Moon Knight, Season 1, Episode 6: Gods and Monsters
(Apologies, I thought I uploaded this the weekend that the episode came out, but turns out it languished in my drafts for a while.)
A lot of these Disney+ shows kind of... stumble a bit in its final episode. So far, I think only WandaVision had a full season that felt cohesive from end to finish. Falcon and the Winter Soldier suffered from the main villain kind of becoming bland and boring, with a little too many moving pieces near the end -- though that was allegedly the fault of some emergency rewrites. Loki and Hawkeye both introduced a brand-new villain in their respective final episodes with varying degrees of success. And I was super-worried that with the two-episode detour to Marc Spector and Steven Grant's adventure in their fucked-up mindscape and the Duat that we wouldn't get a satisfactory conclusion to everything. Except it somehow manages to tie in every plot thread, both weird and mundane, together relatively well.
So much of Marc and Steven's journey throughout this season boils down to their shattered, split personalities, and I do like that at least some of this episode is devoted to exploring that. Without going through every single thing that the two split personalities do this episode, it's an absolutely great moment when Marc rejects the Field of Reeds and his peace to run back and look for his 'brother' Steven Grant. This ends up with his resurrection at the end, with some little wink-wink nod of Tawaret and an unseen Osiris giving them a bit of a pass to bend the rules of the underworld a little bit. I do like that it's not just the power of friendship (brotherhood? Self-love?) that magically allows Steven and Marc to come back to life, and that there's another reason... it's just that the power of them making peace and 'achieving balance' in their own personal scales is what caused Steven to be returned from the sands of the Duat.
It really is interesting, though, that the Marc/Steven stuff didn't happen until 15 minutes into the episode. No, the first act picks up where we left off in episode... 4, I think, when Marc Spector "dies" after being shot by Arthur Harrow. We get to see Harrow and his cult basically walk their way into the Pyramid of Giza uncontested, with some pretty cool showcases of their instant-judgement powers.
Layla, who... is a character I honestly really didn't care too much about before literally this episode, ends up being pretty cool as she sneaks around Harrow's cult and tries to do her best even though she's just a mortal. There's a couple great bits of black comedy as Taweret speaks through her through the corpses of the people Harrow killed. It's important for Layla to get some clues on what she has to do (find Khonshu's statue and release him) but there's a neat foreshadowing to Layla becoming Taweret's avatar later on in the episode. Layla also absolutely doesn't give two shits about Khonshu's deal and how it's 'so urgent' and whatnot, which is a great change of pace from how Khonshu seems to have every mortal he meets dancing at his fingertips.
Harrow, of course, manages to release Ammit the crocodile-headed goddess, and there's an interesting bit where Ammit actually chooses the imperfectly-balanced Harrow as her champion or avatar or whatever instead of one of the many 'balanced' souls... we do get just enough of Ammit to know that she's just a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to these things, and for someone who only shows up in the final episode, Ammit does have a pretty cool presence. (Also, they clearly saved up the CGI budget for this episode).
We get a very cool 'henshin' sequence for Moon Knight as he is resurrected and walks out to meet Khonshu, and, again, everyone is just sassing Khonshu today as Marc and Steven have found peace and camaraderie with each other, both refusing to take shit from Khonshu.
While all of this is going on, Layla accepts to become Taweret's (temporary) avatar and becomes an Egyptian superhero -- she basically is an Egyptian-themed version of the Falcon, though later press releases would identify her as an adaptation of the obscure Marvel superhero Scarlet Scarab. It's... it's definitely a great payoff that I didn't actually see coming by introducing Taweret as a benevolent deity, and having Layla actually take part in freeing Khonshu and later becoming a fighting force of her own is a lot more dignified than the confused love-triangle nonsense we got in episode 4.
And then the third act of the episode is just a huge, huge fight. Can I just say that my inner ten-year-old is loving this? Sure, it might not be the most sophisticated ending, but I absolutely love Moon Knight, Mr. Knight and Scarlet Scarab just teaming up to fight Arthur Harrow and his minions, while Khonshu and Ammit suddenly go kaiju-sized and have a giant god kaiju fight in the distance. There are a lot of cool moments to see -- like the juxtaposition of Khonshu's giant staff compared to the vehicles below, or Steve Grant's Mr. Knight casually fixing his suit now that he's got the swagger that comes with being partially-indestructible.
There's an interesting bit where Harrow fights with Marc, talking about how his family would've been much happier if the 'imbalanced' weed, i.e. Marc, was the one to die... and Harrow actually wins! In a huge WTF moment -- which, by the way, I would claim to be terrible writing if we didn't get the answer in the post-credits scene -- we get another sudden-blackout of neither Marc nor Steven being in control of their body as we get the distortion sound effect and wake up with Harrow and the cultists brutalized and thrashed.
There's a bit of an interesting bit where Marc/Steven wakes up in the asylum, 'breaks' that reality, before waking up in their apartment seemingly... back to normal, except Steven and Marc have found a way to 'cohabitate' their body. It's an abrupt ending, and I would've complained if this was it. But that's not it!
Except! Except that post-credits scene shows Harrow in a real asylum this time, and we seemingly see him being broken out by one of his cultists -- whose face we didn't see. There's a clever bit of misdirection as he meets Khonshu (dressed with a fancy suit!) at the back of a limousine, who talks about getting a new avatar that's not Layla. It's a great bit of misdirection where it seemed like Khonshu's making a deal to Harrow... before we get the revelation that Khonshu's current and very willing avatar... is the third personality inside Marc/Steven's body, Jake Lockley, who immediately murders Harrow.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you foreshadow this weird third personality throughout literally the whole show (thinking back, Marc wouldn't be the type of guy to 'set up' a date, would he?) and tie in various plot threads such as what happens to Ammit/Harrow, what Khonshu's next plan is... and adds another layer of plot threads to pick up not just on the mystical end of the spectrum, but also within the shattered psyche of the body cohabited by Marc, Steven and now Jake.
All in all, a very powerful ending. Perhaps not the most smooth ride to get there -- there's an argument to be made about the main plot itself and whether the Harrow plot could've used a bit more fleshing out. I personally didn't care about the Layla backstory, and the pacing around the asylum scenes... I wouldn't say it's bad, but I would wonder how the show would be if the pacing was handled differently. But honestly? The action scenes were great, I love the mythology, I adore the post-credits epilogue, and, most of all, I absolutely love Oscar Isaac's seamless switching from Marc to Steven and having the two of them interact so well.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- Jake Lockley is one of Moon Knight's main personalities -- the 'cab driver' to Marc Spector's mercenary and Steven Grant's billionaire. He seems to have taken over Steven Grant's rich-billionaire status in this continuity as well.
- Layla El-Faouly turns out to be the MCU's version of the Scarlet Scarab (Abdul Faoul in the comics) though her backstory is a bit more different than usual.
- Khonshu wearing a suit, as well as a car with SPKTR as the vanity plate, came from the 2016 Moon Knight run.
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