Steven Grant starts to learn the truth…

Spoilers

Moon Knight has terrific pacing. This second entry out of six gives us a huge amount of motion without losing the sense of character established in episode 1.

What I found most endearing was that under the cover of a somewhat light hearted veneer we have a man very plainly struggling with his identity. This isn’t played for mockery or dismissive laughs. What we have is a sense of the absurdity of discovering that you cannot trust yourself, that things you thought were true are revealed, almost at each step, to be something else entirely.

Oscar Isaac plays Steven Grant entirely straight. There’s no tongue in cheek here. No sense that Isaac is laughing along with us at how silly Steven (with a v) is.

I realised on my second watch that I’d felt a slight displacement on my first time through precisely because as a viewer I know something that Steven doesn’t – that this is a Marvel show and the things he’s wrestling with are real.

I’d seen Steven as an impediment to the story because I was waiting for the hero to arrive and kick ass. This is all me and not the show. What the show actually does is hold Steven close, make him plausible. There are numerous scenes in which Steven is shown to be someone struggling to hold himself together. He doesn’t see Marc as part of himself but as an alien thing waiting to ruin his life (and seeing that he already has done so). I love this treatment of both Steven and Marc as characters.

Marc is there demanding to be given control and Steven, whose life is already turned upside down, isn’t going to let himself be shoved aside. What’s most important is that Steven resists not because he thinks he can do better or because he refuses to see the danger around him but because he sees himself as a real person whose very identity is threatened by the concept of Marc. As far as Steven is concerned, Marc represents an existential threat to his continued well being – so Marc’s many arguments about helping tackle the problems Steven faces are always going to miss the mark.

If Steven, for one minute, lets Marc in there’s a risk he’ll lose more days, hurt more people and maybe never emerge as himself again. There’s a specific scene where Steven says the best thing that can happen is for him to be locked up – it feels faintly ridiculous, melodramatic except that if you read it as a man wrestling with his mental health and feeling he’s losing control.

Steven can see the ghost of paranoid delusional psychosis hovering at his shoulder, has seen the people he has hurt and killed, and is determined not to let it happen again. In this light his determination suddenly makes a lot more sense.

I’m sure you got that way before me, but it was a turning point in how I saw the story and I really like it.

Moon Knight continues to deliver on all the things I already liked – the non-US centric story, the lack of connection to other parts of the MCU, the dignity with which Steven is written. Now I have something more to like – that this story, told through Steven’s eyes, sees him fighting not some ancient Egyptian evil, but rather himself with the stakes being his soul.

Rating? 9 broken mirrors out of 10.

Stewart Hotston