Moon Knight, Season 1, Episode 4: The Tomb
This one is an interesting episode, I feel, and one that I think is an episode a lot of my friends pointed to in saying how Moon Knight works better as a binge show. After the exposition-heavy episodes 2 and 3, "The Tomb" spends around half its runtime basically just... decompressing. There's a lot of neat panoramic shots of the Egyptian desert, a bunch of Indiana Jones style ruin spelunking and some honestly eye-rolling love triangle between Marc, Steven and Layla. It's neat television, but it's nowhere as engaging as the previous three episodes, y'know? And I don't really think I'm missing much by handwaving a lot of the first half of the episode. Oscar Isaac and May Calamawy are competent and engaging enough actors that the scenes never quite get boring, but they're also not as gripping as the previous episodes, you know what I mean?
Admittedly, the mummy stalking Layla in that ridge is suitably creepy, and I got some laughs out of Marc shoving around in Alexander the Great's mummy mouth, and I suppose if you're engaged with the Steven/Layla shipping you might be more invested, but I wasn't, so I was actually twiddling my thumbs a bit throughout the first half. For the writers' credit, though, there's really not much Moon Knight superhero activities you can do when Marc/Steven can't actually transform into Moon Knight at the moment.
(After the Loki/Sylvie alternate-timeline-doppelganger stuff, now we have a love triangle involving two different parts of a split personality. Man, they're just trying to have as many weird-ass romance relationships as possible in the MCU canon, huh?)
I was definitely far, far more interested with the drama revolving around the revelation of how Marc Spector was involved in the death of Layla's father. Layla has been a constant presence throughout these episodes, but beyond being a competent fighter-slash-archaeologist I really didn't find her particularly engaging at all. So it's absolutely nice to have some drama unrelated to the weird split-personality romance. It's, again, pretty basic as far as these things go -- but it's pretty fun stuff. A lot of the themes in these Moon Knight episodes and the general dynamic between Layla and Marc revolve around how much secrets Marc has been keeping from Layla (so much that the 'Steven Grant' persona seems to be born out of honesty, as the show lampshades) and Marc keeping such a large and crucial information from his wife does give us some interesting drama. I also do like Arthur Harrow's minimal but impactful role in pushing Layla basically over the edge and getting her to confront Marc.
And then Marc gets shot and dies!
And then wakes up in an asylum!
All this imagery in the asylum segment brings me a lot of fond memories of Legion's excellent first season, which... which goes all out with the bizarreness and the trippiness of the concept. And honestly, after so many different superhero comics, shows and manga, this isn't particularly weird for me personally, but I did really love the balls on the show for basically diverting half the episode to running around in this... whatever this asylum is.
Now obviously the superhero show about a superhero isn't going to have the twist that everything is all in a mental patient's mind all along. But the fact that Marc and Steven have been struggling so much with their mental issues throughout the season does really make it somewhat plausible -- in-universe -- for Marc to be dreaming all of this. Layla is the pretty nurse that takes care of him, Harrow is the well-meaning but strict doctor that 'shot' him up with anesthetics, Steven Grant is based on the persona of a bombastic Indiana-Jones-style movie, the Egyptian references are thanks to the hospital's decor, 'Moon Knight' looks like an action figure Marc is holding, he's bound to his wheelchair the same way that Steven finds himself bound to his bed...
It all really fits well into the mind-screwy themes of Moon Knight the character, and I absolutely love that the episode doesn't drag it out too long before revealing that, yeah, this asylum is... some sort of trippy dimension. As Marc runs out of "Doctor Harrow" and his office, chased by the orderlies that are played by the same actors that played Harrow's cultists in previous episodes, he stumbles into a sarcophagus and releases Steven Grant, allowing both Moon Knight personalities to interact. Joyous!
Which means that this 'asylum' is either a representation of Marc's mind (a la Crazy Jane's mind-world in Doom Patrol) or how he interprets the Egyptian afterlife. A lot of intentionally confusing stuff are thrown at us all at once -- including the showcase of the third sarcophagus with ominous rattling noises, which is totally the blackout persona that killed the cultists without Marc or Steven knowing in episode 2. Khonshu? Jake Lockley? Someone else? We'll find out. In the meantime, it's great seeing the two personalities get to interact with each other this much.
And then the episode ends with the glorious gag of something ominous approaching them, and it's the hippo-headed goddess Taweret... voiced with the sweetest voice ever while both Steven and Marc scream their heads off. End scene.
And... and it all hinges upon the revelations that we'll be having in episode 5 (which at the moment I haven't watched) but I do really like this. It's such an unconventional way to 'twist' the show beyond just Egyptian gods, split personalities and vigilante fighting. I actually did find the first half of the episode relatively dull if we're being honest, but the twist -- even though no one in the audience believes that Marc will permanently die from the gunshot or that this is all in a mental patient's mind -- was executed pretty well.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- Less of a Marvel easter egg, but more of a mythology easter egg -- the hippo-headed lady is most assuredly Taweret, Egyptian goddess of childbirth and fertility.
- Layla's comic-book counterpart, Marlene Alraune, had a similar backstory to Layla where her father was an archaeologist that was killed due to some altercation that involves a mercenary group that Marc Spector was part of. I'm not sure if they're going to be adapting Raoul Bushman into this season or saving it for later Moon Knight outings, though.
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