Moon Knight, Season 1, Episode 3: The Friendly Type
Another interesting episode where this one's also pretty exposition-heavy, but in completely different ways. Episode 2 focused on telling us about Marc and Steven's Dissociative Identity Disorder; the identity of Khonshu; plus a little bit about Layla and Harrow. Here, our primary focus is the Egyptian gods and how they work in the Marvel universe.
With Marc Spector at the helm of the mind, he goes around beating the hell out of Ammit cultists. And where Marc was a somewhat sinister presence haunting panicked Steven Grant's mind last episode, this episode Steven Grant becomes Marc's personal Jiminy Cricket, telling him through reflections how he shouldn't be going around murderizing people. Except a literal skull-headed mummy god with the best sarcastic voice ever is constantly telling Marc to do exactly that.
The rooftop battle is particularly great, and I do love the implication that there's a third personality that neither Marc nor Steven are aware of that ended up causing the violence in one of their blanks. That's not the mystery for this episode to solve, though.
Also, this episode really made me appreciate what a riot Khonshu is. Sure, his CGI isn't particularly convincing in the daytime scenes (that floating skull works best when half-shadowed) but I really love F. Murray Abraham's vocal performance, bringing along a simultaneously dry wit and the required menace for Moon Knight's mystical mentor.
The relatively large setpiece in this episode involves a meeting of the Ennead gods -- or at least five of them. The Egyptian gods have taken a vow of noninvolvement with humanity, but they are still willing to judge the affairs of their gods. It's... it's honestly pretty typical as far as these scenes go, and while it is admittedly a bit underwhelming compared to major-budget MCU movies, it's miles better than the Shou-Lao we didn't get for Netflix's Iron Fist. Admittedly, as much as I love lore-bomb scenes like these, the Ennead trial scene does feel a bit clunky and somewhat forced. It doesn't distract me all that much, but compared to how well-done Moon Knight has been delivering its exposition, it does admittedly feel a bit weaker. There's a fair amount of awkward 'as you know' to explain Khonshu's relation to the other gods; shouldn't it be better shown as Steven or Marc discovering these facts themselves?
(If the show hasn't already made you realize that Harrow's a villain with his casual murdering of people for sins they haven't committed, then shoving Marc's mental illness as a reason to dismiss every point he's making should make it clear that, yes, Harrow's a dickbag)
Anyway, the trial ends up finding Harrow not guilty for anything. It's just an excuse to show that Khonshu can piss off the other gods by manipulating celestial signs like solar eclipses, and for Hathor to give our heroes the next clue in their Indiana Jones style clue-hunting globe-trotting mission, which sends them off to hunt down the mummy of Senfu.
We do get some fun scenes between Layla and Marc. Layla notes how terrible Marc is at both archaeology and trying to blend into the Egyptian populace, and I do like that all throughout the episode, in the guise of playing it up as a bit of a 'shut up, nerd' between Marc, Khonshu and Steven, the fact that Steven's a huge Egyptian archaeology buff ends up becoming important in the final act of this episode. It's a neat way to make Steven a necessary component of the team, so to speak, instead of just reducing him to a wet blanket.
Layla brings Marc to the rich criminal/collector Anton Mogart (played by the late Gaspard Ulliel, to whom this episode is dedicated to) who chews the scenery pretty well. This scene does drag on a bit long, but I do appreciate Marc stubbornly trying to do things his way and demanding that Steven tell him what to do when Steven himself would've solved the riddle a lot faster. Of course, the tables are turned when Steven morphs into Mr. Knight during the fight and tries his whole non-violence schtick with the trained cultists... and gets speared three times for his trouble. That's some black comedy that I actually find hilarious.
I didn't quite like this fight scene quite as much as I did Mr. Knight's first debut and his later transformation to Moon Knight in episode 2, although actually having stakes with Anton Mogart technically being a named antagonist and having Layla run around in the background beating up Mogart's main bodyguard does make this a bit more eventful... though I will never not find that scene of Marc hardening his cape to deflect the bullets back at his attackers not awesome.
(There's also Harrow dropping casual revelations about how Marc apparently killed Layla's father -- something Marc denies later on but obviously going to be an important aspect of the plot going forwards)
After that battle is over and Harrow is back with his cultists at Ammit's Tomb (I'm not sure what happened to Mogart, I guess he just rides off?), we get a pretty cool sequence where Marc finally lets Steven Grant out, and he figures out that the mummy sarcophagus is actually a constellation map. And in a neat callback to the earlier eclipse, Khonshu ends up reversing the sky in a pretty cool way to incorporate sci-fi and magic together. "I remember that night. I remember every night." Khonshu claims, before helping Moon Knight to essentially rewind time to show the position of the skies and therefore, Ammit's Tomb. This honestly pretty cool moment is juxtaposed with the other five Ennead gods sealing Khonshu in stone, robbing our poor multi-minded hero from their pigeon companion.
Overall, it's admittedly a lot slower than the first two episodes, and the exposition a bit more clunky, but... again, I still really enjoyed this episode a lot. The pacing is a bit off, perhaps, but I've seen worse, and overall I feel like some degree of exposition is definitely needed considering the rather esoteric subjects we are dealing with here relative to most of Marvel's usual output.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- The avatars of the Egyptian gods Horus, Isis, Tefnut and Yatzil appear here. Among the other gateways is a cat-themed one -- one of the most famous Egyptian gods associated with cats is Bast, but in the Marvel universe (and especially the MCU), Bast is very much associated with the Black Panther.
- When Anton Mogart gets hit by Moon Knight, midnight clock bells are distinctly heard. Mogart's comic-book supervillain name is the Midnight Man.
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