Oscar Isaac Continues Hard Carrying ‘Moon Knight’ In Episode 2

Episode 2 of Moon Knight is live now on Disney Plus, another series that’s only running for six episodes this season with an unclear path forward for its future after that.

The show has been generally well-received, albeit perhaps slightly less so than a couple of the other Marvel Disney offerings, but scores have normalized to the point where it’s practically indistinguishable. What’s different about Moon Knight, however, is that this the first series with absolutely no existing ties to the MCU at all, no carryover characters, leaving the burden on Oscar Isaac to build a new and memorable hero from scratch.

And so far across these two episodes, Isaac seems more than up to the task.

I cannot overstate how impressed I’ve been with Isaac in these first two episodes here, playing both Steven and Marc. His accent was mocked in early trailers, but I absolutely love his portrayal of Steven in particular, and would argue that he’s on another level past the rest of the source material featured in the series.

Spoilers follow for this week.

Things are getting expressly weird in this corner of the MCU, as we are now in a place where literal Egyptian gods have become MCU canon, as is the basis for the Moon Knight character in the comics. I mean, we technically have Norse gods, or at least the inspiration for them, with Thor and Asgard, but this is different. Literal gods. I think, anyway.

And there do not seem to really be any heroes among them. This episode, we learned that Marc, and by proxy Steven, is the avatar of Khonshu, the Egyptian god of the moon, meant to exact his “justice” through a magical suit. That sounds all well and good, except Marc/Steven are more or less his slave, and he keeps serving Khonshu so that the entity will not take his wife as the next avatar after him. Not great.

But even more not great is the other side, where for a brief moment, we see that maybe Ethan Hawke’s co-op cult isn’t so bad, until Steven figures out that the Egyptian god they serve, Ammit, wants to purge the word of evil. But that’s her definition of evil, including actions people may not have even committed yet, which could encompass innocents or even children.

Marc/Steven seem stuck between a rock and a hard place, but the main priority seems to be stopping the resurrection of Ammit and the mass killing of a huge number of people, and then figuring out a way to get out from under Khonshu’s thumb somehow later. As of this episode, we now have two Moon Knight variants, Marc’s version in the traditional wraps and Steven’s more tailored version in a literal suit, which he summons because he doesn’t fully understand the concept. But it gives him powers all the same.

As for the larger picture, I detected no further MCU references this week, nor any more indications about a path toward Doctor Doom after last week’s dip into what looked like Latveria. Four more episodes to go, and we’ll see where we are next week.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.