Moon Knight episode 4 review: Like Tomb Raider, with a twist

It’s as enjoyable as it gets Moon Knight Although it’s been a pleasure to watch the show, explaining its essence has proven difficult. It’s taken half of its six-episode run to give its protagonist a clear goal, and with three episodes left, it’s hard to know what the series is building to. Marvel TV’s most entertaining episodes have been able to be aired because of their strong sense of direction. WandaVision, leading Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) and Layla (May Calamawy) on a race to beat the villainous Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) to Ammit’s tomb. Call it Marvel’s Indiana Jones,Oder Tomb RaiderYou can also call it: Uncharted — it’s half an hour of adventure-movie action, with weird monsters and death traps and forbidden treasure. If this were the entire of what? Moon Knight turned out to be, that would’ve been a good show. But there’s another 15 minutes to see, and they turn the entire series on its head.

[Ed. note: Heavy spoilers for the fourth episode of Moon Knight follow]

What makes “The Tomb” such a good episode of Moon Knight isn’t simply because Ammit’s tomb has such a great series of setpieces, but because it’s also the place where every character’s arc collides. Steven wants to save Ammit and defeat Harrow. Layla is willing to assist Steven but has her own questions that linger in the background. She wants to know who her father was on an old expedition. Marc continues to deny how broken he truly is. Harrow tips over all these dominoes by finding Layla alone and suggesting that Marc Spector is responsible for her father’s death.

The revelation builds to a confrontation in front of Ammit’s sarcophagus, where Layla demands Marc take over from Steven to answer her questions. He tells her one of his mercenary partners “got greedy” and murdered everyone at the archeological site they were hired to raid, including Layla’s father; even Marc almost died out there.

Photo: Gabor Kotschy/Marvel Studios

Marc’s defense is an oblique retelling of Moon Knight’s origin story, one that Moon Knight has resisted telling in full until it’s relevant — which is admirable, if a bit frustrating. It’s also, unfortunately, the origin story of Marc’s relationship with Layla, as he wanted to tell her what happened but couldn’t, striking up a friendship and marriage out of his guilty conscience. Layla is angry to hear this but Harrow and his men have enough time to talk to Marc and get to know him. He doesn’t die, but instead wakes up sedated in a psychiatric institution.

This last twist is the episode’s most exciting, but also most suspect. To those unaware of Moon Knight’s comic book history, the shift to an asylum might read as the series embracing a shopworn trope. Television characters were once thrown in mental institutions to provide shock value. This is back to the days when Buffy the Vampire Slayer It goes beyond. It’s an arresting visual that preys on both common fears and the social stigmatization of mental illness, and is usually wrapped up at the end of an episode, or perhaps a two-parter.

Moon KnightHowever, there are more reasons than many to visit this location. The first half of this series is available. Moon Knight It has not been influenced by any single influence. Deep-cut characters abound (last week’s antiquities collector, Anton Mogart, is better known in Marvel Comics as the masked thief Midnight Man) and series mainstays like Layla and Arthur Harrow (hell, even Steven Grant) are thoroughly transformed in this incarnation, giving Moon Knight It has its own distinctive texture. It isn’t too familiar with the MCU and it doesn’t rely too heavily on comics lore. It is possible to be the most easily accessible MCU project in some time. This makes the series’ loose plotting and inconsistent pacing even more disappointing. When Marc Spector wakes, is it a nightmare? It’s the sort of scene you can, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Finally, stand up and point at a comic book story.

Image: Greg Smallwood/Marvel Comics

That comic is 2016’s Moon KnightGreg Smallwood and Jeff Lemire, 14 issue series. It began with Marc Spector being held in strange asylum where he was informed that his role as Moon Knight was only a fantasy. In “The Tomb,” the Disney Plus series gets about as close to straight adaptation as the MCU does, and while it may go no further than this brief scene, the moment is instructive.

Lemire and Smallwood’s comic was a story about acceptance, and in the final act of “The Tomb,” Marc Spector finds himself in the unbelievable situation of having Moon Knight’s villain as his psychiatrist and the events of the series a fiction; “Steven Grant” is even implied to be based on a pulp B-movie about an adventurer of the same name. Yet even in this state — powerless, in a drugged stupor — Marc Spector knows this isn’t right, and he needs to find help: in the form of Steven Grant, trapped in a sarcophagus deep in the institution. Marc Spector’s broken mind is found here in the labyrinth. Moon KnightA step closer to an idea that could make it stick when it ends, that Marc Spector And Steven Grant need each other, if only to say that they aren’t okay, and maybe begin to heal.