‘Moon Knight’ Series’ Grand Storytelling Required More Than Six Episodes

The Disney+ limited series starring Oscar Isaac, May Calamawy and Ethan Hawke concluded Wednesday.

Oscar Isaac as Moon Knight in Marvel Studios’ MOON KNIGHT, exclusively on Disney+. Courtesy of Marvel Studios

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for the finale of Moon Knight.] 

So, that was weird, huh?

My reaction to the Wednesday conclusion of Marvel Studios’ Moon Knight is a sentiment likely shared by many of those who have followed the Disney+ series for the past six weeks. The series, currently billed as limited, and without any contractual obligation for future appearances by Oscar Isaac, ends on a cliffhanger, and a partial resolution in a mid-credits scene.

While it would be a surprise if Isaac, who also served as an executive producer on the series, didn’t return to the role in the future, the lacking sense of narrative completion feels like a puzzling choice regardless of where your rating of the series falls.

While every Marvel Cinematic Universe project, from film to streaming, has narrative threads and mysteries that carry over to the next project, Moon Knight feels the most unfinished in terms of completing the story set-up, resulting in an oddly rushed finale. There’s no denying the ambition and talent at play in Moon Knight, but the end result left me wanting more and questioning whether the six-episode format best served its characters.

There was plenty to love about the six-episode series, created by Jeremy Slater and directed by Mohamed Diab and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead, namely, Isaac’s dual performance as Marc Spector and Steven Grant. But as the first Marvel Studios series to debut without a film establishing any of the characters beforehand, Moon Knight felt decidedly too short to explore all the new characters and mythology it set up.

I noted after the premiere episode that the series looked to reinvent the mythology of the comic book character in a way similar to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and Eternals (2021) had. It was always clear that Moon Knight wasn’t going to be a Daredevil or Batman copycat, and that was a good thing.

So, the issue with Moon Knight isn’t the fact that it strays from the comics, or even that it seeks to be more of a character study than a superhero show. The issue is that Moon Knight starts in the middle of a story, with Steven serving as a surrogate for the audiences’ puzzlement, but it never fully gives us a time frame in which to ground us. How long has Marc been Moon Knight? No idea. What were he and Layla (May Calamawy) up to before Steven re-manifested? No idea. When does this take place in the MCU? No idea. For all the reasons there are to relish a project that feels largely unconnected to the larger MCU, Moon Knight feels unmoored, a museum of exposition evidence that rarely answers the looming questions and never feels fixed to a moment in time.

As a psychological examination, Moon Knight does wonders. Isaac sells every moment of Marc and Steven’s trauma, and there are truly some emotionally shattering moments audiences are left to work through, particularly during the fifth episode. But it does often feel as though the series is more interested in exploring how to visualize dissociative identity disorder than it is in exploring the characters. By the sixth episode, I felt I still didn’t know who Marc Spector was. I knew some of what he’d done, the fact that he was blamed for his mother’s death and became a mercenary, but he always felt like an action figure. And when the series undergoes psychological sessions with Marc/Steven, the other supporting characters fall out of the picture for too long, as do questions the series posited.

The existence of a third alter, Jake Lockley, is teased in the series’ earliest episodes, but doesn’t come into play until the mid-credits scene. Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) was the previous Moon Knight before Spector, but reached his breaking point with the violence required of him. What that breaking point was, how he escaped his contract with the moon god Khonshou (F. Murray Abraham), and how as a follower of the goddess Ammit (Sofia Danu and Saba Mubarak) he was able to summon jackals is never made clear.

Layla El-Faouly (Calamway), a beautifully played and necessary reinvention of the comics Marlene Alraune, becomes the avatar of the goddess Taweret (Antonia Salib), but also the superhero Scarlet Scarab, raising the question of how the Hippo-depicted god of motherhood and childbirth manifests as a beetle themed hero with wings and offensive capabilities. And Marc, who was raised Jewish, is never confronted with his faith while also accepting the knowledge that Egyptian deities are real. I raise these points not to create a list of grievances with the show, but to point out how all of these fascinating elements, each of which could be their own series, are underserved by the six episodes allotted.

The central influence on the series was Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood’s 2016 comic book series, which also saw Spector facing his dissociative identity disorder and the possibility that Moon Knight may be a delusion conjured up in a mental hospital. But Lemire and Smallwood’s series had 40 years of Moon Knight comics to serve as a prelude before offering a deconstruction of the character and his various alters.

Marvel Studios’ Moon Knight feels like a deconstruction before introduction for a character who has never appeared onscreen before. The series gives us some of the most impressive visuals, direction, and performances in the MCU, but Moon Knight is begging for a format shift in the form of either a minimum of 10 episodes or a multi-session plan from the onset. As it stands, Moon Knight is a great three seasons’ worth of exploration crammed into six solid episodes that fill me with both excitement and trepidation for the character’s future.