Throughout its run, Moon Knight has seemingly dedicated itself to being possibly the most bizarre entry of the MCU that the never ending super-franchise has ever seen. While it simply could have fallen back on its laurels and just been something of a Batman or Daredevil clone with supernatural undertones, it’s chosen to take the main character’s disassociative identity disorder as far more as just a gimmick and a quirk and instead used to to forge the show’s entire identity.
Well, that comes to a head in the fifth episode, Asylum, which not only buries the needle on the weird shit-o-meter, but it finally answers almost every question we have about how Marc Spector/Steven Grant came to be in a way that gleefully throws of the usual conventions of an origin flashback episode in a way that only the Fist Of Khonshu can. Of course, long overdue therapy is necessary for healing, but is doing it in the Egyptian afterlife while being watched by a hippo-headed woman the best surrounding to do it in?
Marc Spector is dead and so is his other personality, Steven Grant, after they were shot in the chest by well meaning wannabe mass murderer Arthur Harrow. However, taking the adage that death isn’t exactly the end in the Marvel universe, both identities have found themselves in the Duat (aka. the Egyptian afterlife) in the presence of the rather sweet and eager Taweret, the goddess of women and children who attempts to process them and literally weigh their hearts do that they can pass on to the Field of Reeds to spend eternity in peace. However, thanks to their bifurcated personality and the fact that Marc has done some pretty heinous shit as his time as both a mercenary and Moon Knight, the scales simply won’t balance until both Marc and Steven travel through their own psyche and witness their memories in an attempt to find some sort of inner peace.
That’s going to be rough for Marc because he’s holding all the mental cards and would literally be turned into a supernatural vigilante rather than face his issues, but it’s worse for Steven who has no memories of any of the stuff that forged his “brother” into the scrambled mess he’s become.
It also doesn’t help that they’re on a clock and during great moments of stress, Marc’s mind keeps snapping back to that other reality that he’s a patient in a psychiatric ward with Harrow as his doctor. However, Steven manages to guide Marc through some pretty dark shit (his sizable body count from his merc days all sat in the cafeteria), some massive past trauma (the accidental drowning of his brother as a child) and some sizable revelations (the moment Khonshu manipulated a dying Marc to be his avatar), but not even Steven is ready to discover that not only is he not the original personality, but the reasons Marc’s subconscious whipped up in the first place are too tragic to contemplate.
I’ve seen the odd disgruntled whisper stating that Moon Knight is running a little slow for a show about a vigilante infused with the powers of a skeletal bird God, but while the show has been noticeably missing the type of suited-up action seen in, say, The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, the fact that it’s taken its cue from the more bizarre examples of Marvel television means that it’s defiantly like anything we’ve seen in the MCU so far – also it’s admittedly taken a few cues from the Fox X-Men show Legion. However, while the show is obviously enjoying keeping its audience completely off balance almost all the time by being anything but your typical superhero show, it’s time to finally lift the veil and see exactly what drives Marc Spector.
Frankly, all those naysayers can go do one, because Asylum turns out to be one hell of an emotional ride that not only takes us on a trip through the darkest recesses of Spector’s guilt and the damage it has caused, but it gets impressively heavy for the MCU the same way it addressed grief in WandaVision. In a review for an earlier episode, I kind of accused director Mohamed Diab of not really having the ability to balance all of Moon Knight’s quirks as well as the season’s other helmers, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. However, here he proves me wrong in spectacular style as he takes Egyptian mythology, crippling generational trauma, goofy comedy and devastating revelations and mixes them all into a concoction that manages to answer a wealth of questions without losing the quirky, anything goes nature that the first episode brought to the table. But before we go any further, can I just say I utterly adore Taweret and the sight of a God with the head of a hippopotamus (complete with twitching ears) who has such a happy and upbeat nature is the exact level of ridiculous needed to balance such a brutal and heart breaking installment and newcomer Antonia Salib does a cracking job of keeping things light while delivering a ton of exposition about the Egyptian afterlife.
However, as cool as a wooden boat cruising on sands under a purple sky is, the real meat of the show comes from Marc and Steven’s journey through their past trauma and boy, is itcsome heavy stuff that takes in the accidental drowning of Marc’s brother and the subsequent break down of his mother whose resentment led her to becoming physically abusive. In an attempt to whether the storm (not to mention the beatings), Marc’s mind created Steven to escape and the two were completely separate for years, but the death of their mother months ago was the final strain that broke them which was the cause of their lives finally starting to bleed over into one another’s. If revisiting this is tough on Marc (who’s skills at avoidance are technically what caused all this to begin with), it’s even hard on Steven who not only had no idea thatcany of this even occured, but he didn’t even know his mother was dead, hence all those needy phone calls he makes to her and if anyone was curious to what might have brought Oscar Issac to this role in the first place, your answer is right here. The a
due is magnificent, not just because he tackles facing generational trauma from the point of view of two completely different personalities who are experiencing these traumas from utterly different vantage points, but he’s doing it while essentially playing off himself while making the while thing seamless.
Yes, the superhero stuff is only relegated to a single scene where we go back and see Marc unfairly recruited by Khonshu to be his avatar during the campaign that cost Layla’s father his life (still a damn cool moment which gives that theme an excuse to swell) and the ending slips back into slight convention when Marc and Steven fail to balance their hearts and instead have to fight off sand zombies, but it’s nowhere near enough to dull the breathtaking emotion of the tragedy that we’ve just witnessed.
In fact, the only real problem with Asylum is that it’s left a hell of a lot of things for the final episode to clear up. Not even counting the fact that Steven falls over the side of the boat and sacrifices himself so that Marc can make it to the afterlife, Khonshu is still trapped, Harrow has Ammit’s ushabti and Layla’s fate is utterly uncertain. That would be a huge amount of material to wrap up in a single episode even if its heroes wasn’t essentially dead and that’s not even taking into account any other surprises the unpredictable show may hurl into the mix.
Never mind the travellers of the night; can Moon Knight protect its own finale after such an magnificent episode?
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