Marvel Studios' Moon Knight: Season One, Episode One

SPOILERS AHEAD!! READ AT OWN RISK

I know it's been a while for all of us Marvel fans. I mean, it feels like a good long while since we got a television show on Disney+, the last one being Hawkeye, starring Jeremy Renner as the titular Clint Barton/Hawkeye and the newest young superhero to take on the mantle in a direct reference to the Marvel comics: Kate Bishop. And it's been about the same length of time since Spiderman: No Way Home, starring Tom Holland as the title hero and featuring cameos from the past iterations of Spiderman, Andrew Garfield (who I wrote about this week in my review of Tick...Tick...Boom!) and Tobey Maguire.

But I was so happy to learn that Oscar Isaac was becoming a new hero in the repertoire of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Moon Knight. I've never previously heard of Moon Knight before, as I'm not exactly well versed with the comics, but this was a great show to introduce me to the character.

The episode starts off fairly quaint, but immediately you begin to recognise that things are not as they seem in the small, quiet world of the first personality of this character, Steven Grant, a bumbling, most often forgetful British character who works at a museum, and who is most interested in the Egyptology department. First of all, the ankle restraint. Then, the sand around the bed, as well as the tape on the door and the double locks.

As the episode goes on, you begin to realise that he has another personality inside of his head, one that is quite potentially dangerous. He goes to sleep, and wakes in random locations, and during his dreams (which occur strangely like real life), voices speak in his head and he blacks out in random intervals, making him do dangerous things, such as the scenes where he's fighting a group of armed gunmen who chase him to retrieve a gold scarab beetle and he ends up killing them, with no memory of how he has blood on his hands or how a gun ends up in them. During these strange and often frightening dream sequences, he also sees a tall monster with the skull of a bird, which is most likely the form of Khonshu, the Egyptian Moon god. And these scenes are truly trippy, possibly even more so than the later episodes of WandaVision (2021).

After which these dream sequences occur, he loses track of time and often wakes in his bed with several days having passed. The episode also introduces what appears to be the villain of the series, a man named Arthur Harrow, portrayed by Ethan Hawke. I haven't ever seen Ethan Hawke in movies and TV before, but he plays an interesting villain. It will be interesting to see what role he plays in the later episodes of this already thrilling show. During the final scenes of the episode, in which Steven is chased by a strange, dog-like monster through the halls of the museum he works at, which makes for a chase equal in thrill and terror, akin to a horror movie. You won't find any typical running into the attic or a storage unit, though. But he did run into a bathroom. As the monster begins to break in, we finally meet the second personality of the show, the one who seems to be taking centre stage from here on out: Marc Spector, who claims he can save 'us', referring of course to the double identities within the man who is currently Steven Grant.

Steven lets him take control and at the very last moment, he transforms into Moon Knight, which is a very short scene as he catches and seemingly kills the monster, but feels a lot like Robert Pattinson's portrayal of the legendary Batman, known more ironically for his brutality as the character, and it is then that the stage is set for the rest of the show. Gritty, street-level with a hint of mysticism, and quite dark and violent.

I was actually really looking forward to this show, and now that I have seen the first episode, I'm excited for what the rest of the show holds for this character. Oscar Isaac's portrayal of a unironically quiet man with dissociative identity disorder (DID, also known as multiple personality disorder) and his ability to handle three characters at once is not far off from Nina Dobrev's portrayal of four doppelgangers at once (Amara, Tatia, Katherine and Elena) in The Vampire Diaries/The Originals, and I'm excited to see the other two personalities inside Steven Grant's mind come out to play. It will certainly be interesting to see how he interacts with the rest of the MCU as Phase 4 rolls out its new slate of heroes.

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