What a fitting end to a disappointing series. In fact, it was such a disappointing ending that I genuinely didn’t realize it was the end of the episode until the credits began rolling – that’s how anticlimactic and messy the episode was. We were robbed of the true showdown between Moon Knight and Harrow/Ammit that we longed for thanks to another black out jump (solely as a means to hide Marc/Steven’s third identity that everyone had already figured out was responsible for the more vicious carnage of the series until the mid-credit scene), we were granted the chance to watch Layla as an avatar (albeit for Taweret, with powers that seemed pretty amorphous in the grand scheme of things) without much lead-in to explain why she opted to allow a goddess she hasn’t really interacted with to take her over, and we were given an ending that didn’t so much wrap things up as reconciled a single aspect of the series’ plot while leaving the other plot threads blowing in the wind.
My major complaint with this and the other less successful MCU series has been the sheer amount of plot and character development the various showrunners attempt to shoehorn into the incredibly short run times of the series. Look at WandaVision: the series was given enough time not only to present us with Wanda’s mental and emotional anguish, but it also was able to lay the groundwork for a massive blockbuster that drops this Friday. Then there’s Loki: the series knew precisely what story it was telling (introducing the concept of the multi-verse, growing Loki as a more complex character, introducing Kang) and did it effectively.* Falcon and the Winter Soldier had far too many mouths to feed to be able to present a coherent narrative arc that was satisfying for everyone involved. Hawkeye was a bit tighter, in that the scenes focused on Kate and Clint (and Yelena) worked great, but it started floundering when it tried to pull in more characters into the short run time. And here, with Moon Knight, the series was tasked with setting up the Marc/Steven/Jake character, building him into someone we understood and cared about, introducing Layla’s impact on the story, Harrow’s villainous plan, and the role of the Egyptian gods in the lives of man all in a mere six episodes. It was never going to really work.
*I suspect it’s not a coincidence that the two Disney+ series that worked the best were the ones directly setting up films that were already in production/in the process of being written while the series were airing. When you know what you need to address to prep fans for a future project, it allows you to excise the superfluous information much more easily than when you don’t really know the ultimate end goal for a character/set of characters. Yes, you know who you need to introduce, but without that clear roadmap into the next installment in that character’s journey, there’s more room to flail around and mess things up.
And, in the end, it didn’t. Were there some really cool visual moments? Absolutely. Did Oscar Isaac, May Calamawy, and Ethan Hawke give it their all? Definitely. But there was far too much story to fit in the time allotted. Sometimes, the whys aren’t as important as understanding the impact a moment or sequence has on a character – especially when the character is our entry point into the story being told and the reason we want to keep watching – but in this finale, there were so many unanswered questions that I found myself more annoyed with the way things ended than enthused to find out what might be next in Moon Knight’s future.
And that is another question that remains unanswered: Just what, if anything, is Moon Knight’s future? We were, as I predicted a few weeks back, introduced to Jake in the mid-credit scene. We know that he’s now the only aspect of Marc/Steven/Jake’s personality that is actively aligned with Khonshu – and, presumably, Marc/Steven still aren’t aware of just who Jake is – so that means any future installments that include Moon Knight will also need to address the fact that only one personality is working with the Egyptian god. Where would this character fit into the world of the MCU moving forward? It’s pretty well documented that the Greek gods will be appearing briefly to be destroyed in the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder film. We still have a couple Norse gods rolling around in various forms. And while the Egyptian avatars were pretty well wiped out throughout the series, they could presumably respawn into new human avatars if given the chance. Will Moon Knight fit in better in the more supernatural wing of the MCU (with someone like Blade), where he can be violent without the confines of the more mainstream PG-13 rating restraints? Or with someone like Thor, where the comedy aspect of the character might be able to thrive? Or will this turn out to simply be an interesting experiment that ends up going nowhere?
When you sign someone like Isaac onto a role in the MCU, and then hint at an even darker side to the character that hasn’t fully been explored yet right when the MCU is starting to pivot into more niche, violent territory from its initial origins, you don’t envision the outing to be a one and done. But there just doesn’t seem to be a great place to slot in a character this complex, and underdeveloped, without taking additional time to build him up into someone we can grasp easily within the MCU. There’s still so much unfinished business between Layla and Marc (not to mention we never got a chance to unpack just how her brief(?) foray into being an avatar impacted her life – something I would have genuinely enjoyed seeing, particularly if it gave her a better understanding of Marc’s own struggles with Khonshu), which isn’t a shock as MCU properties have been notoriously bad at dealing effectively with any sort of relationship issues for their heroes, that we could easily have another six episode season just about that.
Ultimately, while the idea of bringing Moon Knight into the MCU was an interesting one, it wasn’t a well-executed one from a narrative perspective. For a character this complex, the season would have been better spent fully immersing ourselves in Marc/Steven/Jake’s world – their lives, their abilities, their relationships, their mental illness – rather than sending us off on a confused chase throughout Egypt trying to stop a pretty run of the mill villain from enacting a Thanos-like plan. There was a way to make this series work. Unfortunately, what we got instead was a mishmash of truncated character development, under-boiled plot, and a villain without a real world view. Which is a shame, because when it worked, it was cool as hell.
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