This is an unorthodox Storytelling Enneagram, but I’m going to count it. Moon Knight has been hit and miss so far. Let’s see what the showrunners tried with this episode.
LEFTOVER NINE
An upside down image of someone walking flips and resolves into the banker-looking avatar. He carries the Khonshu statue, placing it in a ceremonial room lit by candles. The wall contains a number of little icons; this must be Egyptian god prison.
Roll credits.
ONE
We’re back in the overly dark desert with Layla as she tries to wake Steven.
She drags him as headlights approach. Gunfire. Layla rolls both of them down a dune. Leaving Steven, she runs for their truck, hiding alongside.
TWO
The other truck doesn’t find her, but it does locate Steven, who looks dead.
Layla lights a flare, drawing their attention. She dodges their gunfire, then comes up alongside. In the bed of their truck is a rack of bullets. She tosses in a flare, igniting their ammunition.
THREE
As she watches the men dive from their truck, the camera reveals Steven standing behind her.
FOUR
Transition to dawn, the truck driving through the desert.
In the cab, Layla says, “We’re going to need Mark.” In the side mirror, Mark agrees. Steven, who has the body, disagrees. He argues that he and Mark made a deal. When Mark was done with Khonshu, he’d disappear and give Steven full control. Mark disagrees to the terms, and Layla, whose husband has agreed to disappear from her life, is angry.
Mark wants the body. Layla, who knows that Mark would solo the mission, seems glad that Steven has control. Steven is, naturally, happy to team up.
On foot, they walk through a narrow canyon. In the distance they spot the digging location. They’re cautious in the camp, but it looks like no one is here. Before heading down into the pit, they check the tents for supplies.
A reflective surface lets Mark chastise Steven. No Khonshu means no suit and no healing. Steven, who wishes there were no Mark, too, says he’ll be okay. He has muscle memory. And he has Layla to watch his back. In a hand mirror, Mark says, “Oh, now you’re in love with my wife? If you lay one finger on her — ” Steven walks out on the conversation.
Cut to Layla as she packs a bag. When she leaves, the camera pans down to show something in the sand. A tool with blood on it? (I can’t tell, but the camera lingers, obviously planting whatever it is.)
Layla stands close to Steven as she fits him in the climbing harness. He’s excited — he’s been waiting for adventure his whole life. She says, “You smell like him,” and leans in for a kiss. Steven pulls back and defends Mark. He tells her how Mark fears that Khonshu wants her for his avatar. “Why are you telling me this now?” Steven felt he should. Honesty — “that’s a you thing,” Layla says. Going all in, Steven kisses her, and she kisses him back.
They’re ready to enter the pit. Steven asks, “What’s belay?” Layla laughs, not aware that Steven isn’t joking. (It’s so well played.) Before Steven can follow her down, though, something (?) invisible punches him in the nose. After a beat, he falls down the hole after her.
He’s as thrilled as Layla to be surrounded by so much history. Layla has written something in the dust that is in remembrance of her father. Steven knows nothing about him, an “archaeologist on a mission”. Layla mentions that he died pursuing this life, and Steven is very sympathetic.
Further in, Layla realizes the way forward is a maze. Spent shells lay in the dirt on one of the paths. Steven starts drawing the Eye of Horus. (I’m not sure how he arrives at his conclusion. What’s important is that he and Layla geek out over the location, that they connect via their enthusiasm for the ancient world and their knowledge of it.)
Continuing, they find a ceremonial room. An altar in the center is covered in fresh blood, which makes Steven gag. A stained mummification tool looks like the one from earlier in the tent. On the floor, a blood trail drags out the doorway. They seek and find an alternate exit.
Gunfire, though, makes them hide. Someone has thrown a live person on the altar and begins using the tools. Layla and Steven, horrified, hear the wet squishing noises. Who’s doing it, though? It looks . . . undead, although none of us have a clear view. It click-talks and moves in an inhuman fashion. Discovered, Layla and Steven separate and run.
Layla must sidle along the edge of a bottomless pit. (How the heck did that get here!) Something reaches through the wall, grabs her, and pulls her inside. She fights her way back out, pulling apart the decaying body that’s attacking her. Driving a lit flare into its eye socket, Layla throws it into the pit.
SWITCH
Watching from the other side (Yikes!) is Arthur.
FIVE
Meanwhile, Steven has stumbled on a tomb laden with relics. He’s excited. Oh, and then Mark in a water reflection speaks. “So, you kissed her.” Steven ignores him and moves forward, admiring the find. He reads the inscriptions and stares at a massive, ornate sarcophagus. “I think we’re looking at the long lost tomb of Alexander the Great.” Hold on the beautiful image while choir music soars.
Cut back to Arthur. He speaks to Layla from across the pit, but she turns to leave. “My little scarab,” Arthur murmurs, “isn’t that what your father used to call you?” She stops. Layla can now confirm, Arthur continues, what her father always believed: Egyptian gods walk among us. Holding up his cane, Arthur talks of the scales showing him sin and pain. “And your husband,” he tells her, “is in agony.”
Steven can’t decide whether or not to open the sarcophagus. Mark convinces him to do it before Arthur comes. Inside is a wrapped body holding something golden. Reading the hieroglyphics, Steven says that Alexander was the voice of Ammit. He rips away the head bandages and cracks open the jaw of “Mr. Great”. He reaches down into the chest cavity while Mark eggs him on.
Back to Arthur as he explains that Mark was one of the mercenaries who murdered Layla’s father. He knows this from reading his scales; the image of death dominates Mark’s thoughts. Barely holding it together, Layla asks if he’s done, then walks away.
Steven still fumbles around down Alexander’s dusty throat. He finally pulls out one of those little statues. It’s Ammit. When Layla enters, Steven triumphantly holds up the icon. She’s focused, though. “What happened to my father?” She’s demanding an answer from Mark, and he takes over the body. He pulls at her arm, trying to get her to leave with him (and trying to distract her). She’s wracked, insistent. Finally, Mark must admit he was there, and that his partner killed her father. “I’ve tried to tell you since the moment we met.”
(Wait. He began a relationship with Layla, married her, all while knowing he’d watched her father die and not telling her? Oh, dude.) “We met,” Layla says, “because you had a guilty conscience.”
Now they’re interrupted by Arthur’s minions. Layla looks for another exit while Mark takes Alexander’s tomb ax, ready to fight. “It’s just you,” Arthur says. Of course, he knows that Khonshu is gone, that Mark no longer has his protection. The god’s voice is quieted and Mark is free. He must decide if he still opposes Arthur. A beat, and then Mark starts swinging the ax, taking down men. Arthur shoots him in the chest. In the shadows, Layla gasps silently. Arthur shoots him again. In slomo, Mark falls backward into the shallow pool surrounding the sarcophagus.
SIX
The camera twirls about, and Mark is now floating in the stars, in eternity. He merges with the distant moon, which dissolves into a flashlight beam. A young man in the jungle holds it.
SEVEN
We’re in an almost Indiana Jones scene, with the boy and a brave explorer. The language is stilted, overwritten. The boy, impressed, says, “You’re Dr. Steven Grant.” The camera pushes in for a heroic close-up. Pull out to show the scene playing on a television.
EIGHT
The room with the TV is white, the people are clothed in white, and someone is calling bingo while no one pays attention. The camera pans the room to show a nurse dispensing cups of pills. The clock on the wall ticks overly loud. Still moving, the camera reveals people coloring with crayons and, finally, near a goldfish in a bowl, Mark. His eyelids droop as if he’s drugged. Layla, in white, takes a bingo card from his lap and inanely says they won. When she leaves, Mark focuses on a reflective surface and asks for Steven. He rises from his wheelchair and immediately trips from the ankle restraint. Some kind of figurine falls from his hand. Oh, it looks like a Moon Knight action figure.
Close on Mark’s drugged face as we hear Arthur’s voice. Across a glass table, Arthur’s hand pushes an old video box for “Tomb Buster”, Steven Grant’s movie. Arthur is blurry, seen through Mark’s vision, but he’s obviously a psychiatrist here, nerdy and kind.
(It’s a long sequence of Mark trying to focus. Meanwhile, Arthur brings up Moon Knight plot points in the context of real world explanations. The whole office is loaded with Egyptian elements that gaslight Mark and us.)
Dr. Arthur, white-handled cane leaning against his desk, explains that Mark has been drugged because he was too violent. The doctor mentions Steven, which confuses Mark. “You know Steven?” Of course, Arthur answers, but I want to talk to you right now (as if he’s dealing with split personalities). Arthur continues standard doctor-speak while Mark looks around, losing his mind. Angry, he tries to rise, but he’s too drugged. Crawling, stumbling, drooling, Mark breaks the door’s glass window and tries to escape.
(Hilariously, Arthur genuinely seems like a thoughtful, responsible doctor.)
NINE
Mark runs down the white tile hallway, which inexplicably sways. He hides in a room with an Egyptian sarcophagus that shudders, as if someone’s trapped inside. When Mark lifts the lid, Steven, terrified, tumbles out. He wears street clothes and looks astonished to come face to face with Mark. They hug.
Mark asks what Steven last remembers. It’s the gunshot, which thrills Mark, verifying reality. As they move to escape, the next room down, door open, has another trembling sarcophagus. Ignoring it, they continue past, coming to a door at the end of the hallway. It opens, and a large hippo-person in Egyptian regalia walks through.
Everyone draws back, startled.
The hippo waves and says hi in a sweet voice. Steven and Mark scream.
Roll credits.
CRITICAL NOTES
Let’s jump right to that Three/Six situation. The Six is quite clear and easy. Mark is shot to end the Five, and then a dreamy, trippy scene follows. Weird, arty interludes make nice Sixes.
That points to a Three that will also be somewhat otherworldly. When Steven appears standing behind Layla (last we saw, he looked dead), it hits that same beat. I don’t think this Three was shot with an intention of marking a strong beat; it’s murky rather than eerie, and the timing feels rushed. It doesn’t feel like a foreshadowing of its Six. The lighting and editing aren’t decisive. However, here it is. Good instinct.
I would make the same argument for the Two. Steven appears dead in the desert. In the Eight, Steven/Mark seem to have just died. That’s a pretty good direction from Two to Eight. Again, though, the earlier sequence seems instinctually good but haphazard in execution. The Two Trouble should boldly announce itself, not reveal itself when I trace the plot backwards.
A stronger, more definitive Two and Three would’ve helped prepare us for the wrench of this Eight; it’s going to wreak havoc with our perceptions. How real is this asylum situation? Is Mark in some kind of purgatory, or Egyptian afterlife? Or has he been delusional this whole time, and we’re only now seeing reality?
Honestly, I don’t like tricky twists like this. Very few stories can successfully sell a one-eighty. Where this episode succeeds is in bringing Mark and Steven into the same location, and in the new, suspicious-yet-sympathetic Arthur. The hippo-god is so drastically unrealistic it ends up becoming a great hook for the next episode.
This is a difficult transition. I think we’re looking at the season’s Switch. Later, after my breakdowns are over, we’ll review the complete Enneagram and decide for certain. Right now, though, this shift was a hard sell on my first viewing, and a rewatch hasn’t clarified much.