‘Moon Knight’ Episode 1 Recap: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

Marvel on television is a tale of two streaming services. First, there was Netflix, home to a suite of gritty, street-level vigilantes who brutally battled their way through a series of cramped hallways and even, occasionally, had sex. Your mileage may vary on which of these shows were good and which were bad—in the interest of full disclosure, I enjoyed Daredevil and The Punisher, disliked Jessica Jones, thought Luke Cage was mid, and skipped Iron Fist and The Defenders altogether. But taken as a whole, they had a distinct identity from the mainline Marvel product, both on the big screen and compared to the relatively wholesome vibe of ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which tied into the Marvel movie machine much more directly than the Netflix shows did.

Then along came Disney+, and with it a new approach to putting Marvel heroes on the small screen. For starters, they literally took Marvel heroes—the ones from the movies—and put them on the small screen! The Falcon, the Winter Soldier, the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Loki, Hawkeye: Suddenly your favorite characters (well, maybe not your favorite characters, but you get the drift) from the mighty Marvel Cinematic Universe were appearing in limited series you could watch week to week in the comfort of your own home. 

Now you can find those hallway-fight-filled Marvel/Netflix shows directly on Disney+, which has absorbed them from the big red streaming behemoth that is now their direct competition. And as of today, to the sum total of Marvel on TV, you can now add Moon Knight, which is an interesting development in this stage of the MCU.

(NB: Moon Knight was originally created by writer Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin. These characters do not spring directly out of a vat in the bowels of Walt Disney World!)

And like the title character—who, whether through ancient magic or modern disassociative identity disorder (or both), is two people at once—Moon Knight has two identities in one. It’s the latest in the full-fledged Marvel/Disney TV-show fold, but its troubled protagonist and penchant for vigilante violence put it closer to the Marvel/Netflix lineage than any of the Disney+ superhero shows that came before it.

The question is, does this superheroic hybrid work? The answer, based on this premiere episode (“The Goldfish Problem”), is a qualified yes.

Much of the show’s success in this early outing is owed to the lead performance of Oscar Isaac. In this episode, he stars primarily as Steven Grant, a nebbishy museum gift-shop clerk with a goofy English accent who fancies himself an Egyptologist, at least insofar as telling little kids facts about the Egyptian gods is more fun than doing inventory checks. He has a one-finned goldfish, he makes dates with women that he subsequently forgets he’s made, and—here’s where things get important—he literally ties himself to his bed every night in order to avoid the sleepwalking that plagues him. 

Things get dicey for Steven when he wakes up in the middle of a village in the Alps and is immediately shot at by goons who want the ancient Egyptian scarab made of gold that he finds he’s been carrying around. He flees directly into what is essentially a cult meeting led by a man named Harrow (Ethan Hawke), who is able to magically pass lethal verdicts on the past, present, and future conduct of his followers via a magical tattoo of the scales of judgment, powered by the Egyptian goddess Ammit. Steven tries to give Harrow the scarab, but finds his body won’t allow him to. And when things get really hair for him, he blacks out, only to wake up surrounded by the beaten and/or dead bodies of the men who are chasing him to retrieve the scarab.

Steven loses two or three days to this outing before waking back up in his bedroom, believing it all to be a dream. But then Harrow and his minions show up at the museum, explaining their whole deal—Harrow believes that if Ammit had been freed from the prison the other gods condemned her to, she could have stopped Hitler, Nero, Pol Pot, and the Armenian Genocide—before letting him go on account of the “chaos” within him.

Chaos truly breaks out when a dog-like monster materializes in the museum after hours, hunting Steven down. It’s then that a man named Marc—an alternate personality dwelling within Steven who talks to him through mirrors, much like the booming disembodied voice that sometimes gives him commands throughout the day—asks Steven to surrender control to him in order to save his, or their, life. Steven relents, the dog monster is defeated, and voilà: Moon Knight debuts.

Written by series creator Jeremy Slater and directed by Mohamed Diab, “The Goldfish Problem” is a fun little diversion. Again, its success largely hinges on Oscar Isaac, who plays the Steven Grant persona as a more chipper and scatterbrained British version of his loser character in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Whether he’s missing a date, taking part in a high-speed chase, getting yelled at by his boss, receiving strange phonecalls from an unknown woman on a burner he found hidden in his wall, or waking up surrounded by people he’s beaten the crap out of, he treats everything with the same sense of mild-mannered “oh, bugger” confusion. He’s a fun secret identity to watch, and that goes along way.

So does that final reveal of Steven/Marc/whoever in full Moon Knight regalia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the character has had the staying power he’s had in the comics world because that costume design—Batman at P. Diddy’s white party, basically—is so bitchin’. Based on the glimpse we get of him in this episode, the show has made no concessions to superhero-movie kevlar-uniform “realism” in translating it to the screen. He really does look like he teleported in directly from the funnypages, and that’s good to see.

And there are little flashes of compelling material throughout the episode. The soundtrack leans heavily on charming songs by Bob Dylan, Englebert Humperdinck, and Wham! (The last one is particularly fitting given the show’s “wake me up” plot.) A little girl portentously asks if it sucked for Steven not to make it through the Field of Reeds from Egyptian mythology—a non sequitur until you reflect on the character’s roots and start to wonder if whether he simply misunderstood the question or if there’s more to this girl than meets the eye. The tied-to-the-bed-to-prevent-sleepwalking thing is reminiscent of a similar storyline in The Leftovers, a brilliant show I’m always happy to be reminded of. The bit where Steven realizes his one-finned fish has either spawned a new fin or been replaced is cute, too—like, did Moon Knight stop by the pet store to replace it or something? 

I found myself intrigued and entertained throughout the ep’s breezy three-quarter-hour runtime. And though there are no hallway fights just yet—give it time—Moon Knight definitely feels more in sync with the old Marvel/Netflix crew than it does with, say, the blockbuster-by-numbers approach of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. So far, Moon Knight is a hero I’m rooting for.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.