Spoilers

Marc, Steven and Layla are on the trail of Arthur Harrow…

The thing about the middle east, about countries like Egypt and Tunisia and Jordan, is that they’re not yellow. They have rivers and trees and mountains and neon cities and people wearing bright colours. They have life and are vibrant.

Moon Knight gets this. There’s no horrid digital filter laying down a sandy yellow over the camera, no sense that everyone dresses like they’re in a traditional madrasah and perhaps most importantly – people like Steven Grant stick out a mile.

Moon Knight has young people, rich people, old people and just about everyone in between and they feel like they might actually live in the places represented. It’s not stereotypes out of central casting and for that I’m very, very grateful.

Moon Knight is also channelling the spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark in increasing quantity, even down to shot selection. That is no bad thing because it’s also doing something Raiders didn’t – centring the people who live there.

May Calamawy’s Layla even comments at one point ‘right place, right time, wrong person’ – pointing out that Marc isn’t Arabic and despite speaking Arabic is quite clearly a foreigner.

So we have Saturday morning movie adventure but without the sense of exploitation. It’s Egyptian powers fighting among themselves. Their pawns are global, but their focus is on their own affairs and that’s fantastic.

I think what works about this show is that it’s finding an almost perfect balance between being small scale and epic. What I mean by that is the show is concerned with the travails of Marc Spector and Steven Grant, two men who might be equally real occupying the same body. Neither of them are clear if the other one is the original, neither are completely sure if the other isn’t actually just a symptom of a deeper illness, but both are completely certain they are who they think they are.

If I had to bet at all, it feels to me like Steven is more invested in being alive, in being real while Marc is making promises about leaving and never coming back. The interplay here is fantastic and Oscar Isaac does a great job of delivering the differences between the two of them with posture, expression and language.

Additionally, the show takes this core focus on an ongoing mental health crisis and writes it to the larger screen, giving us consequences that could be world changing but without ever leaving us with no emotional core to hold on to.

In this way, for me, it’s superior to Loki, WandaVision and Hawkeye – all of which felt like they veered too far one way or another. In comparison the recipe here feels honed and mastered.

Having said that, although there’s a central plot around a McGuffin and an off-screen monster, we’re also seeing Marvel’s ambitions around super powered beings who are not directly connected to anything we’ve seen before.

With the openness about Egyptian gods being real in the MCU we’re encountering something that stands on its own even if there are small tantalising hints at how they tie into the rest of the world. It feels like it’s taking place far away from the rest of the MCU but scratch the surface and there’s a line here and a line there doing some clever work in showing us how it all fits together.

My only criticisms of the episode are that there were two moments where I was shaking my head at decisions made. One in particular felt just plain daft – there is the equivalent of a court scene and not only is there no process to be followed, evidence appeared to make no difference or even be considered. The characters talk about how they need to have a cast iron case then just abandon any attempt to present it. Baffling.

The second is a decision to take a cosmic hammer to crack a walnut for which there are literally apps out there doing the same thing. I’m not going to die on a hill over this nor describe it because of spoilers but you’ll know what I mean when you see it.

In both cases it felt a little like clumsy plot progression but I’m not really here for the plot – I’m here because Oscar Isaac shines as Steven Grant and the show is taking his character seriously.

There remain mysteries I’m dying to understand and bits of the story I really want to see bear fruit but first and foremost this is about a character I love watching.

Rating? 8 ancient relics out of 10

Stewart Hotston