‘Moon Knight’ Season Finale Recap: The Battle of Cairo

Spiffy new superhero costumes! Kaiju battles between ancient gods with the Pyramids as a backdrop! Cold-blooded murder in the back of a limousine!

Wait…what?

Fittingly enough given its title character’s split personality, the final episode of Moon Knight (“Gods and Monsters”) is a bunch of very different things all at once. One one hand, it’s a big goofy superhero romp. After Marc Spector rescues and reunites with his alternate personality Steven Grant, the pair are spirited out of the afterlife and back to the land of the living by the hippo goddess Tawaret. With the help of Marc’s wife Layla, who shatters the statue keeping the moon-bird-god Khonshu a prisoner, they resume their powers as Moon Knight—though when Steven’s in control, he switches from vigilante robes and capes to the nattily attired “Mr. Knight” persona. Moon Knight soars through the air to take the fight directly to Arthur Harrow, the fanatic who has unleashed the crocodile goddess Ammit on the world to cleanse it of its sinners. Battle ensues.

Meanwhile, to help out, Layla accepts Tawaret’s offer to become her avatar, and voila—she winds up in a cool ancient Egyptian–themed costume with extendable, bulletproof wings. (Wikipedia tells me she is now the Scarlet Scarab, although that character has a totally different secret identity—and gender—in the original Marvel comics.) She confronts Harrow’s followers; battle ensues.

Then there are Khonshu and Ammit themselves, who grow to giant size and confront each other at the Pyramids like King Kong and Godzilla. You guessed it: Battle ensues.

Unfortunately for Marc/Steven, they are outmatched by Harrow’s powers—until they black out, like they used to earlier in the series. When they come to, Harrow and all his goons have been completely beaten down, and they have no idea how they pulled it off. 

Regardless, Marc seizes the opportunity. He and Layla recite a magic spell that seals Ammit in Harrow’s body, making her vulnerable—but Marc/Moon Knight refuses to execute him, as Khonshu wishes. Instead, Khonshu frees Marc/Steven from his service; the pair awake first in the imaginary mental hospital run by an alternate version of Harrow, then back in Steven’s book-strewn loft, where they find themselves chained to the bed to prevent sleepwalking as per usual. Cut to the credits.

Ah, but that’s not all! In a stinger, we find Harrow in a mental hospital—a real one, this time, and he’s there as a patient rather than a shrink. A mystery man wheels him away past a series of knocked-out orderlies and into a waiting white limousine. Inside the limo, Harrow sees that his fellow passenger is Khonshu, who’d known all along that Marc/Steven’s mind was even more fractured than he knew. Sure enough, the driver of the limo is a new personality named Jake Lockley, and this persona has no problem executing Harrow by shooting him at point-blank range. The End, for real this time.

Which kind of blew my mind, to be honest. That’s how you end a Marvel series on Disney+? With a ruthless, no-nonsense execution? That’s wild! It gives serious Punisher vibes, at the end of an episode that featured a giant crocodile woman fist-fighting a massive skeletal bird-man on the outskirts of Cairo. It’s a radical departure from pretty much everything else in the episode.

And I honestly appreciated the tone of the scene, which made no bones about the fact that this new facet of the Marc/Steven/Moon Knight/Mr. Knight poly-persona is a killer, and that this is probably not a great thing. It’s a far cry from, say, the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which seems to give the murderous ex-new-Captain America a chance at a whole new superhero career despite the fact that he beat a guy to death on camera earlier in the series. 

And it’s an emotionally intriguing note to end on, that’s for sure—a new Marvel Cinematic Universe hero, doing something pointedly anti-heroic, or even just straight-up bad. If we do wind up getting more Moon Knight adventures, Oscar Isaac’s lightly comic performance as all of the Moon Knight collective’s individual components will be the main selling point, no question; they’re what made this show so easy and fun to watch. But after that ending, I’ll be curious to see just how grim’n’gritty the character is allowed to get. I’d imagine that white costume dirties up pretty good.
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.