AB GhaylaneThis article contains spoilers about Marvel‘s Moon Knight series.
Moon Knight is Marvel Studios’ biggest bet on Disney+. Yes, it’s the first of these expensive series to be led by a completely new character in the MCU, but that character is also a complex and often downright inscrutable character, beloved by his Marvel Comics fans and sometimes mocked by those who see him as Marvel‘s much less cool version of Batman.
Well, we get no Batman vibe in this first episode of the new Disney+ series, where we meet Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac in his element), a shy British museum gift store employee who thinks he has a sleeping disorder. Every night, Steven straps himself to his bed and locks the door to make sure he hasn’t wandered the streets of London in his sleep. He is nevertheless exhausted and regularly puts himself in hot water at work for being late and over thinking his job.
Steven is passionate about ancient Egypt and seems to be, by all accounts, a charming man about to begin a romance with a pretty colleague whom he doesn’t even remember asking out. At one point, Steven voices his concerns aloud, “If I’m going to have a girlfriend at some point, obviously I can’t have ankles on my bed, right? That’s the definition of a red flag,” which earned me my first big laugh. If a camera crew had been filming me, I would have looked directly at the camera.
Of course, it wasn’t long before Steven was out of bed and getting into trouble. After going a certain distance trying to make forty winks, he suddenly finds himself in imminent danger. He seems to have been tasked with stealing a golden scarab in the possession of one Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke, clearly having a great time), a mortal cult leader who inflicts punishment on mortals in the name of the Egyptian goddess Ammit. She can apparently tell if your misdeeds outweigh your good deeds. And if those misdeeds are part of a muddy future that hasn’t happened yet? Yes, it will nip them in the bud.
Harrow is established as our villain when he judges a couple of his followers with a mysterious cane and a tattoo of scales, and it comes across as pretty silly despite Hawke’s enigmatic set design, even before the ominous sequence turns slapstick. In fact, there’s a lot of really cool stuff in this episode that ends up being a bit tarnished by disappointing CGI or Isaac’s quirky central performance as Steven, which is unfortunate.
This is also the point in the episode where things inevitably get confusing, as a panicked Steven goes back and forth between his own identity and that of Marc Spector, a mercenary who appears to be working with the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Moon Knight fans who were curious about how the MCU would handle Spector’s brutal fighting style will probably be a little disappointed to discover that this first episode mostly uses cuts between these two identities to get through Marc’s bloodiest moments rather than showing them in full, keeping these battles as Disney-friendly as possible.
The second half of the episode focuses on helping Steven understand that his meager life was a charade through his thoughtful interactions with Marc, during which he is stalked by Khonshu. There’s a reason I love how Khonshu was crafted for the series, he’s just perfect! The casting of F. Murray Abraham as the voice of the moon god is a master stroke.
Steven also learns that a woman named Layla (we can probably assume she’s the MCU version of Marlene in the comics) has been looking for Marc for a long time, before the villain Harrow gives Steven a calm, explanatory speech about Ammit and how if she were here, she would have killed baby Hitler/Pol Pot/whatever, just like the Rhodey who strangles Thanos! Hoo boy.
Finally, we get some brief action from the Moon Knight in a suit, when Steven allows Mark’s identity to take over his body in order to educate one of Harrow’s conjured jackals, and some of the museum’s facilities end up looking like a regular public restroom in the UK. Probably better, if you include British music festivals.
“The Goldfish Problem” is a pretty solid introduction to the world of Moon Knight, but it feels like the Internet daddy has been given “Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean”-level interpretive freedom when it comes to Steven’s portrayal, and your mileage may vary as to how it all works for you. While Isaac’s British accent is a roller coaster for anyone living in the UK – sometimes it sounds right and other times it doesn’t – there are hints that we’ll get more American Marc in the next episode.
There are discernible limits to telling a Moon Knight story in any medium, and there are generally three main options for approaching it: you can place it in the middle of the street-level Marvel universe, you can delve into the Egyptian mythology of it all, and you can attempt a study of his mental health journey. It takes a brave writer to attempt all three, because that’s a lot of angles to incorporate! Here, the writing team chose options two and three, but there’s still so much to do, and perhaps juggling all of that given the constraints of a six-episode series was a challenge. Regardless, it’s hard not to imagine what a slower version of this series could have offered us on Netflix.
I have to say, it’s refreshing to watch an ambitious Marvel series that isn’t filled with Easter eggs (for comic book fans, there’s a quick glimpse of the name “Duchamp” on Marc’s cell phone) or in-universe callbacks – Moon Knight doesn’t have to worry about leaving breadcrumbs and can just tell its own story from the beginning. Steven Grant’s MCU version is certainly irritating enough, but at least he’s a very different protagonist we can root for. I’m looking forward to finding out how much Steven’s good heart will clash with Marc’s mercenary brutality later on.
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