’s a big week for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the launch of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness—which I’m seeing as you’re reading this—and the finale of Moon Knight, the fifth live-action MCU television project on Disney+ and the first to be based on an entirely new character. After four projects spinning off characters we’ve become intimately familiar with through the phases of the MCU, the Jeremy Slater-developed series was a weather balloon of sorts for the idea of creating something entirely new in an episodic format, as opposed to using existing characters as a launching pad for characters like Kate Bishop (Hawkeye) or John Walker (Falcon and the Winter Soldier) that will carry through to the “C” that still drives the MCU’s storytelling.

When I was mapping out the shows to cover here at Episodic Medium a few months ago, the MCU shows were a logical choice: they’re released weekly, they have a large built-in fanbase, and there’s lots of online traffic generated around them. I skipped Moon Knight, though, partly because it would have overloaded my schedule, but also because I was apprehensive about whether these six-episode narratives would work effectively when we don’t have an existing buy-in for the characters involved.

I don’t think any of the MCU shows has been truly satisfying: there’s been great moments in most of the shows, and WandaVision’s ten-week run had a bit more room to breathe, but the six-episode format feels trapped between the movie they could have been and the actual TV show they refuse to be. And while that was kind of acceptable when you mentally accepted it was just a bridge to the next movie featuring these characters, or a way to introduce Kang the Conqueror for future movies, would the same be true if the project was literally just creating a new branch of the MCU that may or may not offer a direct connection to future projects?

After six episodes of Moon Knight, my answer to this question is “no.” This isn’t to say that Moon Knight was terrible: Oscar Isaac is a great actor, Ethan Hawke got to have a bit more fun as the season wore on, May Calamawy was great once she got something to do, and Mohamed Diab’s direction was often striking. But I ultimately don’t believe a superhero origin story is better by being spread out across six episodes, as it ends up living in this liminal space where there’s not enough structure to support proper episodic storytelling, and yet also not enough time to deliver the type of cinematic climaxes that a traditional three-act structure offers.

Photo: Marvel

The exception is the fifth episode of the season, “Asylum,” which sends Mark and Steven into the afterlife to explore the trauma that brought the latter to life as a defense mechanism. It’s the standout episode of the season because it’s the only episode that truly stands on its own, taking advantage of the episodic dynamics of the medium to diverge and divulge in a way that would derail a cinematic origin story from a pacing perspective. Even though the finale undoes Steven’s sacrifice, the attempt to balance their scales is a smart way to get us inside Mark’s head, creating a clear short-term goal that generates emotional momentum to carry into the end of the season.

In his interviews about “Asylum,” Slater compared it to The Leftovers’ “International Assassin,” but there’s a key difference: whereas that episode was paying off two whole seasons of character development, this was still very much part of Moon Knight’s origin story. In the balance of a six-episode season, “Asylum” didn’t unlock new meaning in what we had already seen: it was the meaning we had been searching for, making the rest of the season a buildup to actually getting these answers. It rewrote the episodes that came before as just empty action and exposition that signified very little, in a way that the third act of an MCU origin story rarely does. It illuminated our understanding of this character and his mission, but it also underlined that the early episodes were mostly just setup for this reveal.

Essentially, Moon Knight never tries to be a TV show—it doesn’t set up a cast of characters, or a narrative engine to generate episodic storylines. It just takes the mystery of Steven and Mark’s double life and stretches it out over four episodes. This was one thing when Hawkeye did it, since that show was doing triple duty as a coda from Endgame for Clint, an origin story for Kate, and even an epilogue to Black Widow for Yelena. But here, this is just an origin story for Moon Knight, and while the bonus Scarlet Scarab reveal for Layla is good it doesn’t make the character’s fairly muted entrance any more compelling in those early episodes.

Origin stories are already hard enough in a film context, as there’s always the sense that the story only truly starts when the origin is out of the way and we can experience the character’s final form. But that doesn’t mean the early parts of an origin story aren’t important: take Shang-Chi, the last MCU origin story, as an example. There’s a lot of exposition in the first act of that movie, but the bus fight is actually a really critical moment for merging his two worlds together, and in kicking off the hero’s journey. For me, Moon Knight has no similar moment: “Asylum” was the first time the show was saying much of anything, and the finale ultimately did little to revive anything—side characters, subplots, themes, etc.—that the first four episodes had kind of just thrown out there without a great deal of purpose, even if it was on a basic level engaging enough.

The only MCU shows that have managed to feel remotely televisual are WandaVision—because its structure is about television—and Loki, as it had an early procedural structure. Both shows eventually blew those structures into smithereens (which was particularly damaging for WandaVision’s climax), but the fact that structure existed made Loki’s turn toward the surreal and multiversal that much more effective, even when the ending was just a long monologue to set up a villain for a movie. I don’t know if Moon Knight just needed another character or two, or whether it simply should have abandoned the idea of building to “Asylum” and given us more insight into Mark upfront as opposed to just dropping us in with Steven, but the balance of the piece just didn’t work for me in the end. The finale going full Kaiju—okay, in my head it’s always full Power Rangers, but I know that’s where it got it from—paid off the Egyptian mythology of the piece, but the actual storytelling and character work didn’t form a cohesive whole in a way that I’d expect from a good origin story.

And while I know we’re meant to celebrate that Moon Knight wasn’t just about setting up an MCU movie, with then post-credits scene instead revealing the third personality trapped within Mark’s body that is serving as Khonsu’s avatar, I have to admit that I sort of needed it to hint at something bigger for it to feel satisfying. That’s not because every MCU project needs to do this: it’s just that if an MCU project is going to meander like this one did, and like so many of them have, the promise of an MCU connection is what nags at the back of your head as you continue watching, waiting for something to click. If Moon Knight were better at being a TV show, I would have been far more satisfied that it ended like a TV show would.

It also makes me wary of Ms. Marvel, which as a teen show is inherently rooted in a television genre in a way that Moon Knight was not, but which I fear might face the same fate. The fact Ms. Marvel has a stronger link to the MCU—she’s obsessed with the Avengers, she borrows Captain Marvel’s name—means this isn’t the same kind of origin story that Moon Knight was trying to pull off, but I still just wonder if the creative team at Marvel have a firm grasp on what these TV projects are from a structural level that will allow for a truly satisfying experience as opposed to what Moon Knight ended up being: a thing we’re doing for the sake of completion because we’ve been trained to do so.

Stray observations

• The reveal that Oscar Isaac’s terrible British accent was actually based on a bad B-movie sort of justifies how bad it was, but…does it, really? You be the judge.

• I don’t think there’s actually a way to perfectly balance out the level of Egyptology central to the plot of this story: I appreciated their commitment to it, but I wasn’t nearly committed enough to the project to actually do any research into it, and while I know there were probably podcasts and other explainers kicking around, I just chose to roll with what they offered me in the show. The end result is…very little retention, so don’t quiz me.

• I’m all for milestones, and appreciated the show’s commitment to depicting modern Egypt in a meaningful way, but the “Are you an Egyptian superhero?” line is just such an inelegant way to accomplish the goal of underlining it. It’s efficient in the midst of a busy action sequence, but it also stops it dead for what is clearly a pat-on-the-back, and I’d like to see them explore ways to actually tell that story versus taking credit that the story exists and just going back to the pyrotechnics.

• The thing about spreading a story across six weeks is that you kind of lose the impact of the foreshadowing: the existence of a third personality was hinted at a few times before it’s more explicitly brought up in the finale when Mark and Steven are in control of their switching and yet both black out, but I had mostly forgotten about them by the time we got to the finale. Again, if I had been invested and reading/listening to a bunch of stuff, that’s one thing, but Moon Knight never commanded that much of my attention.

• For the record, I watched Moon Knight sporadically: watched Episodes 1 and 2 together, then 3 and 4 together, and then caught up on 5 earlier this week in preparation for the finale. It wasn’t appointment viewing until the finale, so we’ll see how my feeling about the show shift as I start writing about one (or more) of them.

• Currently, my intention is to write about Ms. Marvel myself as a way to work through more of my feelings about the MCU TV projects and genre, but I might change my mind as we get closer to June and try to find a new contributor, so stay tuned. In the meantime, curious how you’re feeling about the MCU shows overall, and of course Moon Knight specifically.