SPOILER Moon Knight (2022)

As a comicbook aficionado, I adore the connections to the larger universe, its seems with every Disneyplus show fans want a standalone series, which to me makes the vast universe rather small. Fans also wanted the Mandalorian to be a standalone series, they didn't care for what they call fan service. I guess because I've been a comic book fan all my life, I look forward to connections to the vast universe or multiverse.
Marvel's connections are pretty good, on the other hand, DC in terms of films, can't actually get it right, (Nolan's Batman trilogy still remains my favorite, but what bothered me, is that it was in a standalone series. Ben Affleck's Batman is in a connected universe and that's why I like his iteration a bit more, even though it all ultimately failed), however they've been doing it for decades on end in the books. Even in the Netflix Marvel series that is currently on Disneyplus, all the standalone series converged into the Defenders series.

Imagine a standalone Kenobi series... I know there will be fans that will crave for Obi-wan to be in a standalone series, but from the trailers and the rumor mill, if true, I don't think that will be the case.

As far as Moon Knight's episodes 5-6 having connection to the MCU, its a frivolous rumor, so I didn't shroud it in a spoiler tag. I do believe episodes 5-6 will have the most action of the entire series IMHOP.

Marc Spector is Moon Knight from the first volume of the series. Spector enacted several aliases, or 3 to be exact, ( Marc Spector, Steven Grant, and Jake Lockley) over time as a crime fighter. Later on, the creative team turned those aliases into multiple personalities, or D.I.D., so Spector is MK, I don't know how they will go forward in the Disneyplus series, Steven is not MK according to the source material or comicbook.

 

I just bindged the first three episodes, and here are my Egyptological comments, as far as I can offer.

EPISODE 1
No, the Ancient Egyptians did not remove all of the body’s organs, “except for the heart”, through the deceased’s nose during mummification. (That was only the brain).

Interestingly, and quite surprising in a way, there is no such thing as a crow god (or any kind of corvine deity, really) in Ancient Egyptian religion.

The judging-by-way-of-scale thing was a rather clever use of the Amduit “Heart Weighing” scene. Cool. That said, Ammit isn’t a goddess of judgment but more a monster who devours those who have been judged (usually by Thoth and/or Anubis) and found to be evil.

It makes no sense that the Anubis-beast thingy works for the bad guys…


EPISODE 2
“Ammit’s ushabti”, now that’s a weird concept. A ushabti (or just shabti) is a small figurine servant you take to your grave to do work for you in the afterlife. Basically, it’s a fake you that you bring along in death, so that you don’t have to do all the hard work in the afterlife yourself. Now, Ammit having a shabti makes no sense. I guess they’re re-conceptualizing shabtis in some way in the show? This should be interesting.

Konshu banished? Well, that’s new…

Cool that Hawke casts his spell in Coptic. That’s pretty accurate (for the Late Period of Ancient Egypt).

Hm… So we end the episode at Giza. Now I'm excited (We should be able to see the Sphinx from his hotel balcony, though… He’s on the east side of the Giza pyramids looking west, almost exactly in front of the Sphinx, give or take).


EPISODE 3
Hm… I have no clue where they are in the opening, desert scene. (Of course, it might be a CGI desert).

The ruin on the ledge where the Ammit cultist kid kills himself? Yeah, that’s a fantasy place. There is no such place as far as I know.

When we see the city of Cairo darkening during the solar eclipse, you can see the island on the Nile where I lived in Cairo That’s nice. Makes me “homesick”.

Yeah, no, they’re definitely not inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, LOL! I think they’re on the set of The Mummy

“Hathor, goddess of music and love.” That’s quite accurate, if a little reductionist.

Oh, a medjay even! That’s cool The medjay were Nubian soldiers serving in Egypt as “police” and enforcers. By all accounts, they were bad-butts!

Well done, Leyla, for just reading the coffin text at a glance! That takes mad hieroglyphics skills The folding the papyrus bits is plain fantasy (and quite disturbing treatment of ancient artifacts to even a hobby Egyptologist ).

The Egyptians did absolutely not invent modern navigation. That is complete hogwash. They navigated by landmarks and well-scouted routes; at sea, they sailed within view of the shoreline so they knew where they were. They dreaded the open sea and did not navigate by the stars.

If I understood it correctly, the avatars imprisoned Khonsu in a shabti? Well, that’s new.

 

Here's my top-of-my-head egyptological commentary on Episode 4.

First of all, I really liked it. Some of the best fantasy-Egypt I've seen.


They took great liberties with the Eye of Horus, but all right. The Eye of Horus is a bit compex, meaning different things in different contexts, but basically it never signifies anything of what they suggest in this show

Weird that there’s a mummification workshop inside a tomb, but the sequence was very cool indeed. The tools and such were quite accurate, too.

Pitfalls, like the one Leyla traverses, are very common in larger tombs/pyramids, although there wouldn’t be a ledge to climb around it on.

Very clever to give Leyla a flare as a weapon in an otherwise very dark scene. Writers are smart!

Steven Grant’s knowledge of Ancient Egypt varies wildly from scene to scene. In one scene he doesn’t know what “heqa” is and in another he recognizes Macedonian (not Greek, but Macedonian) writing in a supposedly Egyptian Tomb. Weird.

Ok, that they actually find Alexander the Great’s tomb is very cool and clever, and it makes all kinds of historical sense. (Basically, his coffin was stolen/relocated in antiquity, and disappeared from history). Grant wouldn’t be able to push the lid aside himself, however; that this would weigh tons and tons and tons. The fact that Grant violates Alexander’s tomb hurts my soul…

The decorations in the tomb, while we glimpse them only fleetingly, look at a glance to be quite reasonable.

The axe that Marc wields when the mercenaries enter the tomb is famous. It’s a Hyksos/Levantine axe, and one just like it was used to kill the 17th dynasty Pharaoh, Seqenenre Tao.

And that ending! That was, in case anyone wonders, Taweret. “Hi”. Very funny stuff


Say, to those who're in the know, comic book wise. Is Moon Knight involved in any mulitverse (of madness) stuff? Is that what's going on with the mad house? There's something about an evil pharaoh dude in the Marvel universe, too, right? Thoth-Ram, or some such? Perhaps that character is behind stuff, somehow?

 

Thank you, @cawatrooper. That post right there cleared up so many things for me.

Your mentioning of the Enead (by which I assume you/Marvel mean the Anceint Egyptian Ennead (a grouping of nine gods worshiped at Heliopolis)), which they did indeed mention in the Ep1. There are several such groupings in AE religion, and it even varries a bit which gods are included in the Heliopolian Ennead, but I don't remember Khonsu being part of any... (Although he's part of a couple of triad mom+pop+kid groupings).

Hm... (can't be bothered to look it up right now, but) I wonder if Khonsu isn't also described as a great snake in one of the myths (or was that Iah - another AE moon god?), a snake that fertilizes the first egg from which the world/reality is born? If so, while this "great snake" is certianly not evil, the Marvel folks could perhaps conflate that snake with Apep, making Khonsu a secret evil deity? Well, I'm grasping now

But yeah, thanks for the clear-up, mate!

 

Pretty twisty, which I enjoy in tv shows. I am finding the portrayal of Steven Grant to be hilarious.

Spoiler

for instance, I cracked up when just out of the blue he sees the camels and he's like 'Helloooo'. So the statues in the beginning of the episode are a bunch of trapped gods? How many dang gods are there in Egyptian culture?

.

 

Many hundreds.

 

So, episode 5, through an egyptological lense


Taweret as the guide through the Duat is, while perhaps unusual, not unprecedented, especially from ca. the New Kingdom onwards (if I remember my timelines right). She became quite popular down the line, when religion became more and more personal and piety-driven (as opposed to the elite thing that it was in the Old Kingdom, for instance), and she’s definitely a protector.

The underworld barque sailing on sand is quite accurate. Several of the middle hours of night (i.e., the underworld) are nothing but sand.

Again, it’s a bit unusual that it is Taweret who conducts the heart-weighing scene – actually, I cannot remember having encountered that before, but she is an occasional guide. That it isn’t Anubis is not that big of a stretch however, although the fact that Thoth is not there is a bit off. Oh, there’s an Anubis statue holding the scales, so that covers Anubis, then

The temple, while hard to see, looks correct. The statue sanctuary is a bit fantasy-Egypt, though, but fair enough. I wonder why they give Khonshu a skeletal crow head, though? Does he have that in the comics, too?

I really like the depictions of the Underworld, though. Very cool stuff

Baboos. Again, those are kosher. I guess they represent the presence of Thoth in the Underworld.

The white statuette of a ram-headed god with the elaborate crown, on Dr. Harrow’s desk is Khnum, he who creates (human) bodies from clay upon his potter’s wheel. I’m not sure what he’s doing there, though… It is possible that, since Khnum also created the Ka (=spirit-self that animates the human body), that Marc & Steven are supposed to be the Ka & body that make up the composite person, or, perhaps Marc (white jumpsuit) is the Ka and Steven (block sweater) is the shadow, two soul parts of the body struggling for dominance. Yeah, I’m grasping now…

The sand guys on the barque, they are probably demons. The dead would routinely be tested by demons during their trip through the underworld, and they had cool names like, “he with knives”, and “fire-breather”, and a whole lot of weird stuff, heh heh.

Steven turning into sand… hm… don’t know what that is supposed to be.

The episode ends with Marc reaching the Field of Reeds, one of the better regions you can go to in the Duat (and often tied directly to a successful heart-weighing scene, like in this episode). It’s like this heavenly place, located in the east of the underworld where the sun rises, and represents a boundless and eternal delta of the Nile, like the one in northern Egypt. Having died and been found “justified” (as the ancient Egyptians would say), Marc can now move on to other things, I guess. He’s probably going to escape Dr. Harrow’s “care” very early on in the final episode, to do whatever it is he’s supposed to do, then (rescue Leyla etc).

All in all, I thought the episode was pretty cool, although I can understand the argument that we’ve seen this exact kind of challenge before, with a slightly different dressing, in Loke, etc.

 

thanks angelman you are so wise

 

I tried out AC Origins at one point, but I got bored really early on. I'm no video game player anymore (although I was HUGELY into that stuff in the late 80s), and I couldn't quite figure out what to do in the game. That said, I did a ride-through of the country, and while it was laughably condenced, it was really cool to see how well they had made their version of Ancient Egypt. I've visited many of the places you see in the game in real life, and they made a really good job with several of them; I knew exactly where I was and could turn a corner and find the exact pillar, or whatever, that I expected to find. That was very cool.

I never got to any underworld stuff, however. I visited a couple of tombs, but never transitioned into an actual underworld. (Also, I had just played Jedi:Fallen Order and had very little patience left for doing and failing all the jumping and climbing stuff ).

Hah hah hah, hardly! I'm dumb as a sack of really dumb rocks, I am. (Although, I have read a couple of books, so I can offer an oppinion on a couple of things)

 

Spoiler

I really liked that episode, I also just finished Peacemaker which had some parallels with this episode. I enjoyed the deep dive they did and can understand now why he's the "Batman of the MCU". His back story is heart-wrenching IMO. I mean damn, the phone calls that Steven makes to his mom are even more twisted now in light of it all.

 

Laser Sky Battle or CGI Army Battle, which would you prefer?


Anyways, I loved this episode. I loved Oscar's character work, I loved the deep dive into Marc and Steven, and I loved the methodical yet trippy way they told the story to us. I'm curious how this will all wrap up. Oh, and we FINALLY got a reference to the MCU as a whole! Thank you!
My friend ADORES this, and she was so upset that I didn't watch this on Wednesday because she had some articles she wanted to send me...and then she sent them to me anyways.

I've been pretty ambivalent on this show outside of the end of the last episode and this one. It's not because the show is bad, but because I'm only invested in it because of my friends and Oscar Isaac's acting (which has been put to VERY good use). But I like it, and I'd recommend it to those who may be on the fence like I was.