Well, they went and did it. The worst Marvel series has finally come out, and the award goes to Moon Knight!

Now, I hate to disparage anyone’s work. As an aspiring author, it’s hard to put words on a page. It’s even harder to get that work out there. After watching Disney Plus’s new Marvel series about a hero that I knew little about, I didn’t really want to know more after either.

And really, that’s too bad. I thought a Moon Knight Series would be a way into a character that many online seem to love.

But really, the series just never hooked me in.

Here are my major issues with Marvel’s Moon Knight.

Moon Knight Who?

I think the major problem with the series is that not many know Moon Knight. I didn’t know much about the character before the show. I had heard that Moon Knight was supposed to be Marvel’s version of Batman.

But the series didn’t really do much to show that.

From the first few episodes, the character of Moon Knight doesn’t even know who Moon Knight is.

The story centers around a character that blacks out and wakes up somewhere else. In the Moon Knight premiere, our main character Steven seems to have a mundane life, but he wakes up chained by the leg, surrounded by a circle of sand, and the doors heavily locked. None of these things seem out of the ordinary for Steven, he simply thinks that he’s sleepwalking.

But when he wakes up in the middle of another country watching something supernatural happen in front of him, he… blacks out again.

We eventually find out that Steven is really just another personality inside the same body as a man named Marc, who is also a mercenary. Besides that, we find out that there’s another voice (or two) in Steven’s… Marc’s? head: Khonsu.

Khonsu is an ancient Egyptian god and Moon Knight serves him as his avatar in the real world. They protect the vulnerable and deliver justice to those that hurt them.

This is as difficult to explain as it was to watch.

I’m not against the setup here. I even like that we are dealing with multiple personalities, but I don’t think it pays off at all.

By keeping our main narrator in the dark about his split personalities and superhero work, there was a disconnect between him and me. I didn’t grow invested in the characters since things just kept jumping around and nothing really got explained. For me, it might have been stronger if we set up the world a little more without blacking out and not explaining what really happened. Maybe the first episode could set up that there’s a person righting wrongs during the night and Steven is afraid of him. Maybe even set up why Steven has set up such elaborate traps in his nightly sleep routine. But we never get that information.

We also hardly ever see Moon Knight in battle. He shows up in episodes 1,2, 3, and 6. And when he is in battle, things usually go weird as the different personalities try to grab control. So it feels a little like Iron Man 3 where Tony is out of his armor for most of the movie.

But everything just felt disjointed. I couldn’t get into the characters at all. I also didn’t know if he was really a hero or a villain.

Lame Bad Guy

The opening scene of the series has the main bad guy, Harrow break some glass and put it in his sandals before he walks away because of… reasons?

In fact, Harrow’s actions are spelled out fine. He wants to balance the world of evil. From all the pandering and chatter that we get between Steven/Marc’s blackouts, we come to know that means that Harrow wants to rid the world of all that would do evil before they even commit the crime. Okay cool. But why?

I think it ties into the fact that Harrow was previously the man that Khonsu possessed before Marc/Steven. However, we don’t really find out much more. By the end of the show, we don’t really know why they were not partners, we don’t know why Harrow turned on Khonsu and wanted to go with another Egyptian god, nor do we know why he broke the glass to put in his shoes.

I don’t think that the acting was bad at all. Ethan Hawke did a great job with what he had. I just don’t think enough time was spent setting things up. Motivations weren’t really established enough for me to care.

Too Many Tricks on the Audience

I’m a fan of twists, I even like turns when it comes to my stories. But this series felt like it was trying to make twists out of something that wasn’t there by keeping the audience in the dark.

The frequent blackouts by Marc/Steven kept the audience from getting all the information. That doesn’t make a good twist. Twists come from laying out all the evidence and then doing the unexpected. Here though, we never really get all the information we need to make the twist pay off. For example, in the climax of the show, during the big fight between good and evil, Marc is bested in battle and is about to die. But then he blacks out. When he wakes up, he has the upper hand, but we don’t get shown how or even why it happened. It cheapens the moment, to set up a future story thread.

This goes on in the underworld, where we spend at least two and a half episodes going between memories, boats, and a psych ward. We don’t know what’s real any more than the characters do, but we also don’t get any confirmation. Things get even further complicated in the post-credit scene where we find ourselves back in a psych ward with another character, but it looks just like the one from before!

So was everything fake? Was it real? Does it matter? No, no it doesn’t.

Not Enough Moon Space

The crux of the issue I had with Moon Knight is that it tried to fit too much into too little of a space. With only six episodes, multiple personalities, deities, and afterlives to investigate, not much time is given to developing these things. If more time had been given to set up Steven, Marc, Khonsu, and the rest of the Egyptian gods that only show up for a little while, things might have been smoother. But when you have such a limited space and such a complex character, things needed to change in the writing room.

Is That All?

I’m tough on the story because I’m a story guy and a hopeful author. I would love to be able to work on a project like this even if someone on the internet tore it to pieces. But it wasn’t all bad.

Oscar Isaac did a great job playing all the roles he had to play. He is a fantastic actor, even if all his body of work isn’t that great. The locations and humor were on point as always with Marvel Cinematic Universe projects. This series also doesn’t seem to connect to the larger MCU unlike the last big movies Spider-Man: No Way Home or Avengers: End Game. That could be a blessing or a curse.

So what’s next for the MCU?

Dr. Stranger and the Multiverse of madness is coming for the movies and Miss Marvel is coming next for series’.

What did you think about Moon Knight? Let me know in the comments!