Moon Knight Ep. 5 shoulders an emotional burden.
Meanwhile, I have questions about the afterlife in the MCU.
The Short Take:
A heavy, emotionally devastating penultimate episode still keeps Moon Knight’s high adventure alive. Give Oscar Isaac ALL the Emmys.
Image Credit: ComingSoon.Net
[SPOILER WARNING: A lot happens in this episode! Some spoilers for WandaVision pop up as well.]
The Long Take:
At the risk of sounding braggy, it feels good to be right. Most of my predictions from last week came true. The Egyptian underworld is real, explained as one of many “intersectional planes of untethered consciousness” in the MCU. Tawaret, the hippo goddess names the Ancestral Plane in Black Panther as an example of another. Marc and Steven, over the course of this episode, have to confront their Dissociative Identity Disorder in order to advance to the Field of Reeds. Tawaret helps them out (or at least “roots” for them the whole time). We haven’t made it back to the earthly tomb yet, but Marc sets his sights on doing so, and likely will in the finale.
I did not, however, predict just how emotionally brutal this episode would be. I assumed that Marc and Steven would experience some amount of pain in trying to resolve their combative relationship, but the backstory we piece together over the course of the episode, door by door and window by window, is far darker and sadder than what I anticipated. We learn that Mark created Steven to cope with his younger brother’s death and his mother blaming him for that death. Anything that features children in peril is already difficult for me to watch — more so now that I have my own — but the added tragedy of Marc’s mother spiraling into what appears to be alcoholism and child abuse brought this to a whole other, completely devastating level. I felt so bad for Marc, and thought that his constant attempts to shield Steven from those memories were effectively affecting because Marc explicitly created Steven in order to live a happy, peaceful life, free of all that trauma. There’s an innocence he doesn’t want Steven to lose.
These piecemeal flashbacks in the asylum are very, VERY similar to what we see in WandaVision, down to the use of a house-like structure to visually represent the corners of a character’s psyche. I didn’t have a chance to go back and rewatch it, but as I recall, we see Wanda venture down a hallway in Agatha’s basement and then revisit tragic moments in her past, from her time as an adolescent test subject for Hydra to her loss and mourning of Vision. Do I mind that this may suggest an MCU/Disney+ formula at play? Not really. Both versions of this memory lane style episode — skillfully written and masterfully acted — help us better understand the motivations of their respective characters.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
Yet Moon Knight’s version seems more complex and layered because it not only explains why Marc is the way he is; it also explains why and how Steven exists. How once Marc confronts his past trauma and faces the pain he created Steven to soothe, he may “balance his scales” and ascend to a higher plane.
Image Credit: FandomWire
I thought the writers very cleverly used the asylum setting to explain what was going on in the episode and bring all the layers together. Dr. Harrow explains the organizing principle concept, telling Steven that all the fantastical elements of Moon Knight’s story, including his recent mention of a talking hippo and a giant sand-faring boat, are what he calls an “organizing principle”: something Marc’s mind has created to cope with trauma. I interpreted his explanation as a way for the show to explain — just as Dr. Harrow does — what is “sense” and what is “nonsense.”
What constitutes sense and nonsense, though, is the opposite of what the therapist claims. He and the psych ward are actually the organizing principle created by Marc so Marc can cognitively process the Egyptian underworld. Tawaret reinforces this when she explains that most people passing through the Duat have to find ways of grasping such a vast plane of consciousness, but that she hasn’t seen anyone convert it into an asylum before. The “sense,” then, is a hippo goddess running an afterlife ferry and the “nonsense” is Marc’s self-diagnosis that he is insane or that anything he sees is too improbable to be real.
Image Credit: Polygon
If I return to the question of whether or not this is too similar to what WandaVision does, I can counter that accusation with the idea that these two shows, in their mirrored usage of an organizing principle, of hallways and doors to spatially and visually represent what certain characters may experience on other planes, establishes a continuity in the MCU, which will be especially useful moving deeper into Phase 4. I’m also thinking of Wanda learning the secrets of the Darkhokd and traveling to some other dimension to try to find her two kids, who may have seemed like a phantom of her grieving imagination but in fact do exist somewhere. Between that, the house of Wanda memories, and now Moon Knight’s asylum/afterlife, fans are able to get comfortable with multiple alternate cosmos.
So by the time we get to a feature film, say…Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (which hits theaters next weekend!!!), we have already learned that weird-looking buildings could just be a way to make an ethereal plane of existence more legible to the characters and the audience. The trailer for the imminent Doctor Strange film memorably features a trippy staircase and door that opens to empty space. So maybe this is all to prepare us for something even weirder than Moon Knight, which will end, incidentally, days before Multiverse of Madness’ release.
One place where the Ringerverse (I swear I listen to other podcasts) and I diverge in speculation last week and interpretation this week is that the Asylum is some kind of manipulation on Harrow’s part, to keep Marc from foiling his plans. I didn’t think of that initially but, back in Episode 4, thought it was possible. It’s looking like that’s not true at all now.
In fact, we see signs that the real Harrow back in Alexander the Great’s/Ammit’s tomb is just fine moving along with his plans without worrying about Marc, who probably appears only as a dead body there. From Tawaret’s boat, we see the purple lights descending off in the distance, and she comments that so many souls passing through at once is not normal. Harrow has clearly started his crusade to Minority Report his way through the human population and enact some kind of preventative justice.
The references to what’s still happening outside the Duat reminds me that this episode included both an intensely emotional, character-focused story and wacky fantasy adventure hijinks, which is pretty impressive. The time we spend in either mode is as balanced as the scales we see stabilizing at the end of the episode. The depth devoted to Marc’s journey with Steven into the past isn’t undercut by Marc hilariously trying to persuade Steven that they can take out the hippo and steer the boat themselves, for instance. But that’s the MCU’s secret sauce, isn’t it? The ability to inject levity and make a story fun without undercutting its emotional heft.
Image Credit: Den of Geek
The literal scales on the boat, of course, balance perfectly once Steven succumbs to the soul-eating Duat. I was bereft when this happened, not only because I already loved Steven as a character, but because the episode leading up to that moment does such an amazing job of showing us that Steven is Marc’s best coping mechanism. That Steven’s existence comforts Marc like a warm hug, representing everything that was loving and caring in Marc’s life before his brother died. Steven is so nice, so lovable because he is what Marc could have been like had so much tragedy and trauma not befallen him. Side note: I’m already a pretty hawk-eyed parent, but after this I am basically never letting my children play unsupervised…ever. That’s what I was supposed to take away from this, right? By the end, the way that Steven says, “it’s not your fault; you were just a child” hits so hard, even though we’ve heard that kind of line a thousand times before in other things.
What I find most fascinating about Steven’s death, though, is that it was not Marc’s choice. I know that the scales in balance should reflect some kind of wholeness or peace that Marc has to find in order to literally and figuratively move on. But it’s not as if Marc lets Steven go because he decides he doesn’t “need” him anymore. Instead, one of the sand souls pulls Steven off the boat and he also turns to sand. So the Duat or maybe just happenstance decides whether or not Marc makes it — not Marc or Steven. This gets stranger the more I think about it because it feels like there’s been a kind of resolution because Steven and Marc reach a shared understanding, but it’s not until external circumstances — the time running out and the Duat trying to claim their souls — intervene that we get emotional closure.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Steven’s death, regardless of how it happens, resolves the childhood trauma narrative and shows that even though Marc didn’t want to say goodbye to Steven, doing so was good for him or at least achieved something that the Egyptian afterlife values. I’m not sure if those two overlap, but the show seems to present the scales as absolute and correct. Only…Ammit is the one who would eat a soul whose heart weighed more than a feather. By that logic we should not judge Marc’s wellness by those scales. Am I talking myself in circles here?
While the establishment of the Duat as real and the Asylum as an organizing principle may seem like standard sci fi exposition for the MCU, I need to stop for a minute to acknowledge just how big a statement this is from a theological/existential perspective. Not only is the Egyptian afterlife — the Duat or the Field of Reeds — real, but it’s just “an” afterlife — one of many. Egyptians have one afterlife while, simultaneously, the Wakandans can have another with a completely different landscape, as well as different properties and rules. This is a pretty substantial statement about what lies beyond our mortal coil. That after we die on Earth we could actually go somewhere else. While we’ve been lots of places beyond earth in the MCU, has any hero traveled somewhere after death? Please correct me if I forgetting something.
Van Lathan mentioned the cultural implications of Moon Knight’s configuration of the afterlives on this week’s Ringerverse instant reaction pod (the only one I’ve listened to so far; The Colbycast is next in the queue.). He specifically noted that Marvel can side-step “siding” with one religion and culture by saying that they can all exist simultaneously and “everyone’s beliefs are right.” A pan-religious approach that has a tinge of Epcot/We are the World naïveté, which would not be worth complaining about were it not for the likelihood that Marvel will probably never go near Christianity for fear of offending anyone. I don’t claim to be a theology expert by any means, but I suspect there would be some outrage if characters from the Bible showed up and Christian heaven were just one of many possible otherworldly dimensions. What does that say about how we’re thinking about the other non-Western religions and mythologies — and therefore the people who genuinely believe in them — by comparison? I’m heading to murky waters here and don’t have any clear insights; but it’s worth mulling over. I defer to those with more expertise in this area.
Even if the general invocation of Egyptian theology is potentially sticky, I thought the adaptation of Tawaret into an MCU character was extremely entertaining. Her absent-minded congeniality reminded me so much of another show that contemplates the afterlife, The Good Place. Her bumbling and saying “I don’t have a card for that” made me chuckle. I’m not sure what her role might be going forward, but I sincerely hope she continues to play a part in all this during the finale.
Image Credit: Comics Beat
Marc tells Tawaret that even though he does not want to return to Khonshu, “it’s the only way” to save humanity from Harrow and Ammit. The only way to save Layla. This means we are almost certainly going to free Khonshu at the start of the next episode and have an epic fight for the rest of it.
With Oscar Isaac’s astounding performance thus far, I am ready for whatever’s coming.