Moon Knight, Season 1, Episode 5: Asylum
Again, a very stylish and interesting delve into the minds of Marc and Steven and the still-unnamed third alter-ego within his-their minds. I would've thought that after the WTF moment of being shunted off to the maybe-insane-mind maybe-the-afterlife (it's both!) in the previous episode, we'd get some more superheroing again in this episode... but no! We don't even get to see the 'real world' at all in this episode, with the hippo goddess Taweret explaining that they are in a boat over the Duat leading to the Egyptian afterlife. Which is also connected to Marc-Steven's shared consciousness.
And, in a way, all of this is just an excuse to give us a backstory, but oh boy, what a backstory. That's one of the biggest problems that some superhero shows have had, with so many retellings of Batman, Spider-Man and Superman's backstories that you really do kind of need a twist for these backstories to make them come off as interesting. And hoo boy, I absolutely love that the show-writers basically integrate Steven finding out about their shared body's backstory by a mystical sense that Steven and Marc need to 'balance' their scales, otherwise the Duat would consume all their souls.
I absolutely love this. I absolutely love how we jump around as Marc and Steven -- essentially two very well-realized characters at this point -- bicker and argue about the things they have been hiding from each other. All the while, we still have breakaways to the psychiatric hospital ran by 'Dr. Harrow', which just adds to the mindfuckery of everything that's going on but also acts as a neat place for Marc and Steven to kind of 'decompress'.
Also, whenever she gets to say something, Taweret is just adorable. Her giving exposition on the mythological parts of things, and essentially being a likable neutral goddess that wants to help the two Oscar Isaacs as much as she can, is absolutely fantastic.
Again, without going through everything act-by-act, "Asylum" does a great job at showcasing different parts of Marc Spector's life. The superhero origin story, that he was part of a mercenary team whose job went sour (as with the comics, he didn't actually kill Layla's dad but was helpless to save him) and in desperation, he ends up crawling into Khonshu's temple and accepting the Moon Knight powers. But that's just... that's not the most interesting thing here, even if it's nice for us to see that.
No, the most emotionally-charged scenes are the ones involving little Marc (he is Marc in the beginning, right?) being involved in some pretty fucked-up childhood memories. This alone would be enough to tug at our heartstrings, but the heavy emotions involved with both of them -- Marc wanting nothing to do with the past and actually throwing a fit at one point; while Steven is in full denial in regards to their mother being a horrible person... it's heartbreaking when Steven realizes that all of his memories about his mother being a nice person and how he 'converses' with his mother every week is actually a fabrication.
The actual events that plagued little Marc is also pretty heartbreaking -- while playing around to imitate the television show of Dr. Steven Grant, he accidentally leads his little brother Randall to drowning in a cave -- a scene shot pretty horrifyingly and really made me squirm even though I knew where it was going. And then after Randall's death, Marc's mother Wendy kind of... well, broke down. It's understandable why the death of a child would completely shatter a person, and it's just... it's just heartbreaking, y'know, seeing it go from Wendy flipping out at the funeral to missing birthdays to outright physically beating the shit out of little Marc -- and this was when we see the alter-ego of Steven Grant be invented to 'escape' from mom... and we later see Steven Grant appear as an adult to also 'escape' from Marc's grief upon realizing that his mother is death.
A lot of great, great moments and Oscar Isaac just sells the acting for both personalities of our protagonist. And, of course, there's still hints of the third personality somewhere there, locked up in a sarcophagus... there are still missing holes in the story and a weird New York accent that slips in here and there, and I'm genuinely looking forward to see how the show ties it all together.
We also get Marc Spector admitting to Steven that, yes, despite being the badass anti-hero persona, he's wracked with guilt over all the people he killed, remembering them all in one of the many rooms-of-trauma within their subconscious. When their time is up and they haven't found balance, all of these dead people end up attacking Marc and Steven. We get some fun fight scenes on Taweret's boat, but ultimately Steven Grant pulls off a self-sacrifice, saving Marc but falling overboard in the process and getting turned into sand, while the scales balance and Marc Spector finds himself in A'Aru, the Field of Reeds in Egyptian afterlife.
Very great episode, a massive kick in the emotions... it's just that I wonder how things will be tied up in one more episode. We are only having six episodes, right?
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- Marc explicitly cites 'Bushman' as the leader of the evil mercenaries that killed Layla's dad. Bushman is one of Moon Knight's archenemies in the comics, and filled a similar role as what he did here in causing Marc Spector's initial injury that caused him to seek the help of Khonshu.
- Taweret notes that there are multiple afterlives for human souls, even mentioning the 'Ancestral Plane' from Black Panther by name.
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