Moon Knight Episode 5 Review: The MCU isn’t built for this

It might be a generalization to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is designed for children, but it’s absolutely not designed to exclude them. Despite the MCU’s slight geopolitics and frequent friendly gestures towards the military-industrial complex, at the end of the day the franchise is carefully designed to remain firmly family-friendly, with mostly bloodless violence and nothing too scary or intense. For the most part, that’s fine. The MCU could arguably be better without his fixation on comic book heroes as paramilitary agents and every step away from it (like Shang Chi) is estimated. However, sometimes the focus on storytelling in four quadrants clashes with the claim of the story in a specific MCU installment – like this week moon knight illustrated.

Asylum is among the darkest and most intimate devastating stories Marvel Studios has ever told. It’s an episode about a man’s broken mind, who is finally shattered as he relives the most traumatic moments of his life. It’s full, awful stuff, delivered with a light touch that could be to bright. The horror is frequently undercut with moments of humor and a reluctance to center that horror on screen.

That’s frustrating in an episode as crucial and internal as Asylum. “Asylum” picks up where “The Tomb” left off and sees Marc Spector and Steven Grant (both played by Oscar Isaac) seemingly trapped in a psychiatric ward run by “Dr. Harrow” (Ethan Hawke), who tries to convince Marc that the events of moon knight so far they are a fiction dreamed up by Marc’s brain as a coping mechanism. Taweret (voiced by Anotonia Salib), a hippopotamus-like fertility goddess, offers Marc and Steven another option: They are dead and currently being judged in the desert afterlife known as Duat.

Image: Marvel Studios

According to Taweret, Steven and Marc’s hearts must be weighed on the Scales of Judgment to decide whether they will remain trapped in the Duat’s sands or venture into a reed-filled paradise. The balance of scales is in flux, however, as Harrow attempted to use his own powers to weigh the two men’s guilt. Steven and Marc need to work together and – to quote David Lynch – fix their hearts or die.

With that in mind, “Asylum” takes shape, in which Marc and Steven wander the halls of the asylum, contemplating their past together. Each door along the white corridors hides a memory, and upon visiting these rooms, moon knightThe writers of fill in just about every gap in the series’ backstory so far. Viewers are shown how Marc accepted responsibility for his brother’s childhood death, how that death led to his mother becoming abusive and resorting to alcoholism, and how Marc invented the Steven Grant persona by matching it to his favorite films imitated to help him withstand this abuse. As Marc gets older, the wall between him and Steven gets higher, and Marc endures all the pain. Eventually, he is discharged from military service and begins a career as a mercenary, while Steven must live in desolate ignorance.

It all builds on Moon Knight’s origin when Spector’s crew is hired to raid an archaeological dig. His commander has other ideas and starts slaughtering everyone – including Layla’s father. Mortally wounded from trying to defend the archaeologists, Spector crawls to a statue of Khonshu deep in the site and hears the moon god plead for his allegiance in exchange for a new life.

Image: Marvel Studios

Tonally, “Asylum” fluctuates wildly between the adventure story feeling of “The Tomb” (Marc and Steven fight against sand zombies) and dark psychological horror. (The zombies are all the people Marc killed in his mercenary life.) moon knight feels caught between two masters: the challenging, morally gray tale about a man struggling with a mental illness and his own capacity for horror, and the Marvel Studios-branded action film for the whole family to see.

Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive — something that’s kind of lost on modern shows’ ’80s homage stranger things so like classics of the 80s ET delivered stories in which the real fun is paired with real terror, danger and inner turmoil, all of which were difficult for children (both on screen and in audience) to process. However, under the Marvel formula, every edge is ground down. Did you know that Marc Spector is Jewish? His family sits Shiva twice in this episode and he tears off a yarmulke in agony, but none of this affects his character or perspective. Critics might be making headlines for Moon Knight as Marvel Studios’ “first Jewish hero,” but what does that mean? Not much in this context. As with the sex scene in eternal, the sense of commitment to something meaningful is missing. Where is the story potential in a supposedly passionate relationship when it’s reduced to a static shot of two deadpan people lying together, vulnerable and almost sluggish?

This lack of engagement with a story’s biggest emotions remains perplexing, especially in light of this moon knight is only minimally connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far. (In the most blatant MCU reference in the episode, Taweret indirectly says that the Duat is just “an” afterlife, noting that the ancestral plane, as seen in Black Pantheris beautiful.) Under the current MCU structure, moon knightDiluting the greatest accomplishments of to aim to broaden the horizons of the broader Marvel Studios project a bit. The representation efforts and interest in darker, more complex matters may be commendable. But the series should focus more on serving the main purpose of storytelling: to make us feel something.