Moon Knight finale review: Marvel’s fascinating, worthwhile failure

It was not an easy job to adapt Moon Knight. Like a lot of characters in the pulp tradition — he first appeared in a comic called You Werewolf at Night, after all — Moon Knight’s history is full of elements that clash with modern sensibilities. Classic orientalism is the premise, a white soldier imbued in the power and might of an Egyptian god of the moon, but later comics revealed that the character had a dissociative disorder. Comics would be needed to update to better reflect the current understanding of mental illness. All that’s left is the good stuff. BeforeYou have to confront the complex nature of comic book continuity. It is difficult to imagine all this being turned into six episodes of coherent TV. However, the episodes are a little shaky. Moon KnightIt was mostly possible.

Moon Knight’s creative team set their ambitions high: not just to adapt this character’s story from page to screen for the MCU, but also to correct for the pulp transgressions of the source material and center the story around a modern-day Cairo, and modern-day Egyptians, as much as possible. The At Moon Knight’s best, the creators pulled this off with fun Tomb Raider-esque flair and big moments that didn’t culminate in your typical superhero fight. It was at its worst, and it began to unravel the fabric of the MCU.

It feels like the series was rushed and needed more time. The finale, “Gods and Monsters,” abruptly ends with huge status quo shifts. Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy) becomes the superhuman Scarlet Scarab, and viewers finally meet Jake Lockley, the third persona sharing a brain with Marc Spector and Steven Grant (all played by Oscar Isaac) that’s been hinted at for the entire series. The following leaves Moon KnightThere are a lot of questions that need to be answered, which is quite surprising for a show that was pitched as a miniseries without a clear sequel.

Image: Marvel Studios

“Gods and Monsters” is mostly preoccupied with bringing the arcs of its three most important characters — Steven, Marc, and Layla — to a conclusion. Marc and Steven are now able to accept one another and share their powers and bodies after reaching a new agreement with Khonshu. Layla, however, becomes Scarlet Scarab following a more fair partnership with Taweret. However, it seems that the last moments strongly indicate that none of these things are true. This clear-cut; Jake Lockley’s presence implies that Marc and Steven don’t fully have a grasp on their condition. And Moon Knight’s rushed pacing leaves enough room for doubt as to whether it is being intentionally ambiguous in some regards (like the nature of the asylum in the latter half of the show) or simply unclear.

It is an occupational danger that adapting work to fix and translate can cause. It is the ambition and intention of those who created it. Moon KnightIt is clear that they are throughout. They are SoMany scenes seem to be carefully considered in order to make the story fair for everyone it touches, including those suffering from mental illness, Egyptian audiences and Latinx audiences. Moon Knight’s six episodes simply do not have enough runway to make any of its efforts land effectively, and the result is a disjointed series with potential for genuinely gripping storytelling mostly reduced to brand maintenance, or the rehabilitation of a “problematic” character into something more appropriate for mass consumption.

One characterization of the Marvel Studios method of storytelling argues that it’s a machine very effective at producing stories that are “not bad,” rather than stories that are “good.” It’s a bit of semantic wordplay that mostly speaks to how effectively commercial the MCU is, with an efficient house style that only really sours when a person reaches their subjective limit. Moon KnightIt is an unusual duck. It doesn’t really care about the wider MCU, and even though it hews pretty closely to that house style, there are some deviations. The all-encompassing nature of the Marvel machine can make it hard to gauge whether there is a genuine spark here or a case of any-port-in-a-storm optimism, but there’s an earnestness to Moon Knight That makes the latter option even more appealing. This is the hope. Moon KnightIronically, the abrupt ending of the story is where it ends. Things aren’t neat. It’s the rare Marvel project that leaves things weirder than we found them — and hopefully, if there’s more, there will be room to get weirder still.