The Disney Plus series Moon Knight has never really had much in common with the rest of the catalog of Marvel television shows. It didn't tie into the fight against Thanos and the aftermath of that fight. It's entirely possible that Moon Knight doesn't really exist in the MCU. Obviously, the show larger franchise, but the Disney Plus series could exist entirely outside of everything that happened in every movie and show that came before it. It's rather hard to tell exactly where the show lands because there simply isn't a mention of where it might be. Moon Knight isn't an Avenger or anything close to it at this part of his life. That despite the fact that he appears to have had quite the life and career when. the show kicks off.
While the lack of tie-ins to other Marvel shows makes Moon Knight stand out, there's also the fact that there are times when the program simply does not act or look like a superhero show. That was certainly the case with the series' penultimate episode. Most superhero shows would have spent the entire time having the hero gear up for a massive battle against the big bad. Perhaps there would have been a training montage. Perhaps there would have been a couple of scenes where the badly injured hero would be healing up and getting everything ready for the big trial at the end. Instead, this show decided to solve another problem first and did it without more than a minute of actual action.
Instead of the hero getting ready for a big fight, this episode of Moon Knight was all about Marc and Steven working through the events that caused them to exist alongside one another. In order to do that the show puts the characters back in the same psychiatric hospital that they ended up in last week. However, it turns out that it's more than just a mental hospital. It turns out they also think they are on board the ship of Taweret. Taweret was the Egyptian goddess of women and children and it turns out that at least part of the episode is about Marc and Steven attempting to balance the scales so they can travel through the Egyptian underworld of Duat.
As they travel through the sands of time, they are having to try and work to balance the scales. Should they not balance, they'll be pulled into a kind of hell where they'll be imprisoned for all time. It shouldn't surprise that the show continues to explore Egyptian mythology considering the Moon Knight character is based on one that was led around by an Egyptian god. It's also an interesting look at at least one version of what it might have felt like to deal with the afterlife in that era. Of course, it's not clear whether this is really about Marc and Steven trying to balance the scales or whether this is all a sort of fever dream as Marc tries to sort out his personalities.
That is how Marc and Steven tried to get the scales to balance. They have to journey through the life of Marc Spector before he became the Moon Knight. The show has already sort of reformulated the history of Moon Knight by doing things like making Steven more of a goofy brit. Now the show is going all the way back and making a whole new history for Marc Spector that shows he's had multiple personalties since he was a small child. It turns out that the idea of Steven Grant was a coping mechanism though it was quite a different coping mechanism than other shows that have dealt with this kind of thing have decided to use.
The coping and sorting out of just who is real and why there are multiple personalities also involves what has been the show's big vilian in the form of Arthur Harrow. However, this version of the character is that of a psychiatrist who is trying to get Marc to understand why he has created the persona of Steven and to try and work through things. The series is clearly trying to blur the lines of what is actually real and what isn't and it does a fairly good job explaining why each different situation could be real. It appears the audience is going to need to wait until next week to really get a definitive statement on that.
If this wasn't the penultimate episode of a Moon Knight series that is only ever going to be six episodes long, it could be lauded as quite the bit of character building. That it took an episode and a half to get to this place, in a show that did remind its audience that there is real danger in the real world, it seems to be a time killer that didn't need to take nearly that long. Or perhaps it could have been done earlier in the season and allowed the rest of the series to focus more on the battle between good and evil.
Of course, Moon Knight has made it very clear that it wants to be a different kind of superhero show. It wants to take a deep dive into the world of Marc Spector and show why he became the way he did. The problem here is that the viewers don't really know Marc Spector all that well, they're mainly just told that he's a bad guy. That's the problem with doing something like this in a six-episode show.
If this were in the middle of a 15-episode first season, it could have been excellent and really engaging. Because it was meant to tell the audience about characters that they really just met and won't ever get to know, it just feels sort of hollow. Certainly, the acting chops of Oscar Isaac help the episode have some emotional punch. He does a very good job of bringing both characters to life. The tactic and the episode itself just doesn't pay off in the end.