Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for Moon Knight, specifically for episode 5. If you do not wish to be spoiled, please turn about and leave the page. This post will still be here after you've caught up, if you so wish to return (and I'd be chuffed if you did).
Update (2 May 2022): I ended up posting an incomplete entry again... This was due to two things: one, my laptop lags like a mofo and that's what I was using to write this entry (I normally use my work PC, shhhh), and two, the content was just really hard to get out anyway because emotions are a thing. I have done an edit, though, and you have my apologies for not maintaining a certain quality of work.
(Image copyright Marvel Studios/Disney)
My post for this week was supposed to be a review (of sorts) for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent... And while I am still going to try and get that done, I can't right now. I was naïvely, excitedly awaiting the arrival of Moon Knight's newest episode, and I made the mistake of watching it before writing up the review, and... I just can't.
I can't remember the last time a show or film wounded my emotions this deeply...
Moon Knight has been keeping the bar extremely high on the storytelling, for the most part, while still maintaining that certain level of frustration and confusion that just makes the anticipation for the next episode damn near tangible. The acting is superb, especially on the part of Oscar Isaac, who has impressed the fuck out of everyone with the ease with which he slips from one character to the other in such a natural, believable fashion. It is, in my honest and humble opinion, the best thing Marvel has put out in a while, if not ever.
The end of episode four confused a lot of people, especially those fans who are unfamiliar with the comics. Steven and Marc found Ammit's ushabti, but their victory is short lived, as Harrow finds them and proceeds to drop all pretenses of being a benevolent and humble servant of preemptive justice and just straight up shoots Marc. Twice. Next thing we know he wakes up in a mental hospital full of people he knows, and where his doctor is apparently... Arthur Harrow. This part of the series seems to be pulling heavily from the 2016 Lemire comic arc, and I can definitely see how people unfamiliar with it might be lost as fuck. (If you can, you should absolutely read it. It's ace.)
The episode goes on to have Marc find Steven, now a separate entity from his body, and while the both of them are a little confused as to how that has happened, Marc opts to focus on the more practical matter at hand: they need to escape. In their attempt to, they meet none other than Taweret. And that's where the credits roll.
Now, before I get into all the shit that broke my heart into more pieces than there are sands in the Sahara, I want to share this thing I found on Twitter after episode four aired:
Steven is so adorable, and I wanted to share it because this is basically (sort of) what he was like after he realised that it was Taweret in front of him. He's dead, that's weird, but oh, there's an Egyptian goddess in front of him!
Wait, they're dead? Well, yes... Taweret informs them that they have, in fact, died as a result of the two bullets that ripped through their torso, and thus they are now on a boat sailing the sands of the Duat. She explains to them, after finding her notes for it (to be fair, this isn't her day job, but it's a bit hard for Anubis to do it since he's apparently also trapped in an ushabti), that the reason they are seeing the afterlife as a mental institution is because the Duat is not something the human mind can comprehend, so it defaults to something more familiar to the individual.
Steven questions the setting, to which Marc very blatantly points out that they're insane. For a moment he entertains the idea that his sessions with 'Doctor' Harrow are, in fact, the reality and everything else is a fiction created by his mental instability, but then he goes through a set of doors that should have been for the room where Crawley (named this episode, yay) was calling out bingo. Rather than finding the commons where other patients are passing their time, Marc finds himself out on the deck of the boat. In front of him stand Anubis' scales.
Steven joins him on deck a moment later, followed by Taweret. She proceeds to pull their hearts from their chests and place them on the scales together, to be weighed against one of Ma'at's feathers of Truth. If the scales balance before they get to the gates of the Aaru, they will be permitted to pass into eternal paradise. If not, they'll be dragged overboard into the sands of the Duat, where they will become frozen for eternity. (It would traditionally be that Ammit would eat their hearts, but seeing as she's imprisoned, I guess they have to improvise.)
It's a fairly straightforward process, save that their hearts not only didn't balance, but sent the scales haywire. Upon examination, Taweret determines that this is because neither of them are actually full like they're supposed to be. She sends them back inside the ship, explaining that all of their memories are there, and they need to figure out what's missing before they reach the end of their journey. So, despite Marc's protests that they should just incapacitate the hippo and steal the ship, Steven insists upon doing as instructed and taking a trip down memory lane.
And now this post is going to get extremely difficult to write...
The first two memories they run across are very recent: Marc beating the jackal in the museum toilet and Steven helping Khonshu turn back the sky. The next one we see, though, is just Marc standing on a seemingly random street. Steven asks him about it, and it is so fucking obvious that Marc knows exactly what it is, but doesn't want to talk about it. Steven doesn't get the chance to press, though, as he is distracted by a call for help from down the hall. He follows the sound, and after a second of hesitation, so does Marc.
The room they find themselves in is a cafeteria full of dead bodies, their canopic jars sat on the tables in front of them. It comes to light that they are all people that the Moon Knight has punished, that this is what Khonshu meant by protecting the travellers of the night. Steven is shocked by the number of them, but he also notices that the scales (which follow them around the memories) are slowing down. And then he notices a child standing by the doorway. 'Why is there a child in a room full of people you've killed,' he asks Marc.
He attempts to engage the child, but he runs away. Steven follows, and Marc goes after them to try and prevent him from seeing the memory the boy is associated with. Steven, however, rushes through the door after the child and locks it behind him. He follows into the memory while Marc stalks frantically through the hospital's hallways, trying to find a way to find Steven.
The memory in question is a family cookout. Steven recognises his parents: his mother, Wendy, is on the grill while his dad, Elias, is working on putting together a playhouse. The boy he followed is sitting at a table colouring a drawing he did of a goldfish, and Marc is there, teasing him for drawing the fish with only one fin. His mother chides him, telling him to be nice to his brother, at which point Steven is like, 'I had a brother?'
Young Marc mentions to his brother, Randall (RoRo), that he isn't hungry and asks if he wants to go to 'the cave' with him, to which he agrees. They go off to have young lad adventures together, though not before Wendy reminds Marc to make sure to take care of his little brother. He says he will and leaves off with a 'laters, gators', to which Wendy replies, 'after while, crocodile'.
Steven follows the pair out to a wooded area, where the boys start their make believe play. Just before they go into the cave, though, it begins to rain. Randall has reservations, as their mother has told them not to play there when it's raining, but Marc tells him not to be a baby, so in they go. (Meanwhile, present Marc is still searching the halls of the hospital looking for Steven.)
Upon entering the cave, which has a sharp decline right from the start, Steven notices how fast the rain runoff is. He tries calling out to them, trying to get their attention, trying to get them to come out of the cave because it's dangerous. They, of course, can't hear him (it is nothing but a memory, after all), but he keeps trying, going further into the cave himself in search of them. Eventually he hears the same calls for help that drew him to the room of Moon Knight's 'victims', and still he presses on trying to find young Marc and Randall.
Out in the hallway, Marc finally comes across a door that he can open. It leads to a memory from Randall's shiva, and it is here he finally finds Steven, who is still wet from the cave.
(Image copyright Marvel Studios/Disney)
So... in my previous post on Moon Knight, I gave some information about Marc's comic book backstory and what contributed to him developing dissociative identity disorder. The show... it didn't use that. At all. There is no psycho Nazi serial killer pretending to be Jewish in order to have easy access to Jews to torture to death. No, we get something infinitely more heartbreaking, something that is more horrible in the fact that it is something real that happens to children all over the world every single day...
Steven watches as his mother remarks that she 'wants [her] RoRo back', after which he hears footsteps on the stairs behind him. Young Marc is coming down, but stops midway at seeing his mother. She notices him, and demands to know why he's there. Marc, at this point, starts trying to get Steven to leave, as he doesn't want him to see this interaction, but Steven remains frozen in place watching his mother scream at young Marc that Randall's death was all his fault.
Young Marc turns and runs back up the stairs, with Steven following behind despite Marc's objections. The next two memories are both birthdays, the first of which starts with Elias trying to coax Wendy into coming down for cake. Getting no response, he switches tactics and tries to assure young Marc that his mother just isn't feeling well, that they'll do it just the two of them this year. He prompts Marc to blow out the candles, which he does, but it's pretty obvious that his heart isn't in it. (If I counted the candles correctly, this is his tenth birthday.)
The next birthday is him turning twelve. It seems to be a slightly happier event at first, but when Elias walks out of the room to go do something, Wendy sits at the table and starts in on Marc again. She accuses him of jealousy towards his little brother, tells him she should have expected him to do 'something like this'. (I find it interesting that she uses the present tense here. It's been over two years since Randall's accident, but this implies that she's living the moment as if it's still happening, or has just happened. I am not going to excuse her for abusing her remaining child in the slightest, but it is one of those little details that add so much depth to a character.)
Young Marc gets up and runs upstairs to his room, slamming the door shut behind him. Steven again follows, but just as he's opening the door to see the memory that happens there, Marc catches up to him and drags him away.
They end up on the street in front of the row houses. Steven attempts to go back inside, to find out what happened in the bedroom, but Marc physically keeps him from doing so. Steven then demands to know why Marc is remembering their mother like that, saying that's not how she was. He tries again to get away and go back inside, but their struggle is cut short by the memory they are now in.
This one has Marc, who is now probably eighteen, leaving with Elias following, trying to get him to change his mind. He tells his son that they'll get Wendy help, that she can get better... that he can't lose another son. Marc shoots back that Elias should have already done something to fix this and questions why he hasn't.
I've been a bit loathe to judge Elias on this aspect, but Marc has a very valid question here. Grief takes on many different forms, as do reactions to abusive situations. The thing is, though, Wendy was abusive towards Marc because she blamed him for RoRo's death, but there's no indication that she was abusive towards her husband. This means that he, through his inaction, enabled his wife to make his remaining living son's life absolute hell. In this, he failed both Wendy and, most of all, Marc, and for that, he's a pathetic excuse for a human being. Pleading with his son who is old enough to leave home, making promises to fix things now? Fuck that noise.
Marc had been trying to drag Steven back through the door into the Duat hospital, but he broke away to watch this memory unfold. Marc goes after him again, and when Steven tries to run, he tackles him. They end up in a different memory yet again, this one far from their childhood home in Chicago. Now it is night, and they are in the middle of the Egyptian desert. Surrounded by corpses.
They are in the aftermath of the murders of the archaeology team. Steven recalls that Harrow had said Marc was a mercenary, that he'd killed hostages. When Marc asks if he believes that, Steven tetchily responds that he wouldn't put it past him. Marc goes on to explain what actually happened: that he was discharged from the military for going AWOL during a fugue state, how that didn't leave him much option in the way of employment, so he ended up working for his old CO, Bushman. How Bushman changed the terms of their job and decided to leave no witnesses, but that he'd tried to get everyone away. That it didn't work, obviously.
When Steven asks what happened to Marc, he simply points. We now get one of the most beautifully, almost 100% comic accurate origins for a character. What Marc is pointing at is Khonshu's temple, which looks very much like the depiction of it in the comics. The pair find this memory's Marc crawling, shot and bleeding out, up to the steps of the temple. In the comics, he actually died at the foot of Khonshu's statue, but here he takes out his sidearm with the intention of committing suicide.
Khonshu intervenes by speaking to Marc, explaining who he is, and offering him a chance at life again. All he has to do is do Khonshu's bidding and punish those who hurt the travellers of the night. He asks Marc to swear to take up his mantle, which Marc eventually does. Steven calls this out as him being manipulative, but Marc responds that it may have just been him accepting the temptation to keep doing the only thing that he was ever good at, which is killing people (apparently).
They hear a commotion outside, and upon returning to the deck, Taweret informs them that a great number of souls are being sent directly to the Duat before their time, without facing judgement. They seek her help to return, and she aims the prow of the ship in the direction of Osiris' gate, which she says is the only one to go through to get back to the living world. She then directs them to go back inside to finish what they're doing.
Back in the hospital, Steven suggests again that he needs to see what was in that room. Marc, who is very unwilling to let Steven see what happened there, attempts to dissuade him by saying they can just talk about it instead, that it isn't worth going back to the actual memory. Steven balks at this and tells Marc that if Harrow succeeds and all those people die just because he refuses to go back to that memory, it will be all his fault, prompting Marc to have a breakdown.
This bothers me so very much... Marc spent years being tormented and abused by his mother, who blamed him for the death of his little brother. Not only did she blame him, but she insisted that he had done it on purpose, that he had basically murdered Randall. Right before he found the memory of Randall's shiva, he ran across one that was simply his mother glaring at him, and the sight of her almost had him have a meltdown right then and there. ('It's just a memory... It's just a memory... Damnit, Steven.')
In episode two, after Marc defeats the jackal and realises the scarab is missing, he ends up having a conversation with Steven via the mirrored centerpiece in the courtyard they're in. Steven isn't used to being the one trapped inside, and he gets upset when Marc refuses to give him back control of their body. He proceeds to accuse Marc of being a parasite, of ruining everything in his life for him. He tells him that all he does is hurt people. He tells him, basically, that it's all his fault.
This isn't the only time he says such callous things, either. In episode three, for example, he calls Marc 'the worst'. In episode four he tells him again that he is untrustworthy, repeating one of the things he said during their spat in episode two. Almost every single time he has spoken with Marc, he's been spiteful and sometimes downright malicious.
I can't get mad at Steven for any of this. He didn't know, and he's dealing with his own shit after finding out that he's not alone in his own head. He has also been under the impression that the body was originally his, so, to him, Marc actually is an intruder. That doesn't change the fact that the things he said must have hit certain places in Marc's brain, echoing his mother as they did. It sheds new light on Marc kicking the shit out of the mirror he was talking to Steven though in that courtyard, and damn near solidifies in my head that he was drinking so heavily in the room in Cairo because of something Steven said.
Interspersed in this episode are sessions Marc is having with 'Doctor' Harrow, who keeps spouting a lot of smart sounding gibberish at him (well, at least that's what he was doing at the end of episode four... episode five is less gibberish-y). When Marc has his breakdown over not wanting to relive the bedroom memory, he 'wakes up' back in Harrow's office. Harrow talks to Marc about breaking down the wall between himself and Steven, tells him that he won't make progress until he can open up to him properly.
And so finally he relents, and he allows Steven to see the memory in the bedroom.
Young Marc is there, hiding with his door shut. Wendy starts banging on the door, demanding to be let in, but Marc just keeps repeating to himself that that isn't his mom, that isn't his mom, that isn't his mom... As they watch, young Marc gives way to young Steven, who immediately begins fretting about tidying up 'before Mum sees it'. It's here that Steven notices the poster hanging on the wall for Tomb Buster, the low budget film whose scene served as a bridge between Harrow shooting them in the tomb and them ending up in the mental hospital. 'When danger is near, Steven Grant has no fear...' it reads.
Thus Steven finally realises the truth.
Wendy finally gets the door open. She takes a belt from a hook on the wall and begins to bear down on young Steven, but before we see what she does with it (though we knew; even if they hadn't included the sound effects as they're exiting the room, we all knew), Marc drags Steven back out into the hallway. 'You don't need to see that. You're not meant to see that. That's the whole point of you.'
When Wendy entered the room, it was Steven sitting on the floor, but it was not Steven who took the beating. Steven was Marc's escape fantasy, the one, as he points out, who got to live a 'happy, simple, normal life', who got to believe that his mother loved him and was good to him. (I'm wondering if perhaps it was Jake who took the brunt of the abuse, but I don't know if that will actually be addressed seeing as there's only one episode left and Jake still hasn't been properly introduced...)
I honestly don't know which one of them breaks my heart more. Steven, who has just found out his entire life is a lie, incredulous at the idea of his mother being a monster who hated his very existence, who abused him, or Marc, who has had to relive all of that trauma in quick succession while also possibly losing his method of escape because now Steven knows. And if it isn't heartbreaking enough already, Marc lets slip that their mother is dead.
Steven argues this point, says he talks to her everyday. His denial is so strong that he begins to melt down, and suddenly he wakes up, for the first time, in 'Doctor' Harrow's office. After some short conversation, it comes up that Steven is the one who checked them into the 'hospital', after his mother's death. He gets very upset about being confronted with this information again, at which point Harrow offers to call Wendy so Steven can talk to her. Immediately his attitude changes, as he starts begging Harrow not to call her, saying she won't answer, telling him not to bother her... before finally saying himself that his mum is dead.
Steven's session with 'Doctor' Harrow is my favourite scene of the show so far. Part of it is because we get to see him being sassy. Part of it is because this scene does a beautiful job of illustrating to us that Steven is also mentally unstable, which I think is easy to forget. And part of it is just because Oscar does such a great job going through the range of emotions that happen in this short little scene.
After Steven admits to his mother's passing we end up back on that street that Marc tried to pretend wasn't important. He's standing out front of his old childhood home, where his family and their friends are inside sitting shiva for Wendy. His father catches sight of him through the window and motions for him to come in, but Marc refuses and walks away. He does not get very far before he breaks down in the street sobbing, tugging off his kippah and taking his frustration out on it. (He was apparently intending to go through with sitting shiva, but could not bear to actually do so.)
(Image copyright Marvel Studios/Disney)
Marc can't handle the pain of it, so Steven shows up to take control. He assumes he's wandered off again and is just lost, and he immediately 'calls' and 'talks' to his mum. There has been a lot of speculation among fans about who Steven has been leaving voicemails for, but the implication here is that he hasn't actually been calling anyone at all. His conversation with Harrow shows that he's known she passed. Marc puts her death as the catalyst of their separation breaking down, so even if he didn't actively know, he knew... But his denial was such that he kept the delusion that they were still talking anyway.
But he knew... In episode two, when Layla visits his flat, she demands to know if he's living there with someone else after noticing the ankle restraint by the bed. He says no, that it's his mum's flat (which can't really be true, either), to which she questions whether they're talking again. His response is a rather awkward, tight-lipped 'mm-hmm', which gives you the impression that even he realises something's not quite right with the communication with his mum.
It does beg the question, though, of how long the delusion has been going on. Marc says she passed two months prior, but with what we know of Wendy, I have to wonder if Steven has ever actually spoken with her at all, or if it has always been in his own head... Both scenarios are awful: either Wendy knew about Steven and loved him while still hating and abusing Marc, or any communication Steven has ever had with her has all been a fiction.
The boat finally reaches the gates of Osiris, but Marc and Steven's scales never balanced. Despite the fact that she knows what they are trying to do (you know, go and save the world and shit), Taweret says that their souls must now be claimed by the other unbalanced souls of the Duat (which is a bit rude, I think, as those souls only do the bidding of the gods in the first place, but as I said, this isn't really her day job, so maybe she just doesn't know...).
Several of the souls climb the sides and try to drag Marc overboard with them, but Steven, coming to terms with the fact that he's a fracture of Marc's life (and not the other way 'round) manages to save him. Thrice.
The second time ends up having Steven fall into the sands of the Duat. Marc calls out to him, demands that Taweret stop the boat and turn around, but there is nothing that can be done. Steven is able to stand for a moment, but in the end, the Duat claims him. As it does so, the scales finally balance, and Marc finds himself standing in the Field of Reeds.
(Image copyright Marvel Studios/Disney)
I thought... I thought that the little heartbreaks from the previous episodes were bad enough, you know? It hurt me to see Steven realise he'd lost two and a half days and missed out on his date. I felt so bad for him when he lost his job. I wanted to hug Marc and tell him everything was okay when playing host to Khonshu wrecked havoc on his mind during the meeting with the Ennead. This, though?
It keeps being said that Phase 4 is nothing but pain, and this is a prime example of that. It is beautiful, amazingly written, superbly acted, emotionally provocative pain that that pierces your very heart and leaves it scarred. I hate this episode so much, but I do believe it is my favourite so far.