Moon Knight alights with a more action-focused finale.
My defense of a breezier letdown after a weighty penultimate episode.
The Short Take:
What Moon Knight’s finale lacks in narrative potency, it sufficiently compensates for in good old-fashioned superhero action. They didn’t hit a home run like Loki did, but I would still rank this show pretty high overall.
Image Credit: The Guardian
[SPOILER WARNING: It’s a finale.]
The Long Take:
Many film critics talk about Marvel having a “third act” problem, which means that after setting up complex characters we care about and a premise that draws us in, creators then fall back on a CGI slugfest that seems to lose track of the more substantive story. I remember many put an asterisk next to their positive reviews of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings because they they felt the story disintegrated once the big battle at the end began.
This criticism has, for the most part, spilled over into the streaming series space. All the Disney+ MCU finales, with the prominent exception of Loki, have been pretty similar in their endings. A high-concept, high-drama penultimate episode followed by a more action-heavy, story-light finale. Critics and some fans expect more complexity in the finale and then end up getting less.
Knowing this, I set my expectations for Moon Knight appropriately. That helped quite a bit. This finale does fall in line with the majority of its peers, as we get only a little bit of the psychological drama/thriller of episodes past and, in its place, a lot more superhero suits and (sometimes random) fighting.
Image Credit: The Ringer
Sometimes seeing giant dragons flying around like we do in Shang-Chi is just cool, though. Similarly, seeing a giant crocodile god have a Godzilla-scale brawl with a pigeon skeleton god while human-sized heroes and villains simultaneously engage in a parallel fight in miniature below them is just COOL, no matter how you slice it. Mr. Knight returns to stylishly pummel his way through a bunch of bad guys in a side-scroller video game fashion, reminiscent of the Kate Bishop v. Yelena Belova hallway fight in the Hawkeye finale.
Image Credit: Deadline
And how could I possibly complain about getting the Scarlet Scarab. I’ve been a fan of Layla all season, so to see her risk servitude to save the day — becoming Tawaret’s avatar and adopting a superhero identity of her own — was incredibly satisfying. I thought May Calamawy’s moment-to-moment shifts from Tawaret’s lovably dotty voice to her own fierce and determined one gave Oscar Isaac’s performance a run for its money. The way her golden wings pop out made me pump my fist in the air, and the gold metal look makes for a great callback to her use of the crescent-shaped collar turned deadly weapon earlier in the season. She slices her way through fights with ease. I thought she was more intimidating than Moon Knight and Mr. Knight, to be perfectly honest. I immediately took her seriously as a superhero in that moment, and I hope she shows up in team-up event films in the future.
Image Credit: IGN
If I think for a few minutes about how her powers work and why they result from her relationship with Tawaret as opposed to another god, everything gets hazy. But, realistically, am I really thinking about while I’m watching all this cool stuff? I just want to see Scarlet Scarab action figures on the shelves at that point.
In short, I enjoy superhero genre antics, even when they aren’t grounded in sophisticated storytelling. But I can see how if I had expected more from this final episode, I would have been disappointed. How it might feel a little anticlimactic after all we’ve gotten up until this point.
I remind myself, though, that this is all a matter of perspective. With these new six-episode series, sometimes limited like WandaVision and sometimes continuing like Loki, I’ve had to shift my expectations. While I appreciate that Charles Holmes’ sometimes hot and frequently critical takes are a staple of The Ringer-verse podcast, as they often challenge me in productive ways, he seems to always complain about there not being enough time to develop characters and flesh out the story in six episodes. I think it might be more productive at this point to measure a show by how much they can reasonably accomplish in six 40-50-minute episodes.
Network television, and to a certain extent “prestige” streaming series on HBO (ahem, Game of Thrones) still has a hold over me (and possibly Charles Holmes too) because my default for any series is to assume that the narrative climax will occur in the last episode, with a huge cliffhanger that will carry over into the next season. Kevin Feige and other executives at Marvel, however, have said that they see the scope and scale of these Disney+ series as more like comic book runs that have more of a self-contained, finite arc.
Part of this, I assume, is corporately-motivated; they want to have the option to abandon series that aren’t as popular and keep going with ones that are hits. I think it’s more that as they try to convince big name actors to sign on to these projects, they have to tone down the commitment to make its at worst appealing and at best feasible. Oscar Isaac very notably has NOT signed a contract that exceeds these six episodes of Moon Knight. I think he and his agent were smart enough to know that he’s too valuable and employable elsewhere to needlessly lock himself into a long-term proposition that may not pan out.
This is my long-winded way of saying that while a series like Moon Knight is longer than a movie, it’s still much shorter than what we historically associate with a season of television. We have to expect more compression as a result. And we have to adjust our expectations for what happens in a season. The finale might not be THE finale like we’re used to with other, longer shows. It may be more of a fun epilogue to the episode that came before.
Do we have time to lay all the groundwork for what we see in this finale? No. I would have welcomed that, of course, but I think not having it doesn’t ruin the entire show for me.
All that said, I did very much appreciate the continuation of the Marc and Steven arc at the start of this episode, which focused on their relationship. Was the line, “You were always my greatest superpower” a little on the nose? Yes. Did it melt my heart? Also yes. I also like that Marc, in essentially saying, “no, I need Steven and can’t leave him behind,” rebels against the Egyptian scales. Even if the scales see Steven as excess baggage that must be thrown overboard, Marc insists that his alter is his own person, and one worth saving.
We meet a third identity who may not be worth saving in the post-credits scene: Jake Lockley. I suppose I should keep a more open mind, but it seems as though Jake is the most violent and least scrupulous of the three. In the final moments of the final fight of the episode, Marc blacks out, we cut away, and then we suddenly see a confused Marc with a massive body count around him. We’ve seen this a few times before, and the post-credits scene confirms that 1.) the more vicious fighting that Marc can’t account for has been Jake all along (cue that WandaVision song) and 2.) that Jake was in the mystery sarcophagus that was shaking in Episode 4. Jake shoots Harrow point blank without any hesitation, confirming that he is as ruthless and scary as past inklings of him have implied.
Image Credit: Mens Health
The bigger, twistier reveal is that Khonshu introduces Jake to Harrow (and us) as his new avatar. Or remaining avatar? It’s unclear what the nature of Jake’s arrangement with Khonshu was prior to Marc quitting. Either way, Marc and Steven have not actually escaped Khonshu’s control because Jake has apparently signed on to take over the vengeance agenda.
My one complaint about this post-credits scene is that it muddied my understanding of the organizing principle introduced in the previous episode. Based on the logic I established then, Harrow would now be in the Duat, trying to make sense of Ammit being trapped inside him and and I guess dying, though I feel I missed the part where he was dying on earth? He does so by imagining Marc’s same asylum, which, to me, doesn’t make sense because the asylum was an organizing principle specific to Marc. To have it remain a static place does make what’s happening more legible for the audience, but, again, the internal logic explained in the previous episode doesn’t match.
Image Credit: Forbes
Where is Harrow at this point and why does Khonshu have him in a limo? Could he actually be in a real life version of Marc’s asylum? Again, the role reversal in of itself was a satisfying punishment for Harrow after having seen him play the therapist for Steven, but I am now doubting my own understanding of the rules.
Regardless of how this scene fits into the parameters of the show, it still opens the door for a second season. Khonshu is still out there with Marc and Steven’s body wreaking havoc. At the same time, I think the opening is small enough that if we never got another episode, fans won’t demand closure. Especially since we only just met Jake and have little attachment to him as a character. Oscar Isaac’s got options and this definitely feels like Mohammed Diab and his writers hedging their bets. We’ll have to wait and see if Disney+ announces Season 2 at their next investor day or at some other point in the future.
I very much want a second season of this show. Now that Marc and Steven have at least achieved harmony and Layla has achieved full blown superhero status, I want to see them solve mysteries and fight crimes together. The way we return to the opening scene and “every time I wake up” needle drop tells me that a season two would begin again with Marc and Steven together, trying to lead their new life but then still doing things neither of them can explain and, eventually, figuring out that Jake exists.
If you’re listening, Disney, there is no price too high to get Oscar Isaac back in the MCU! He’s a phenomenal actor. He crushed this role. And I became very attached to his versions of Steven Grant and Marc Specter. Do what you have to do to make that happen.