How many episodes of Moon Knight

Moon Knight episode 5, "Asylum," dives into the backstory of Oscar Isaac's dual roles, Marc Spector and Steven Grant. In the process, Steven reveals his ...

These two things aren’t mutually exclusive — something lost in the modern ’80s homages of shows like Stranger Things is how ’80s classics like E.T. delivered stories where the genuine fun is paired with genuine terror, peril, and inner turmoil, all of which were difficult for kids (both onscreen and in the audience) to process. (The zombies are all the people Marc has killed in his mercenary life.) In this, Moon Knight feels caught between two masters: The challenging, morally gray story about a man dealing with mental illness and his own capacity for horror, and the Marvel Studios brand of action movie the whole family can watch. It all builds to the origin of Moon Knight, as Spector’s crew is hired to raid an archeological dig. As Marc gets older, the wall between himself and Steven gets higher, with Marc bearing all the pain. However, the balance of the scales are in flux, as they were when Harrow tried to use his own powers to weigh the two men’s guilt. Even with the MCU’s light geopolitics and frequent friendly gestures toward the military-industrial complex, at the end of the day, the franchise is carefully designed to remain firmly family-friendly, with mostly bloodless violence and nothing too frightening or intense.

What's really going on with Marc Spector and Steven Grant at the end of Moon Knight episode 5? And is there another personality or identity at work?

The big plot of the episode is that the goddess Taweret can bring Marc and Steven to the Field of Reeds (a form of Heaven) if their hearts are found to be balanced on a magic scale. Instead of running off, he picked up an impromptu weapon and prepared to attack Harrow. As he started to come off as a pissed-off Robert De Niro, “Marc” was held down and injected in the neck with a sedative. The thing is…how real is the real world in this story? Steve steps up and saves Marc, but at the cost of falling into the Duat and becoming eternally frozen. This whole development had been foreshadowed in the second episode when Layla appeared confused at Steven claiming to be in contact with his mother. Marc was part of the military, but having a double life didn’t exactly gel with that kind of situation, so he was discharged. Steven has always been imagining these conversations and even uses the “later, gator” farewell his mother used to give him as a kid. Marc ignored the warnings and they continued their adventure, only for the rain to pick up into a storm and flood the cave. Marc experienced the truth when it came to his mother, but Steven got to live the lie that his mother loved him. Then there’s the third world, where Marc and Steven are trying to comprehend the afterlife. The penultimate episode of Moon Knight certainly borrows a lot from fellow Disney+ Marvel show WandaVision. Our protagonist is forced to confront their past and the secrets to their fractured mental state through mystical means. What's really going on with Marc Spector and Steven Grant at the end of Moon Knight episode 5?

In the penultimate episode of the season, the show asks: How can we do good when we're broken?

Isaac, of course, volleys quite well with himself (and with Salib) but it was lovely watching Steven and Marc really wrestling with who they are to one another before, well, we found out exactly the answer to such a question. In the meantime let’s find some requisite peace in the field of reeds where a lulling tune lures us into thinking we’ve come, as the song that plays at the end suggests, to the home we know on the other side of the sun. As a narrative conceit, though, squarely placing Marc and Steven in a psych ward where their memories are stored and where they must wrestle with their shared pain and shame if they hope to be returned to the land of the living in time to stop Harrow and save Layla, is actually quite ingenious. - Just as I praised F. Murray Abraham’s voice work for Khonshu, I should set aside some time to stress how refreshing it was getting Antonia Salib’s Taweret in the mix. Moon Knight, in between Harrow’s philosophical musings about Ammit and Marc’s tortured relationship with Khonshu and Steven, has paved a story for itself that hinges on our notions of justice and ties it to issues of mental health. And you have to give it to the show, the gamble pays off.

Spoiler alert: this article is for people watching Moon Knight on Disney+. Do not read unless you have seen episodes one to five.

As he followed the boy through the door, he was taken back to childhood, where we learned Marc had a brother. We saw the yelling and the uncelebrated birthdays and, eventually, Marc leaving to join the military. While not explicitly stated, I believe it served the same function here on screen, mustered by Marc as he has been there many times before. We finished up with Steven, realising that if Marc can fight, he can, too, and fending off a couple of undead on board Tawaret’s boat. I often wince when actors are essentially talking to themselves on screen – Gollum/Sméagol’s two-way dialogue notwithstanding – but this was a masterclass. He was watching his mother’s shiva through the window of his former family home. As Marc and Steven’s hearts were unbalanced, they were instructed to go back into the hospital construct and revisit their memories to show each other the truth. It wasn’t until Tawaret welcomed Marc and Steven to the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, that things began to clear up a little. After the headscratcher of episode four – was it a dream, a trick played by Harrow or Ammit, or was it all in Marc’s head? And so to getting their hearts weighed on the scales of justice, just as Harrow had done for the people in the Alpine town square. As the Duat is incomprehensible to the human mind, people tend to muster surroundings that are familiar to them before passing through to Aaru, or the Field of Reeds, the heavenly paradise ruled by Osiris. At this point, Marc had come to believe he genuinely was a patient in the hospital, while Steven was faced with the revelation that he, too, was unwell. To my mind, the opening recap heavily suggested this was all a ploy by Ammit, or agents acting on her behalf, going so far as to hint that the Ennead are also involved (I still think they are, even though there was no more evidence to support that).