Moon Knight Episode Four – The Tomb

Moon Knight Episode Four – The Tomb needs to learn making things confusing doesn’t make them good.

Moon Knight Episode Four – The Tomb suffers heavily from knowing it’s losing audience attention and needing to shake things up in order to maintain enough fleeting momentum for its finale.

In the episode three review, I wrote that the show was chugging along at a disappointingly mediocre level, requiring far too much attention for the halfway point of the show’s series, and episode four proved my issues with it.

Oscar Isaac‘s fractured split personality of Stephen Grant and Marc Spector is without the guide, aid and healing powers of Khonsu (F. Murray Abraham) after the Egyptian God was trapped as punishment for rewinding the night sky, and has to find Ammit’s tomb ahead of antagonist Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) seeking to release the trapped evil God and use their powers for reasons I don’t know or care enough about.

What the first two-thirds of the episode tell is a jaunty Indiana Jones inspired affair of tomb raiding, monster fighting, and perilous trap evading.

However, I feel audiences will be more amazed or perplexed by the climatic twist in the latter third of the episode after Harrow shoots Marc Spector leaving him dead in a pool of amber water to descend into the tomb’s depths with the episode fading to black.

And fading back into a 4:3 resolution, as a low budget Stephen Grant, a privileged tomb raider, is played out on a VHS tape.

The camera pulls out to show a hospice for those who require specialised psychiatric help with all side characters so far introduced appearing as either matrons or residents revealing Marc Spector, restrained to a wheelchair, requiring medical assistance from lead Doctor Arthur Harrow.

Recontextualising the entire show with two episodes left is a bold move, and one that didn’t work for me at all.

Though it is different, and an apt way to justify Spector’s multiple personalities that inhabit his body, the move felt as though the show knew it was losing any gusto ahead of the finale and needed to entirely reinvent itself to muster enough strength to get there.

I want to care for the show, but at this point, I just want to get to the finale and avoid more cliffhangers of walking, talking hippo goddesses.

Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac, is available to watch now exclusively on Disney+.