Viewer Log: Moon Knight ep 1

Mild mannered has nothing on Steven Grant.

Let’s talk about Moon Knight. Moon Knight aka Marc Specter is the Fist of the Egyptian Moon God Khonshu. He also suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder and has several “alt” personas that help him function with the extreme stress and pain that being the avatar of a literal god can cause. Moon Knight is a street level fighter so often crosses paths with guys like Spider-Man and the Heroes for Hire. Not that we’ll see any of that. Yeah, sorry, this series is almost entirely divorced from the MCU. It’s in canon, but I guess Moon Knight has yet to cross paths with Spidey, Daredevil or Cap. All of this made me really excited at the idea that we were going to get a show about him, starring Oscar Isaac no less. The mental health angle of the character seemed like it might be a bit tricky, but I think they found a good way to show a more dramatic than live version of DID and how it might affect someone’s superheroing. But more on that later. Let’s get to it.

 

Episode 1: The Goldfish Problem

 

The series begins with a mysterious man, later revealed to be Arthur Harrow as played by Ethan Hawke, showing off his scale tattoo, drinking a shot, crushing the glass, and then pouring the bits into his shoes. He then puts on the shoes and walks on broken glass out the door. Yeah… this guy is crazy.

 

Mild mannered Steven Grant hiding an identity
so secret even he doesn't know about it.

We cut over to mild mannered Steven Grant, played by Oscar Isaac. He wakes up and we see his elaborate procedures put in place to keep him from wandering off in his sleep. He hooks himself to the bedpost with a bungee cord and keeps a circle of sand around his bed to see if he left in the night. He also tapes his door with painting tape to make sure he doesn’t leave. Yeah, Steven believes he suffers from a sleep walking disorder and works hard to keep it under control. After calling and leaving his mom a nice voicemail and feeding his fish Gus, he heads out to work. He works at the British Museum in the gift shop. He has a moment where he explains a bit about the ancient Egyptian funeral rites to a child, living out his dream for a second of being a tour guide, before his boss Donna comes over to yell at him for trying to be the tour guide. He’s lead over to his real job, clerk at the gift shop, and told to get to work. His spirits are lifted a little when an attractive coworker, I don’t think she’s named, reminds him they have a date tomorrow at seven at the local amazing steak restaurant. Steven, clearly not remembering setting a date with her (you won’t forget setting a date with this woman), fumbles through the conversation. Donna asks what a vegan will eat at a steakhouse because jerk.

 

Later that night, Steven and Donna are scanning inventory. Steven tries to get her to recognize his knowledge of Egyptology by pointing out the 9 god Ennead are only 7 on all their promotional material. OH, I wonder which two they’re forgetting. Sidelong glance at Khonshu and Ammit. They’ll be important later. Donna blows him off though and tells him to stop trying to be a tour guide and get back to scanning.

 

Ever feel like you're being watched? By a man
with a bird head?

Steven leaves for the night. He has a sandwich and explains his disorder to a local gold painted statue guy. I guess without the bungee, he has a habit of wandering around and just waking up in weird places. He tips the man and serves as his cameraman as he has one sided chat with him. At home, Steven refreshes the sand and the tape, deadbolts his door, restrains himself and tries to get through the night. He apparently tries to stay up as late as he can to avoid sleepwalking. He does puzzles, plays with a Rubik Cube, reads, and listens to a recorded voice to stay awake. Eventually he does fall asleep… but then wakes up in a field in the middle of nowhere with an aching jaw. As he gets up and tries to orientate himself, he hears something tell him to “Go back to sleep, worm.” The voice tells him to surrender the body to Marc, but Steven is utterly confused by that. He digs in his pockets and finds a golden scarab beetle. He walks up to a nearby building, waves at the guards and gets shot at. He runs to the town. There, he sees the man from the opening scene, Arthur Harrow, performing a kind of religious rite on the populace, starting with a man, and then an older woman. He “judges” the man innocent, and her as guilty. After the pronouncement and Harrow’s “sorry this has to happen” speech, she rapidly decays and dies. One of the guards informs Harrow someone jumped their “exchange,” killed two of their men and escaped with their prize. Harrow shouts an order to kneel in ancient Egyptian, and everyone but Steven drops immediately. Harrow recognizes him and calls him a mercenary, but Steven denies it, saying he’s Steven Grant of the giftshop. Harrow asks for the scarab; Steven tries to hand it over but physically can’t open his hands. The voice tells him he will surrender nothing. Harrow’s guards grab him and get the scarab. Steven has a violent flash, and wakes up with blood all over him, surrounded by the either dead or severely injured guards and the scarab in hand. The voice bemoans the idiot being back. Steven tries to cheese it, but he’s very surrounded. He steals a van and drives off.

 

Steven plays keep away with an Avatar of evil.

He races down the mountain road in his cupcake van as the goons give chase and Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go plays.  The goons get on the truck, Steven has another blackout flash and finds he killed them all when he comes to. The Voice tells ‘Marc’ to wake up, and that if Steven loses the scarab, he’ll kill them both. He almost gets crushed by a lumber truck going the other way but swerves around it. Another black out and he wakes up driving backwards down the road, one of the last two cars dead and going off the road. The truck stalls, the goons come toward him, but the lumber from earlier rolls down the hill, crushing them all. Steven wakes up in his bed and assumes it was all a dream.

 

As he tries to wake up, he notices that his fish Gus suddenly has both of his fins. He’d originally been missing one. He takes Gus to the pet store and yells at the store clerk. She tells him she told him yesterday that she doesn’t sell disabled fish. Steven is shocked to see it’s seven pm, as he just woke up, and runs off to make it to his date. He waits for an hour before calling his date, subtitles reveal her name was Dylan, only to find out that he’d somehow lost two full days. She obviously is pissed he “stood her up” and tells him to delete her number and hangs up. Disheartened, he orders the steak and eats. He heads home, eats the chocolates he bought for the date and mopes. He drops the chocolates, but then notices that the floor under one of his rugs had been scratched, as if the table had been moved. He moves the table along the scratch marks, climbs up and finds a loose board. Inside, he finds a phone, charger, and a key to a storage locker. He charges the phone and finds dozens, if not hundreds, of miss calls from a Layla. He calls Layla, who answers almost immediately. She is exasperated, revealing she’d been calling and texting him for months and he never answered. She calls him Marc, which confuses him, but she hangs up when he tries to get more out of her. He starts hearing someone calling his name and telling him to stop. The voice isn’t the same guy from the mountain, but a suspiciously familiar one. He follows it to his bathroom. It’s empty. He thinks he’s being paranoid, but then notices his reflection shaking his head, while possibly wearing a hat. He looks around, and the voice tells him to “stop looking.” Steven’s whole apartment starts shaking and he runs out. In the elevator, he looks at himself in the mirror before it stops on the third floor. Across the hall, the doors open, and he sees an enormous man in white with a bird’s skull for a head and staff coming toward him. He cowers in the corner, but it turns into a little old lady. She’s nervous of him, and quickly exits. As Steven tries to figure out what is happening, the big bird man appears behind him.

 

Still shocked months later that they got Ethan Freaking
Hawke for this.

He wakes up on the bus and sees the bird man on the street as he rides by. He gets off in a hurry, and sees Harrow was on the bus too. Well, crap. Steven runs inside the museum and tells the guard to try to keep an eye out for someone suspicious, but he is barely listening. Donna comes up to try and get him to do something, but he sees Harrow wandering around and follows him. He tries to get another security guard to grab Harrow, but he reveals himself to be in Harrow’s cult. Harrow demands the scarab, but Steven doesn’t know where it is. Harrow tells him that Ammit is his goddess, and she wants to judge the people of the earth. Her duty in mythology was to judge people after they died, but she grew tired of waiting and wanted to start judging people in life. Her ability let her see past, present and future deeds, and that she uses that information to determine if they are good or evil. The result being what happens to the two people in the village, continued life, or instant death. He claims she’d have stopped every dictator and genocide had she been free to enact her plan, but she’d been imprisoned for centuries. Steven doesn’t know what’s going on, which comes across as snide to Harrow. He grabs Steven and tries to judge him. But his tattoo can’t settle, it is constantly fluctuating. He claims Steven “has chaos” in him. I saw a response to this line on Twitter that makes me chuckle. It goes “Sir, you’re walking on broken glass in a museum on a Tuesday, you have no right to judge other people’s chaos.” Steven runs off.

 

Damn, that's a good costume.

Late that night, Steven is doing inventory when Harrow attacks him. This time he uses a jackal demon he summoned. Steven at first thinks a dog was let lose in the museum and tries to find it. He’s corrected when the beast comes into view. Harrow tells him over the PA to give him the scarab and he won’t be torn apart. Steven runs from the jackal, the beast chasing him to the men’s room in back. Inside, his reflection starts talking to him. The reflection tells him that he can save them, but Steven can’t be fighting him. His reflection insists on getting control, breaking through Steven’s fear. Steven does surrender control, and as he does so, a suit of white armor forms around him. The creature breaks in and attacks, but Moon Knight quickly destroys it and the bathroom. The final shot is of Moon Knight walking toward the camera. Bad ass.

 

This was a great introduction to Moon Knight, even though Moon Knight himself didn’t appear until the very end. If I somehow could have blanked my knowledge of Moon Knight, the MCU and come into this show blind, I’d almost believe that Steven Grant was just a normal dude going through some kind off psychological break. The constant mini strokes followed by Steven waking up somewhere else having hurt a lot of people is jarring and gives us a good idea of how the swap between the personas works at the moment. The switching seems to get less… jarring as the series goes on, but it’s never a blink and he’s suddenly the other guy, it takes a few minutes. I don’t think I can overstate how much Oscar Isaac’s performance carries two sides of our lead, the mild-mannered Steven Grant, and the more gruff and angry Marc Spector. All he does is change how he parts his hair, his voice and stance, and suddenly we’re looking at an entirely different character. We’ll see more of it as it goes on, but Isaac nails both guys and their dynamic of wrestling for control of their body. The suit looks dope too, I don’t know how much of it is CGI besides the cape, but it looks like a good mix of real and CGI elements. Ethan Hawke is great as Arthur Harrow as well. Creepy, vaguely sinister and with a destructive ability like no other, he’s a solid antagonist. Fun fact, the shot followed by adding the broken glass to his shoes was Hawke’s idea, as he felt that sort of self-flagellation helps sell the religious zealot side of Harrow. So, yeah, solid start. We’ll see what’s with that scarab next time. 

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