Moon Knight Review: The Best Marvel TV Show On Disney+?

It’s not a secret that Moon Knight has been one of the most anticipated Marvel TV shows since Disney+ first started airing Marvel shows in 2021. And the thing about all of the different Marvel series we have seen on Disney+ is that they were all based on characters that we have already seen in the MCU.

Of course, there’s also the fact that Moon Knight takes on a more supernatural theme because of its focus on the Egyptian gods instead of the cosmic forces and entities that govern the universe. And this is where Steven’s relationship with the Egyptian god of the moon, Khonshu comes in.

Moon Knight opens up with Steven Grant waking up from his sleep with his ankles strapped on his bed. You could also see it in his eyes that he isn’t exactly well-rested.

Working in a gift shop in a museum in London, Steven is fascinated and knowledgeable about Egyptian mythology but is seemingly out of place in the museum because his job doesn’t even have anything to do with his knowledge about the Egyptian gods. Still, he enjoys what is seemingly a quiet, peaceful, and simple life of an awkward yet very meek gift shop attendant. And we must say that we dig Oscar Isaac’s English accent.

Nevertheless, there were already hints that Steven’s life wasn’t as simple as it turned out to be. As mentioned, he wakes up with his ankles strapped on his bed. And there were instances of events happening without him recalling that they happened (his co-worker confirming their date, for example).

But the one that really takes the cake is when he finds himself in a Hungarian town and getting peppered by bullets while hearing a voice inside his head telling him what to do. While in the town, he finds himself in the company of a cult headed by Ethan Hawke’s Arthur Harrow, who introduced himself to the crowd as some sort of a representative of the Egyptian goddess, Ammit.

When Harrow recognized Steven in the crowd, he referred to him as the mercenary named Marc, who he said had something of value in his possession. This was a golden scarab that Harrow obviously valued but struggled to take from Steven, whose body wasn’t cooperating with him when he was willing to hand over the relic. And throughout the entire time, the voice inside of Steven’s head was telling him what and what not to do while also telling him to give his body to Marc.

A wild chase between Harrow’s men and Steven follows, and there are points when Steven basically blacked out only to find that he had beaten up some of the henchmen. The wild chase continues until Steven finally blacks out and finds himself waking up in his bed back in London

From there, Steven realized that things around him were happening without him knowing why or how. Time seems to be moving without him noticing it. Of course, there’s the vision of a bird-headed entity whose voice keeps on telling him what to do.

This allows us to see the show’s premise, which is Steven suffering from dissociative identity disorder (DID), a mental condition that allows someone to assume different identities and personalities that are all distinct from one another. In this case, we are talking about Steven and Marc sharing one and the same body.

Back in the museum, Steven runs into trouble again when Harrow finds him there and assumes that he was just hiding under a different identity. Once again, Harrow asks Steven for the scarab but ends up having to use force when he summoned a jackal. The jackal chased Steven around the museum until he was forced to hide in the restroom.

In the restroom, he sees Marc in the mirror, pleading with him to allow him to take over the body so that they could both survive. Steven finally gave in, and that’s when Marc assumed the identity of the Moon Knight, suit and all.

From what we can see in the pilot episode of the series, there’s a lot of promise here because we are talking about something that’s entirely different from what we know in the MCU. While deities aren’t new in the MCU, the Asgardians were considered cosmic beings instead of actual gods. Then again, Moon Knight allows us to see the concept of actual gods, a side of the MCU we haven’t seen before.

Of course, the fact that Steven/Marc and Harrow are characters that are entirely new to the MCU makes us see that Marvel is taking a huge yet very risky gamble by introducing characters that fans haven’t invested in yet.

Nevertheless, the gamble pays off because we get to connect with the meek Steven’s personality thanks to Isaac’s masterful portrayal of the character. Of course, while we haven’t seen a lot of Marc in the first episode, we also got to see how well Isaac was able to play two personalities and identities in one movie while allowing us to see how different they are from one another.

Then there’s Harrow, whose motives are yet to be mapped out but is also quite the promising villain as well because he doesn’t seem to be someone who’s in it for the sake of evil or greed but is intriguing enough for us to want to get to know more of.

Overall, the initial introduction to Moon Knight makes the series more and more interesting because it leaves us asking about Steven’s/Marc’s overall mental state and how his relationship with Khonshu plays a role in all of it. Then there’s the fact that the other Egyptian gods, particularly Ammit, are also involved in this narrative.

It is interesting to see how well Marvel juggles with the entire DID narrative regarding Steven and Marc and how this dynamic will affect the way the story proceeds. But the one thing we can say is that Moon Knight’s pilot episode left an impression that doesn’t necessarily answer the different questions that people had about the series before its release but still manages to reel people in to stay tuned on what’s going to happen next.

It might be difficult for us to say that this series is the best that Marvel has ever had on Disney+, but it sure does open the possibility of it being better than all of the others.

SCORE: 9/10

Moon Knight episode 1 is now out on Disney+!