‘Moon Knight’: Steven Grant, Meet Marc Spector (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Moon Knight episode 2.]
How well do we ever really know ourselves?
That’s a question Steven (Oscar Isaac) must be pondering in Moon Knight’s second episode, as he gets more information about Marc’s life and work — and he doesn’t like what he sees. A run-in with Marc’s wife, Layla (May Calamawy) spins a spiral of events that leave him on the run from monsters again. And this time, he might just manage to summon a suit of his own.
(Credit: Courtesy of Marvel Studios)
In the aftermath of episode one, Steven goes to work and finds the bathroom has been trashed. Unfortunately, the security footage shows him going nuts, but not the demon-creature he was running from. This gets him fired. Poor Steven!
From there, he decides to dig a little deeper into Marc. The set of keys he found in his apartment leads him to a storage locker, in which he finds a cot, a gun, and a bunch of (presumably stolen) money. Upon seeing this, Steven understandably freaks out. In the reflective surface of the inside of the locker, Marc calms him down and explains what he is: He serves the Egyptian god Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham), and he protects the vulnerable and dispenses Khonshu’s justice to those who hurt them. And because Marc is Khonshu’s avatar, Steven is, too… whether he likes it or not.
Steven doesn’t believe a word of it. He says he’s going to take the money to the police, where they can lock him up and, hopefully, give him pills so he never sees Marc again. Of course, that’s not quite how it goes down. Steven does take the backpack with the money, but he runs into Khonshu in the corridor, and then he runs into Layla right outside. She’s on a motorcycle, and she tells him to get on; on the way to his flat, she tells him she’s his wife (rather, she’s Marc’s wife) and she, having had no clue about Steven, isn’t pleased with his accent or the fact that he doesn’t remember her at all.
(Credit: Courtesy of Marvel Studios)
Layla and Steven go back to his flat — which we learn is his mother’s, so that’s how he affords it — and she hands him a set of divorce papers. Apparently, Marc said they needed to “move on.” He doesn’t quite sign the papers, but she does end up finding the scarab, which was in Marc’s backpack. That scarab was something they’d been looking for, and apparently, they’d been on adventures to find it, which Steven remembers nothing of.
In the middle of this conversation, two officers knock on Steven’s door. They take him into a car and drive him away, but they’re not going to a police station. They go to see Arthur (Ethan Hawke). He talks to Steven as a friend, revealing that he was an avatar of Khonsu before Marc. Steven gets a tour of his weird, too-perfect community (seriously, everyone learns three languages? They watch movies about dolphins?), and then Arthur sits him down and again demands the scarab. He says it will lead to Ammit’s tomb, which will allow them to dispense her justice around the world.
Steven refuses — and actually, he doesn’t have it — but Layla shows up just in time with the scarab. She tells Steven to “summon the suit,” which makes no sense to him; meanwhile, they run from the horde of Arthur’s followers. He summons jackals to track them down, and while they barricade themselves inside a room, Layla tries to get through to him and yells at him to get Marc to come out. Steven, dejected, says he can’t… and then the monster bursts through the door and knocks him out a window. When he hits the ground, he’s still Steven. And he has a suit!
(Credit: Courtesy of Marvel Studios)
Apparently, according to a displeased Marc in a window, the spiffy white suit he’s wearing is not the ceremonial suit of Khonshu. It has the same powers and healing factor, though, so Steven’s fine. He almost takes down a jackal (although it’s awkward for Layla, who can’t see the creature), and then he winds up getting hit by a car in the middle of a road. The spectacle convinces him to let Marc take control, and he summons the (real) suit and leads the jackal away. He impales it on a spike, killing it.
But this isn’t quite a success. Marc doesn’t have the scarab — he lost it during the fight, and Arthur recovered it. Marc chats with Steven, who’s in the mirror now and finds it rather unpleasant. He reveals to his distraught alter that they wouldn’t be alive without Khonshu, and that once his mission is done, he’ll let Steven have the body permanently.
That’s not going to fly with Khonshu, who has a chat with Marc once Steven leaves in the episode’s final minutes. He tells him that he can, indeed, find a new avatar, but he won’t like his next candidate: Marc’s wife, Layla. Marc says they can get the scarab back, and Khonshu takes them to Egypt, to find a new way to get to Ammit’s tomb.
Moon Knight, New Episodes, Wednesdays, Disney+
