Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Moon Knight
207 Plays3 years ago
Professor Sy Islam, co-author of Leaders Assemble! Leadership in the MCU, is back in this episode for a deep dive on Disney+'s Moon Knight limited series! Perry brings the background knowledge of the comics, while Sy approaches this from the perspective of someone who only has a casual familiarity with Moon Knight, and they come back with different takes on the series.
Pick up a copy of Leaders Assemble! Leadership in the MCU
Follow Sy Islam on Twitter
Want to tell us what you think? Have any questions or comments for Perry about superheroes in media or comics? Leave a voice message to play on the show. You can also apply to be a guest on the show.
Patrons get to listen to episodes before everyone else and they also get access to my exclusive companion podcast, the Superhero Cinephiles Book Club. If you want to join in, please consider supporting us through Patreon!
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/superherocinephiles/messageRecommended
Transcript
The Mysterious Room and Family Tension
00:00:19
Speaker
I don't... This is my room. I remember some things, but I don't remember this. It's not my mum. It's not my mum. It's not my mum. It's not my mum. Mark, open this door. Open this door right now. It's not my mum. Open this door.
00:00:52
Speaker
Bloody hell. Look at the state of this place. Better sort it out before Mum sees it. Marcus, open the door! Right now!
Self-Discovery and Trauma
00:01:11
Speaker
When danger is near, Stephen Grant has no fear. You made me up.
00:01:29
Speaker
You're gonna learn. So listen. I didn't have to make you do this. I don't see what she did. I don't see what she did. You're disgusting. You're not meant to see that. You're not meant to see that. That's the whole point of you. The point of me? The point of me what? To be a stress bowl?
00:02:00
Speaker
All this time I thought I was the original. But I'm just something that you made up. You've got to live a happy, simple, normal life. You understand? But it was all a lie, wasn't it? So what? What does it matter? Well, you want to remember the truth? That you had a mother that beat you?
00:02:21
Speaker
that hated you, that made your life a living hell? In lying, just trying to upset me. But you've gotten to live thinking that she loved you, that she was kind, that she's still alive. What are you talking about? She's alive. I speak to her every day. What are you talking about? Dad called me after all these years about her shiva, and I couldn't... I couldn't do it.
Introduction to Sai Islam and 'Moon Knight' Discussion
00:02:50
Speaker
Welcome to the Superhero Cinephiles podcast. I'm your host, Perry Constantine, and welcoming back a returning guest. This time he's flying solo. We don't have Gordon with us. And that's Sai Islam. Sai, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here talking about moon night.
00:03:07
Speaker
Yeah, same here. I just finished the rewatch of it last night. I watched the first three episodes the night before and then the next three last night. But before we jump into it, since it's only your second time on the show, why don't you give people a reminder about who you are and what you do?
00:03:25
Speaker
Sure. So I wear a couple of different hats. I'm a associate professor of industrial organizational psychology at Farmingdale State College, and I'm also the vice president of consulting with a consulting firm called Talent Metrics.
00:03:40
Speaker
And so the first time I was here, we were talking about Leadership in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is the name of the book that I co-authored with my friend Gordon. It's called Leaders Assemble. You can look it up any place where books are sold. It actually officially comes out on June 7, which is about a week after we're recording this podcast.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, so it'll definitely be out by the time people listen to this because I think this episode will actually be dropping in July, if I'm not mistaken, or possibly August not exactly sure 100% of the timeline, we got set up. But yeah, so we're talking about moon night, and this was your, your suggestion to come on and talk about.
00:04:21
Speaker
And I know from our last conversation that you're a Marvel fan from going way back. So what was your familiarity with Moon Knight before this series, if any? Because I know even among Marvel fans, he's not exactly the most well-known character.
00:04:37
Speaker
Definitely not. So I've read a lot of Marvel comics over the years and I only had a passing familiarity with Moon Knight. The most that I'd read about him was in West Coast Avengers when he was on the team. And he always struck me as being kind of a weird fit for that team because you had like Tigra, you had Hawkeye, you had Hank Pym.
Moon Knight's Evolution in Comics and Comparisons
00:04:57
Speaker
And this was during the transition between the Steve Engelhardt run and the Jon Fern run. So there was some weird stuff going on about what they were going to do with the character. And I never totally got the character. I heard a lot about him. And the thing that I liked the most about Moon Knight was not any of the stories. I really loved a lot of the art.
00:05:16
Speaker
Um, you know, they had a lot of some Cambridge art and, you know, he's always had very good artists. So Steven Platt, I remember from the nineties had a really strong run of moon night stories. And then in the last like 20 years, I feel like.
00:05:31
Speaker
you know, Moon Knight has become a more prominent character than I remember him as a kid. Oh, definitely. Yeah, like he had like a couple of one-off series. He was, you know, he popped up in like, Werewolf by Night. He would show up in, you know, these different issues. But in the last 20 years, he's really come around. I mean, he's had more solid runs. It's just that I have not had a chance to read any of those.
00:05:56
Speaker
So this was really my introduction to Moon Knight. I did do a little digging around the Marvel encyclopedia just to read a little bit about the character because there were only a couple of things I knew about the character. One was that he
00:06:11
Speaker
had some mystical element because he was supposed to be the fist of kamshu. And then the comparison I always heard was that he was Marvel's Batman. Right. Which from like what I remember in West Coast Avengers made zero sense to him. Right. That comparison was like these are two guys that are hanging out at night. Maybe they're both talking to themselves or something. But that comparison never made sense. I mean maybe maybe because
00:06:38
Speaker
you know the the main alter ego for moon knight uh you know mark specter is supposed to be at some point a billionaire um i guess that was the comparison but just never none of the stories in especially west coast adventures ever struck me as being particularly batmanish right uh you know so i don't know well what is your experience with uh with moon knight
Perry's Moon Knight Journey
00:06:59
Speaker
So yeah, I kind of came to him late in the game. Like you, he was a character that I'd always kind of heard about on the edges. He popped up in a few things I was reading. I remember Marvel Knights was a series I was reading back in the late 90s, early 2000s somewhere. And he popped up in there. And that was like really kind of like my first real big introduction to Moon Knight. And I'd heard about him and I'd seen him pop up here and there.
00:07:24
Speaker
But the first time I actually read a moonlight comic was Charlie Houston did a run on him in the like 2006 2007 era like around the Civil War era is when it was he did that. And that was amazing. And you're talking about great artists on that. He had David Finch doing the art on that. And that was like
00:07:47
Speaker
David Finch had been mostly image and top cow at that point, and he had started to break in and do some Marvel stuff. I think he had done Ultimate X-Men by this point, but when he did Moon Knight, that was really kind of like a career defining move for him. It really kind of like sent his star rocketing off into the stratosphere once he did that. And then after that, I had gone back and I had gone back and read a lot of the other Moon Knight stuff.
00:08:14
Speaker
I think I own every single moon night trade paperback that is actually in print. So I went back and I've read like the epic collections, the Doug Moenk run, which was, you know, and talk about, you know, loving the Charlie Houston run. Then I went back and I read the Moenk stuff from the 80s and that was,
00:08:32
Speaker
you know, that was amazing, totally brilliant run. And that was where Sinkevich had got his start on. And I'm not sure if you saw this, but I had posted a piece of fan art that I did of Moon Knight and like the whole, the whole crescent shaped cape thing when that is something that comes straight out of Sinkevich's work, like he always drew
00:08:50
Speaker
Moon Knight's cape as a crescent moon. I always thought that was just so badass, so awesome. And even at the scene, they had it only pops up once in the series. But when that when that scene happened, man, I lost my fucking shit. My wife's looking at me. She's like, what's going on? I'm like, I'm like, he's doing the moon cape thing. And I had to go and show her like the art. I'm like, look, look, look, look. Like, oh, OK, OK.
00:09:13
Speaker
There's always that awkward moment where you're sharing the Marvel show with your spouse, and if they're not into it, you have to explain why you geeked out over something. Yeah, yeah. And then that conversation's always a little weird, because then they get to see the 10-year-old version of you. Exactly, yeah. But yeah, so I ended up falling in love with the character, thanks to Charlie Houston's introduction.
00:09:39
Speaker
Now, the interesting thing is he wasn't, the Batman comparisons weren't so obvious in most of the stuff that you'll find in print nowadays. I think the Batman comparison mostly comes out of that 90s run, the Mark Spector Moon Knight ongoing series, which actually has not been collected. So that's one of the things that I have not read of Moon Knight. And that had, I think a lot of the Batman comparisons came out of that because he was
00:10:05
Speaker
He was leaning heavily on the billionaire, the billionaire aspect of it, the whole, you know, using the money and the gadgets to fight crime. He had the, all the moon themed vehicles, like, you know, the moon copter. He had like, you know, like, he had like a secret hideout in his mansion and all that kind of stuff. And in fact, if I'm recalling correctly, Chuck Dixon had done a lot of those issues and then he went on to do Batman.
00:10:29
Speaker
So a lot of those comparisons, you know, you definitely see where the Yersatz Batman comparison came from. Now, when you read him in West Coast Avengers, that was when he was in kind of this weird period in his history because it was like, it was such an outlier from the rest of his history.
00:10:48
Speaker
Um, because the, the original moonlight series had been canceled by that point and they had relaunched it. They relaunched him in this moonlight fist of conchoo, um, series. And that was when he was using a lot more, they were leaning much more into the Egyptian side of things. And like, he had all these like Egyptian themed weapons that he was using.
00:11:07
Speaker
And that was, if I'm recalling my history correctly, because Fist of Konshu I have not read because that's also not collected. And then Doug Mowink, and I think it was Sinkevich, they did a mini series in like the late nineties, I think, that kind of brought the character back to his roots. And that was the other thing that, again, not collected. So there's this huge gap of about 20, maybe like 15 years of moon night stories that are not collected. And it seems, it's an odd choice because
00:11:37
Speaker
a lot of the Egyptian themed stuff in this series. If you're not if you're mostly familiar, if you're if you like that stuff and then you go to find Moon Knight comics, you're probably going to be a little bit confused because there's almost none of that in those comics.
00:11:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, like, I kind of knew that he had the, that he was the fifth of kongshu. I kind of knew a little bit, but there was always, even in West Coast Avengers, everybody thought that Moon Knight was just weird, right? That he was like talking to himself, that he actually wasn't engaged with the actual Egyptian deity. I remember that even among the wackos, right, the West Coast Avengers,
00:12:14
Speaker
wacky characters. He was always on that edge. He was never like really part of that team. And I would only see him pop up in certain certain comics. I remember that he pops off a little bit Mindyke Sons, right? He was a part of that. I can't recall. I think he may have popped up there like once or twice, but he wasn't a big part of it at least.
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, he wasn't, you know, he was more a ghost writer and those characters, so really part of that. You know, but it seems like Marvel wants him to be associated with the Midnight Sun's, you know, brand right now. And I can't figure out if he's really like a street level hero or if he's, you know, I'm not sure where Marvel's trying to, you know, the studio is trying to position him. I'm not sure where, where is he right now in the, in the Marvel, the modern Marvel continuity?
00:13:02
Speaker
completely up to date on what he's currently doing. I haven't read the new series that's out now, although I've heard it's really good. But I haven't I haven't actually read it yet. It seems like for most of the what I've seen is like it seems like it's very much kind of a neoclassic type of take like it you know it's the
00:13:17
Speaker
very much in the same vein like Moenken was doing and that Houston was doing later on. It seems like very much that style of thing from what I've heard or from what, or at least what little bit I can piece together. But, you know, I think the best comparison for me for Moon Knight has not been, and I can't take credit for this, this is, you know,
00:13:37
Speaker
like Derek Ferguson, the host emeritus of the show, he's the one who told me this and it makes so much sense. He said the best comparison, he's like, no, he's not Moon Knight, he's not Marvel's Batman. Moon Knight is Marvel's take on the shadow. And that makes so much more sense. So it's funny you bring that up because I started reading a little bit about him and he has like a crew of contacts, right? So prior to him having these like multiple identities,
00:14:04
Speaker
If I remember correctly, those characters were supposed to be disguises that he wore to interact with his network. And that's very much in line with the shadow. That definitely sounds a lot more like the shadow, especially given the more violent take.
00:14:20
Speaker
that moon knight has on you know how he deals with criminals and things like that that's definitely part of the shadow environment as well plus the mystical element right the shadow is supposed to have some sort of mysticism some you know some mystical powers from the far east that totally lines up and it makes makes a lot more sense to me than this batman comparison which i think is like
00:14:42
Speaker
not a great comparison, especially now having thought about the original character and now having seen the show, it's not really a great fit. But as sort of like a pulp hero, Marvel's version of a pulp hero, that makes a lot of sense to me. Exactly, like the shadow, the spider, all of those. And you're right. When he first started out, the identities were very much covered, because he had made all his money from being a bastard of a mercenary and traveling the world
00:15:10
Speaker
killing people. And so then when he came back, he created the Stephen Grant persona to kind of legitimize himself and his money and all that. And then he also created the Jake Lockley persona to be kind of like the man out of the street. But over time, he spent so much time in these different personas
00:15:30
Speaker
that they ended up developing in their own personalities. And part of it also had to do with the way his supporting cast would treat him. Like, for example, you had, you had Frenchie who was Jean Paul Duchamp who's, you know, just gets a reference in the cell phone. He's, you know, very much like
00:15:49
Speaker
kind of like an Alfred type character, but he was his pilot. So he was his partner when he was a mercenary, he still calls him Mark. But you have Marlene who became the Layla character in this series. She's very much like the Vicki Vale, lowest lane love interest type. She always referred to him as Steven. And then you had the contacts. One of the places you would always go to is he'd spend a lot of time in the Jake Lockley persona at this diner.
00:16:17
Speaker
So like you had the woman who was running the diner, her kids, and then the crawly character who was the statue character in this show. They were like his street informants and they'd all refer to him as Jake Lockley. So he had these different people in his life, all these people he was closest with were all referring to him by different names. And he's transitioning between the different identities and spending so much time in them that eventually they did develop into their own personalities over the course of the character's existence.
00:16:46
Speaker
which writer really brought the DID to the forefront? You know, I'm actually not sure because I don't know when it happened exactly. It's been a while since I've read the mowing stuff all the way through, but I wanna say that it started there, but I don't think it was fully fleshed out there. I think it may have come, it may have happened in that gap period that Marvel hasn't released those stories back into print yet.
00:17:15
Speaker
Hmm. See that, that, that's what I'm thinking about because this is definitely like one of the reasons I never got that excited about reading Moon Knight is because anybody I talked to about Moon Knight, I got like four different stories of who the character was. It was like, he's a mercenary, he's a billionaire, he's this, he's that. And I was like, well, none of this makes sense. And it's definitely like the, a pastiche of like a variety of different writers taking a crack at the character.
00:17:40
Speaker
And the best thing about the character has always been the visual. And for a long time, prior to, I think maybe the 90s or even the early 2000s, I think sometimes the character was like a visual looking for a story that could hook a large enough audience to get people to really say like, oh, we really think this is cool. We really want to
00:18:02
Speaker
you know, read this comic and then be a part of it. Because a lot of people that I've spoken to, they're very infatuated with, you know, the way the character looks. Yeah. Both in the traditional look. And some people really love the Mr. Knight book, which we get a, you know, a chance to see in this series. And, you know, some people just like some of the paraphernalia, some of the other stuff associated with it. So a lot of it has to do with those visuals. And, you know, when Bill St. Cambridge is like the first guy to really come out and do your art,
00:18:30
Speaker
that's going to have a huge impact. I follow him on Instagram and on Twitter and I love it when he's sharing these pages from that run because they're really beautiful pieces of art and I'm glad people are rediscovering those issues now.
00:18:47
Speaker
Oh yeah. I mean, Sankiewicz, I mean, you want to talk about a guy who elevated comic art to a totally new level. He's definitely one of those guys. He's one of the top talents in the business and his work on Moon Knight, his work on New Mutants.
00:19:02
Speaker
Unbelievable. Even in other ways, like, you know, in my other podcasts, E for Evolution, we talked about some of the issues that he had done the inks on John Paul Leon's art. And even just as an anchor, he was amazing. Like, he's just, you know, amazing talent all around. And yeah, Moon Knight,
00:19:22
Speaker
There's so much about the visual and he's a unique character in that. I think he hasn't really had a bad costume design. I mean, the Egyptian type stuff in the Fist of Kanchu era looked a little bit odd, but it wasn't necessarily bad, right? You don't have any type of thing where it's like you can point to some design and you're like, oh my God, what were they thinking? Like all around, it's had very strong design, even when they've done pretty big departures like the Mr. Knight stuff, which started in the Warren Ellis run.
00:19:50
Speaker
I think the most you could probably say is that sometimes his look is a little washed out. Like if the artist doesn't highlight the stuff on the white suit, right? Then it just looks like, oh, he's some kind of white suit. So sometimes I think that happened a lot in West Coast Avengers where the costume didn't pop the way it really should have. But in his own book, in the solo book, I've always thought that it looked good. Maybe in some of the guest appearances and things like that, it just doesn't,
00:20:20
Speaker
I mean, the artists just didn't have enough time to really like put the effort into the costume, but really, you're right, the designs have always been good. I mean, Sainkevich, I think he had a real talent for, because, you know, especially back then, it was really tough to do
00:20:37
Speaker
Some character that was all white, like the coloring process and all that was really it wasn't as advanced as it is now and sign cabbage had this talent of really kind of working with the environment and using
00:20:52
Speaker
almost like negative space in a way when he was drawing it. And that really kind of made it pop out. And that was a thing that not many other artists really had the same skill that he had to be able to really work with that L white costume, which was probably why in the Fist of Kanchu era, they added all the gold accoutrements and all that kind of stuff.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, you need that. Sometimes, you know, I remember this conversation about like Superman's trunks, right? Like people are like, oh, why does he wear underwear outside of his pants? But it's really to break up the visual a little bit, right? That's a big part of it. And so having the gold does help with that. I think other artists, I'm thinking prominently of Stephen Platt, who
00:21:29
Speaker
he did a lot of stuff around the shading, around the white of the costume. And so the costume was totally white, but the way that he had, you know, he zinker kind of like shaded everything. He highlighted a lot of the body, the physical kind of like musculature underneath the costume. And I think that made it look really interesting.
00:21:49
Speaker
And I think Jeff Lemire also has done some really interesting art for Moon Knight. I think that was, Jeff Lemire was the writer on that. I think it was Declan Shelby, I believe. That's right. Well, no, I think Shelby did the War and Alice run. I'm not sure who did it with Jeff Lemire. Yeah, so I remember Jeff Lemire has, he's got the really great
00:22:11
Speaker
contour design that pops up in the in the series that the bird design but then also the costume during his run is I think also really cool looking. Ryan I think it has some you know it has some really interesting elements. I also came across like an earth x version of moon knight that looks more like a mummy than some of the other versions right. Yeah it was Greg Smallwood who did the Jeff Lemire run.
00:22:37
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. He did a really great, great job. Right. He's another artist who has that kind of like,
00:22:43
Speaker
minimalist type style where he can, he's able to make it work without, you know, using the too many lines or anything like that. So they're able to use like very much just flat white coloring as opposed to Steven Platt, which, you know, his style doesn't really work that way. He's a very kind of, you know, very much the nineties style with lots of line, line work, lots of rendering. So they use a lot of like blues and purples and like off white to handle the shading and that to really kind of make it pop.
00:23:11
Speaker
So that's kind of the background of this character. And for most of the time, when we talk about TV shows on this show, we tend to split them up a little bit. So we're gonna see how this works out with this. So we're gonna kind of front load this discussion right now with the first three episodes, kind of see how much we have to say about them and then we might end up splitting this up into two episodes. But let's talk about those first three episodes. So we had the goldfish problem, some in the suit and the friendly type.
00:23:38
Speaker
What was your thought on these three episodes? So I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of the context of kind of Marvel as like dominant cultural engine, right? So one of the big complaints that you see online is people are always saying, well, Marvel is just doing the same thing. It's like a factory. Here's this pre-process.
00:24:00
Speaker
you know, package thing and you're either gonna like it or you're not. And I think the first episode especially for Moon Knight, they departed from a lot of those things, a lot of those things that we kind of take for granted. There's some jokes here and there, but it is off-putting. It's a very kind of shocking beginning, partly because you don't know what's going on with this character. Number one, the character has a terrible British accent. Like an intentionally, you know he's doing it
00:24:29
Speaker
poorly on purpose. Like this is not a real British accent. You know, the character isn't dynamic or even that suave or funny. Usually the characters that we see in Marvel movies, you know, they have some characteristic that you could really latch on to. Steven Grant, as he's presented here, is kind of a fop. Like he's not, you know, there's nothing there where you're like really, oh, I think he's cool. I really want to hang out with him. You're really confused as to why the story seems to be about him in the same way that like
00:24:59
Speaker
when he's in some of those adventurous moments with Harrow and everybody else, people are confused like, what the hell are you doing here? You don't belong here. But I think the ending sequence of the first episode is maybe one of the strongest moments. It's one of the biggest, the costume looks great, the costume reveal looks really good. But I remember when the episode first came out, I think people were kind of like surprised and they weren't sure what to make of it.
00:25:26
Speaker
And also, there aren't many, you know, there's not a lot of connections to the larger MCU. No, very. Yeah, very few direct connections. There are tiny ones if you if you're paying attention, there's little tiny things there's like they have the the GRC, the Global Repatriation Council logo on a bus which came from Falcon and Winter Soldier.
00:25:49
Speaker
I can't remember how to pronounce her name, but the hippo character, she talks about the ancestral plane from Black Panther. And there's some other tiny little ones here and there, but yeah, very, very few larger connections to the larger MCU.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I think I think that's one of the things that maybe made the made the show really unique and really interesting and kind of kind of drew me in a little bit. I was a little iffy on the first episode. I don't know. How did you feel as a fan of the character? How did you feel watching that first episode?
00:26:20
Speaker
So, you know, I had kind of the, I think we both came at this from opposite, we both had kind of opposite reactions to it. Whereas the first episode, like, I love the first episode, that grabbed me right away. And I knew going, I knew just from that first episode, I'm like, okay, this is really different from what I remember the character. I mean, they've got the whole multiple personality stuff, but Stephen Grant is, you know, they just completely invented a new character.
00:26:44
Speaker
reason for that character, a new personality type, all of that is completely invented by the show. And I think a large part of that was, no, I know that a large part of that was because of those Batman comparisons. They were worried that if they had him being like a suave billionaire, like Steven Grant is in the comics, right away people will be like, oh, he's Batman, but with Marvel. And I think, or also the other worry is if they have him be like this smooth,
00:27:11
Speaker
you know, fast talking rich guy, then it'd be like, oh, it's Tony Stark, but now he's played by Oscar Isaac instead of Robert Downey Jr. So I think they were very intentionally trying to get away from that, which is why they crafted the Steven persona. And I didn't mind that change. Like I didn't, I'm not so wedded to the idea that Steven Grant has to be this billionaire suave guy. I thought what they did with him in that first episode, I thought it was really interesting. And I was there for it. I was on board for the ride, like the,
00:27:39
Speaker
and his whole like his blackouts, the whole, you know, insomnia aspect, the chaining himself to the bed and all that kind of stuff. Like for that first episode, when he wakes up and he's chained to the bed and I'm just like, what, what, what's this? Like right away, I'm just asking questions. And, you know, for, for me as a fan going in to make me ask questions and I'd say, Oh yeah, I see. That's a reference to that. That's a reference to that. I think that's, that's a cool aspect of it.
00:28:03
Speaker
So even though it wasn't connected to the comics at all, at first the show really grabbed me. As the show went on, and I think a lot of people who aren't Moon Knight fans, I think they kind of had this reaction, whereas I think Moon Knight fans had probably a little bit more extreme than my reaction. But as the show went on, I became a little bit more detached from it. Whereas like my wife, she became more invested in it as the show went on.
00:28:32
Speaker
Okay, see, that's interesting. I definitely think that the show, one of the challenges in adapting the show, adapting the comic, is that there are so many different iterations of the character that they really needed to remix this and come up with something new that would function on its own because there's each iteration, like the Warren Ellis, Mr. Knight character is really different from the Doug Mohan stuff. It's so starkly different
00:29:01
Speaker
that to kind of create a cohesive narrative out of that, I think they really, they did the best that they could to kind of like piece everything together the way that they thought they should. And I did, you know, I found that that first episode, it was a little disorienting because I did miss that moment of like saying like, oh yeah, I know what that's about. I get that. I see this reference.
00:29:22
Speaker
it was more like, oh, okay, I have to actually keep up with it. I think the other thing is that the show really does require you to pay attention, right? Like you couldn't, you know, you couldn't like wash your dishes and then also just watch the show because stuff happened and stuff mattered. You know, and I think it's like little things really mattered. So like even the first shot of the show where Ethan Hawke is breaking glass and putting it into the sandals, that comes back later.
00:29:50
Speaker
And there's, you know, it's like a totally strange image, but it matters at some later point. So I really think that that's, that's one thing I'm not sure if everybody was prepared for that, for the level of detail at the level of concentration that there were.
00:30:05
Speaker
going to need to really get the most out of it. But I like that. As I was rewatching it, I was like, oh, I'm picking up on a lot more stuff. So if people didn't really like the first time through, I might suggest you rewatch it just to see if you could pick up on the story a little bit more and see a little bit more of the depth of what's going on. Yeah. I think that's one of the problems, too, that you mentioned was because of all the different iterations.
00:30:31
Speaker
And I think that's one of the weaknesses of the show is that they're trying to pull from all these different iterations, but they're also trying to make it into something new. And I don't think, at least for me, it doesn't quite all fit together the way I want it to. And in the end, it started off really strong for me. And then by the time we ended,
00:30:56
Speaker
It's kind of funny, it's like the opposite of the reaction I had watching Hawkeye. Hawkeye, I became more and more invested in the longer it went on. Moon Knight, I became less and less invested in it the longer it went on. And it was a big part of that, because it was just that the fact that it's, I think also I get a feeling that the creators really wanted to, they seem to be a lot more invested into telling a story about
00:31:24
Speaker
a superhero influenced by Egyptian mythology as opposed to telling a story about moon night.
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah, I do think that, you know, the version that we saw, and it's kind of clear in the first episode, because I don't really remember Moon Knight fighting a lot of Egyptian themed like monsters, right? That's not like his thing. He, you know, I remember him fighting just like other mercenaries. Like his big villain is Bushman, right? Like another, you know, another mercenary. So to see him fighting more mystical characters was a little bit surprising.
00:32:03
Speaker
But actually, as the show went on, I did enjoy kind of leading into the Egyptian mythology of it all. I think that if they give this a season two, you can always go back and do a Bushman-type story. You can always go back and do a more mercenary-oriented story that might be a more direct adaptation of something from the comics. But to start off, to say, hey, this is distinct. This is a little different.
00:32:31
Speaker
Here's his mystical stuff. Here's his all this Egyptian mythology that you might not have seen or might not have expected. Over time, that really worked for me. It was a little off-putting in the beginning. I found the first two episodes
00:32:44
Speaker
When I was first watching them, to be a little confusing, I was like, okay, I guess we're gonna move between these two characters and we're gonna have the blackouts and then we're gonna have this. But I thought some of it was good. I think the one thing that was really consistent throughout, I think the action was very good across the series. For MCU TV shows, I think it's up there with Hawkeye in terms of action. Oh, absolutely, yeah.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the story is different enough. Your mileage may vary about how much you want to invest in it, but I think that's also due to the performance. I think Oscar Isaac, right out of the gate, I think does a great job. Did you see him as Moon Knight during the first couple episodes?
00:33:34
Speaker
Definitely as Mark Spector. When he slips into the Mark Spector role, that's definitely Mark Spector. He was perfect. And it was a little off-putting at first to see Oscar Isaac. Because if you had told me before I'd seen the trailer for this or before I had seen the first episode that Oscar Isaac is going to play this foppish guy with a bad British accent, and he's going to look like
00:34:00
Speaker
a total incompetent mess who, you know, he can't get his life together. He can't get a girl, all that. I'd be like, no, that's not possible. I mean, at the end of the day, it's Oscar Isaac, right? He's, you know, the guy's suave. You can't, it was my problem with Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker, where I'm looking at him like, you are way too cool for Peter Parker. You're awesome as Spider-Man, but as Peter Parker, you were just way too cool. You cannot turn that off.
00:34:24
Speaker
And I had the same thought about Oscar Isaac. I'm like, there's no way he could not be charming. And then I watched him in that first episode. I'm like, oh, my God, he is really pulling this off. And then when he slips into the mood, the Mark Spector role, I'm like, it was it was it was so much like watching Christopher Reeve change from Clark Kent to Superman that, you know, that's in the first Superman movie when he takes off the glasses, he stands up. Right. Very similar like that scene when he's in the bathroom and he's looking at himself in the mirror and he just completely transforms into a different guy.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if I didn't know better, you could have convinced me that was two different actors. Yeah, yeah, or twins or something like that. Or twins, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I really think that the thing that really impressed me, not just the fact that Oscar Isaac is like, you know, able to turn off the, whatever charm he's got, he was able to tamp it down, but the scenes where he's speaking to himself, even in the first episode where it's Mark speaking to Steven, they're distinct.
00:35:23
Speaker
Their vocal patterns are different. Their characters are really different. And it's just him playing against himself. And so as an acting exercise, it's really an impressive exercise to see.
00:35:36
Speaker
be able to pull this off and to be able to do that. You know, I kind of think that, you know, the other really good actor in this is Ethan Hawke. I think he's given a lot less to work with. And, you know, it makes like his Arthur Harrow is meant to be menacing, but sometimes he just comes across a little bit kind of lackadaisical maybe, I don't know. So he's not really, he's not given as much to do to kind of compete against that Oscar Isaac performance.
00:36:04
Speaker
I mean, it's such a hard performance to compete against too. I mean, it's just, you know, he...
00:36:09
Speaker
And like you were saying, those scenes when he's talking himself, those were, aside from probably the action scenes, those are my favorite scenes in the show, was just watching him play off himself. And not only the vocal patterns, the tone of voice, but even just like the small little facial text. Like he really worked hard to develop these as each separate and distinct personalities. Even at the end, when we see Jake Lockley, right? And the last steps, we only get that one,
00:36:34
Speaker
brief glimpse of him. But even in that, he is completely separate from Mark and Stephen. And that is, yeah, I mean, I cannot say enough good things about Oscar Isaac. I've got a lot of criticisms of this show. I cannot say one bad thing about Oscar Isaac. He just knocks out of the park every single scene he's in. Yeah, he really, I mean, he really committed and you get that commitment right from the get go. You know, you get to see all of that, like right from the beginning. And, you know, especially for a guy like Oscar Isaac, who's
00:37:03
Speaker
you know, kind of a capital M movie star level actor to kind of be this doofus and kind of be, you know, especially in the first episode to kind of come across as like totally lost is I think really is a vulnerable kind of performance. I think it's also really interesting that he is
00:37:23
Speaker
able to kind of show how, you know, by being this like kind of lost person and starting at Steven was also surprising to me because I knew that Mark, you know, that Mark Spector was the main person. So I'm like, why are we spending so much time with Steven Grant? That doesn't seem right. But I think that that turned things around a little bit to show that, you know, having this multiple personality issue was causing problems not just for
00:37:51
Speaker
our main character, Mark, but also for his other personality. Right. I want to talk more about the Egyptian mythology aspect, because one of the things I loved about the comics and which I feel like one of the I think I would have appreciated this more. And like you said, they can go back and they can do they can do the more the grounded stories where he's like in New York or wherever he's fighting, you know, more of the the standard moon knight villains. And yeah, that's all true. But one
00:38:21
Speaker
but they've let the genie out of the bottle in one aspect. And it's the aspect that is Kanshu real or not. Because that's something that was always kind of this question in a lot of the moon night stories. Like, you know, is Mark really, you know, does he really have powers? Is he really been resurrected by Kanshu? Or is he just fucking nuts?
00:38:41
Speaker
Cause just like you said, like in West Coast Avengers when they're, they're always wondering, why is he talking himself? That, that was one of the kinds of things. Like there's always this idea of like, is Conchua a real thing or is this just, you know, is Mark just so fractured from reality? Cause we already know he's got these different personalities that Conchua was just another one of these personalities. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so there's, have you ever, you've seen this panel where Moon Knight is speaking to Punisher, right? There's a very famous panel where, you know, uh,
00:39:10
Speaker
You know, Punisher basically asked him like, Oh, are you still talking to your fake God? You know, he's like, yeah, he's like, how's your fake God? He says he's good. How's your dead family? How's your dead family? Right. We're not gonna, we could get that joke in the MCU, but it's not going to hit the same.
00:39:25
Speaker
Right. It's not going to hit the same because we know country was real. We know country was is an actual character. I think that the reason or one of the maybe one of the pressures of putting moonlight out there is to kind of create a big enough, you know, villain or big enough story, you know, and so you have to lean into the Egyptian mythology. So it's not just enough to have him like fight a mercenary or something. You know, we got to start off by having him save
00:39:55
Speaker
you know, everyone from, you know, the Egyptian afterlife or whatever. So I think that sometimes that's one of the, that's one of the criticisms I've heard a lot about Marvel is that they're always trying to go for like the same type of ending or the same types of stakes. And maybe, maybe that kind of, you know, stretched the story a little bit further than it needed to be and took away one of the elements from the comics. Though I do think that the focus here was
00:40:24
Speaker
I think they were trying to be really careful about how they showed dissociative identity disorder and also to kind of, you know, to not treat Konshu as another personality just to, for the sake of treating him as another personality. There is a very specific role that Konshu seems to play and that is like a very anti-hero type role. And, you know, he's very much,
00:40:54
Speaker
It's funny that he hates Steven as much as he does. I don't know if that's true to the comics, if he hates some of the personalities that Mark has more than others. I don't recall that being something in the... I could be wrong. I could be 100% wrong. Like I said, it's been a while since I've done a deep read through of the Moon Knight stuff.
00:41:14
Speaker
I don't recall him having like any real animosity between the different personalities. I think there are some times when, which I thought the show did in a really cool way to have like the Mr. Knight persona be like Steven's version of Moon Knight and to have like the more the superhero version to be, which seemed also inspired by that Earth X take with the bandages and all that to be more Mark's take on it. I thought that was a cool little thing because there have been times in the comics when
00:41:44
Speaker
different personalities have had more control over him. So like the, I think it was the vengeance of Moon Knight series that came after the Charlie Houston stuff. And that one, I believe it was mostly the Jake Lockley persona that was driving the things. So can I ask, does Jake Lockley have a significantly different costume than the other character? No, it's just in, well, in that series, Moon Knight's costume was a little bit different, but it wasn't to the extent of the different personalities have different costumes.
00:42:13
Speaker
Yeah, because there is a thing we should spend more time talking about when we talk about episodes four to six. But there is something with Jake Lockley that we don't really see him in a traditional moonlight costume. So I think we have a question about that. Yeah. Well, we also see some of that here. There's that one scene when
00:42:34
Speaker
when Mark takes over the body. And I think this is an episode two or three. And he sees all the dead people and he asked Steve, he's like, did you do that? And Steven was like, are you kidding? I've been trying to stop you from killing every book. It's not me who did that. So there are these little, and like you said, that's one of those things that when you go back and you watch the series all the way through, like me as a moonlight fan, my first thought was, oh, was that Jake Buckley? Is Jake coming through? And then going back and then when you see the end and then going back and watching all the way through, then you can pick up
00:43:02
Speaker
Ah, I see where the Jake stuff started now. Yeah. Yeah. I did. I kind of knew that because even in the end credits, they show you that he has three personalities, right? If you watch the end credits, he's got three faces and you're like, okay, he's got, you know, there's a third persona. There's this little Easter egg that's kind of hidden up until the very end.
00:43:25
Speaker
And I think that that's really interesting that there's there's this like, you know, pressure to kind of figure out where what what moon knight is where where he happens to fall. I think it's also that they really wanted to introduce the character.
00:43:40
Speaker
with as many of the personalities as possible. And I don't know if they wanted people to like wonder if country was real or not. No, that definitely doesn't seem like something they were fixated, which is a choice. And it's not a choice I necessarily agree with, but I can understand the reasons why they made that choice. Yeah. And it's interesting. We're talking about the costume and everything. I think costume design of the show is really good, except for Arthur Harrop. I feel like that costume,
00:44:10
Speaker
could have been a lot better. And I didn't mind that like, you know, Ethan Hawke is basically rocking like a Nehru jacket. And he's like, he looks like he was wearing something that my dad would have worn in like 1978, you know, which I find very funny, but I wish they had done a little bit more with the costuming for him near the end when he gets, you know, when he changes and things like that. But overall, you know, costume design and production design, I thought was very good, you know, for this.
00:44:40
Speaker
And, you know, I really do wonder where they're going to, where they're going to take things. And I did wonder that at the at the end of Episode three, you know, about where, where things were going. I think they did a good job of, you know, with, I know that
00:44:56
Speaker
you know, the May Calamari character is very different from his wife in the comics, right? Like she's supposed to be French in the comics. I can't remember if she's supposed to be French, but she's definitely supposed to be white.
00:45:12
Speaker
Yeah, Marlene Alrin, I think is her name in the comics. And yeah, she has this relationship with him. She eventually leaves him and then she's kind of a recurring character in the Houston stuff. And I don't know what she's up to now. I can't remember what exactly happened to her, but I think they ended up separating completely. Another thing you don't have in here is you don't have Frenchie. You don't have John Paul Duchamp in here, which I thought
00:45:42
Speaker
It was, it was, I can understand why, because they got so much stuff to deal with. And in a way, Leila does kind of fill both the Frenchie role and the Marlene role. So I can kind of understand why they felt Frenchie may have been too much or may have been a little bit, a little bit too, a little bit, what's, I can't, you know what I'm talking about, but I can't figure out the word I'm talking about. It would have been redundant, right? There you go, thank you, yes. You didn't, you didn't, you know,
00:46:11
Speaker
I think they made a choice to have Layla take on more of those traits. And I think there could be a story that's just dedicated to Frenchie to bringing him in as part of like the moon knight crew. Right. I think that's one of the things that maybe is
00:46:26
Speaker
is missing a little bit from the show is that because the show is so focused on Mark and on Steven, that you don't have as big of a ensemble cast as you potentially could have, right? It's really Oscar Isaac is his own, you know, he's half man, half dog, he's his own best friend. Right. It's like, that's how this worked out. So I just think that
00:46:47
Speaker
And I'm amazed that Isaac was able to pull this off. I don't know how that's gonna work if you bring in some of these other characters in a season two. It'll be really interesting if they put him, if they bring Moon Knight into another series or another show. Like if he pops up in Daredevil, what is that gonna look like? Is he gonna be popping between costumes and personalities and like making people really confused?
00:47:16
Speaker
How is that going to work? I'm interested in that, especially because now we've got two different costumes for two different personalities. What does that actually mean later on? But I do think that the Leila character
00:47:32
Speaker
She's one of my favorite parts of the show because I think they did a great job giving her a real arc. They gave her, you know, it was nice to see her be a little combative with, you know, with Steven and with Mark. And it's also, I think, nice to see a married couple vibe on an MCU show. That's one of the things I like about Ant-Man and Wasp. They definitely feel like they're a couple. Sometimes, you know, sometimes the characters don't always feel that way, like,
00:48:02
Speaker
Pepper and Tony didn't always feel like they were a couple because they were just doing corporate speak for a bit. So I really did think that that was kind of nice. And they were a grown up couple. That's the other thing that they were like, you could tell they had some history and they did a good job of kind of communicating that in the beginning. And I think she kind of comes across as a badass. She does a good job like helping him out and kind of saving him a couple of times.
00:48:31
Speaker
And I think that her connection with Steven is also really helpful to the core story. But I think that's also very different from the comics. I don't think he has, he has Frenchie and not this, I don't think his wife goes on adventures with him in any of the runs, really. To an extent, not to the same extent that Layla does, but to a smaller extent, she gets involved in some of the cases.
00:48:57
Speaker
But one of the things you mentioned in there too is, yeah, the married couple vibe, that was something I really liked about them. And that's one of my favorite things about, I'm not sure if you watch Superman and Lois at all, but one of my favorite things about that show is the Clark Lois dynamic and how it's there, this married couple and with all this history and Tyler Hopeland and Betsy Tulloch, they'd really do a great job of making you believe that these two characters have been together for, you know, 15, 20 years.
00:49:25
Speaker
Um, and so, and it's a very mature relationship too. It's, you know, you know, like there's one of my favorite examples of this is when he has to do Superman stuff and he's not able to do something that Lois asked for his help with. And then when he comes back and you know, and she's like, look.
00:49:42
Speaker
I understand that you had to do Superman stuff and I'm, and it's wrong for me to be mad about that logically I know that, but I'm still mad and you know I just have to I just need a minute and I'm just like that was, that was that made sense that was a grown up reaction to what was happening right it's you can't help this.
00:49:58
Speaker
you know, this emotion that you're feeling, but at the same time, you can logically understand why it's ridiculous to feel that way. Whereas in most of the comics, when they do that, it does feel like the love interest is being petty and being selfish. So I like that they found a way to work that out and make it seem realistic.
00:50:17
Speaker
Yeah, they did a great job with that. And now, you know, I, Superman and Lois is on my list, but I may have to move it up a little bit. It's so good. I do love Superman, so I will put that on the list as well. But yeah, I definitely felt like, and you could tell that they had some history, you know, and I think it's kind of, it makes the story a little bit
00:50:39
Speaker
you know a little bit more fun to have them kind of pair up especially when we get to episode four i think that in episode three as well when they start to really do stuff together you start to see some real uh some real sparks i think it's also important because you know so much of
00:50:55
Speaker
comic book history is about like oh I need to hide my girlfriend from you know getting getting into trouble with me or she can't know so this dynamic I think creates a much better more equitable vibe but I think it also came at the cost again of
00:51:13
Speaker
I really felt like one of the weaknesses of the show was not Ethan Hawke as the villain, but he just didn't have as many people to really bounce off of me. He had a lot of followers, but nobody that was at his level until the very, very end.
00:51:32
Speaker
You know, so that I think was kind of a limitation, a bit of the show. Yeah, I do want to talk about that. But I want to mention one thing I want to mention too about the Layla side of things is I like that they found a twist on the traditional superhero love triangle.
00:51:51
Speaker
The traditional superhero love triangle is you've got the superhero identity, the civilian identity, and the love interest. And that's the traditional love triangle, like Superman, Lois, and Clark Kent type of thing. They had a version of that, but it's an interesting take on it because you've got Mark, you've got Steven, and then you've got Layla.
00:52:12
Speaker
Yeah. And she knows they're both the same guy, but they're different aspects of the same guy. And she starts having these feelings towards Steven. I thought it was a really, it was a really cool twist on that aspect of it. Yeah. I mean, like competing, competing with some other side of yourself, but it's also really true about, I think in some, in some relationships, you know, depending on context,
00:52:35
Speaker
your partner may enjoy their time with you in a certain context versus another, right? And that's going back to like Carl Rogers' ideal self theory, right? Where we talk about which self you can tend to activate. It's really interesting to see that that you have this character who's able to kind of flip between these different personalities and still be appealing to the same person. When I realized that they were just going to let
00:53:05
Speaker
Leila learn about all of these different personalities. I was like, oh, they're really going with this. And it worked. I was worried that it wouldn't work at all. And then it really blossoms into something that I wasn't expecting. Yeah. I also did like the choice of
00:53:23
Speaker
changing of doing an Egyptian spin on Marlene. I thought it was a really cool choice. Overall, I think it's pretty much everything about Layla I think is an improvement over Marlene from the comics. So that's one of those differences from the comics that I think works really well with this. The fact that she's Egyptian herself, she's got this archeological background and her whole thing is going out and finding these artifacts and stealing them back. I thought that was a cool aspect too.
00:53:53
Speaker
and all of that kind of stuff. I loved all of that stuff. I thought that was a really, really good twist on it. And it made her feel a bigger part of the mythos as opposed to Marlene who her only connect, the only reason she hooks up with Mark is because of her father's connection to him. And so this makes her connection to Mark feel so much more organic.
00:54:18
Speaker
It does. So I have to say, haven't we all met somebody because of our dad for some reason, right? Who knew?
00:54:26
Speaker
I have to say that casting is a big part of this, and Mae Kalamawi, I think is wonderful in this role. If you saw the show, Rami, she's on that show. She's really great on that show as well, but he or she really levels it up into, you know, superhero and action level. And I would watch a totally separate action movie with just her as a star, because I think she does a great job, Karen. Yeah, she does a great job.
00:54:54
Speaker
um taking things and like you know showing
00:54:58
Speaker
you know, what a capable character she is in her own right. I mean, some of those scenes when she's basically stringing Steven along and kind of like having to explain things and do things for him and like, you know, even like putting the harness on the right way. I thought all of that was really good. Now, when it comes to the villain, now, Arthur Harrow's such an interesting choice. And I think this is really kind of symbolic of kind of the issue I have with the show as a whole, because if you look in the,
00:55:28
Speaker
if you try to find out what Arthur Harro's background is in the comics, because I'm sitting there thinking as I'm watching the show the first time, like, how come I don't remember Arthur Harro? I mean, like I've read like almost all the moonlight comics that are currently in print. How come I don't know this guy? I mean, cause usually when they do the first, you know, introduction of a character, they choose a villain that's very heavily associated with that character. So if you're doing Thor, you give him Loki, you know, you're doing, um,
00:55:54
Speaker
you know, Spider-Man, well, that's a different story because they brought in some other ones there. But, you know, Iron Man, you bring in Iron Monger, eventually you bring in Mandarin, all these different characters, you're bringing in some threat that they're very closely known with. And I couldn't figure out where Arthur Harold comes from. And I looked it up. Turns out he's only in one issue, a Fist of Khanshu, and it has nothing to do with Egypt stuff. He's just,
00:56:18
Speaker
They had created a villain for the show, but they didn't have a comic book counterpart for him. And then the writer said he was just looking through, Marvel would give him a list of all the villains who had appeared in Moon Knight Comics. And he just saw the name Arthur Harrow. And he's like, oh, that sounds like a good name for a villain. I'm gonna use that. And I think that's one of the issues that I have with the series is they wanted to craft this story about
00:56:45
Speaker
an Egyptian mythology and an Egyptian themed superhero. And they wanted to do that story and they just kind of fit that onto moon night, regardless of it if it all fits together.
00:56:59
Speaker
And I think that's the biggest weakness for the show for me is it's a show about Egyptian mythology first and a show about moon night second. Kind of like when we were talking about Iron Man 3, my biggest complaint about it is it's a Shane Black movie first and Iron Man movie second. I see a lot of that here with this show too.
00:57:17
Speaker
See, that's really interesting. So that actually does explain why Arthur Harrow has like totally nondescript costume. Like, I don't know what they were thinking about it. And honestly, comparing it to the quality of the Moon Knight costume and one of the later costumes that comes up in episode six, I'm genuinely surprised that they kept going with the same outfit for Arthur Harrow because it was just bland. I was like, come on, you could do a little better for him.
00:57:45
Speaker
especially with the actor, the stature of Ethan Hawke, to give him a little bit more to do.
00:57:55
Speaker
I understood that he, you know, he was playing kind of a low key villain and kind of not, not this like mustache twirling type of person. But I really thought that there might have been a few more notes for him to play, especially given the backstory that they give where they basically say that he was the previous Fist of Konshu. Right. He's the previous Moon Knight.
00:58:18
Speaker
And that doesn't really come full circle at any point. It's interesting in the first couple episodes to hear him talk about Kanshu and his relationship with Kanshu. And I think it's interesting that they really amped up the level of toxicity in the relationship between Kanshu and his avatar.
00:58:38
Speaker
Right. In leadership terms, he's a coercive leader because he's just forcing people to do whatever he wants. Right. So it's really it's very interesting to see that. But there there isn't this like full circle moment between Konshu and Arthur Harrow that I would kind of expect. Yeah. And another interesting another weird aspect of it is.
00:58:59
Speaker
I think there was a way to do the the Khanshu's past avatar aspect of Harrow and also make it more personal to Mark because in the comic books, Mark's brother becomes a villain himself. First, he starts off as a serial killer, the hatchet man, and he injures Marlene. In fact, he kind of forces her into having a miscarriage, basically, for her injuries.
00:59:25
Speaker
and Mark kills him basically. And then he comes back as the Shadow Knight, which is kind of like this opposite version of Moon Knight. And very much how, you know, and in fact, it's kind of interesting because they took a lot of aspects from that Shadow Knight look and like the whole bandages and stuff like that. A lot of that comes from that Shadow Knight look that his brother had. And they kind of incorporated that into Moon Knight. So I think if you had done,
00:59:51
Speaker
the brother as the main villain, I think it would have been so much more personal and it would also have had both for Kanshu and for Mark too. So some of the decisions I think are in response to criticisms that Marvel has gotten. So one of the big criticisms is all the villain is always like somebody you're related to or he had the same power, you know, things like that. So maybe they were trying to create some distance. They also, they used his brother in a very different way, which we can talk about in
01:00:20
Speaker
when we talk about episodes four to six, but he pops up as something very different, which is an interesting choice. So I have some questions about what the thought process is beyond this season, like where do they think they're gonna take the character? So the Shadow Knight, who else are the big villains? Bushman? Bushman's a big one. Stained Glass Scarlet is a really intriguing villain. In fact, that's another way that you could have had
01:00:48
Speaker
especially amped up the mystery of it because in the comic books, you know, Stained Glass Scarlet, she's a woman who, she marries this guy who's connected with the mob and let me bring up her stuff really quick.
01:01:05
Speaker
That reminds me of, you know, the name alone reminds me of Typhoid Mary, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely get that comparison. So she became a vigilante. Her son actually ended up becoming a criminal. She had been abused by her father and then she had killed her father by lighting his bed with a cigarette and the death was considered an accident. Then she ended up marrying this small time criminal, believing that she could like kind of change him.
01:01:35
Speaker
And he also had abused her just like her father had. And he was gunned down on it. He was gunned down completely unrelated on the steps of the church. And his son ended up becoming a criminal, too. And she tried to save him from from a life of crime, but he couldn't do it. So eventually she ended up killing him. And then she started hunting down criminals who have ever had a hand in like turning her son into crime. And she has this
01:02:06
Speaker
She has this mysterious psychic bond with Moon Knight. So like when she concentrates on him, she can manifest in his dreams and stuff like that. And I think you could have really kind of played with that aspect and played with it, especially because, you know, these visions of Kanshu and all that and all the, I think that would have been a really intriguing way to do the series too is kind of have it more of a, an urban set mystery type of thing. And words like you're not sure who's,
01:02:33
Speaker
who here is like a real person who is who's not real and and I think that would have been a really interesting track to play as well. Is there a definitive you know like if you were to tell somebody here's the moon knight story like this is the thing you should read and this is the moon knight story that could have been adapted that you think they they missed out on? Not not so much I don't think there's like any
01:03:01
Speaker
Because moon night stories, most of them are are much more small than scale. There's like a lot of there's not like any you don't have like a Dark Phoenix saga for moon night. Right. It's just it's very much a lot of these a lot of these stories. They're like one issue, two issue stories that happen in these bigger runs. So
01:03:20
Speaker
Like the Doug Moenkerand especially had a lot of this stuff where it's like these one, two issue stories and they're very, they're very, they're much smaller in scale, which is why I think, I think one of the problems too is the format of these Marvel TV shows, right? Doing these six episode seasons. It's very much this kind of idea of we're doing a six hour movie.
01:03:43
Speaker
in a way. I don't think, I can't think of any moon knight story that really kind of fits that format. It's much more episodic, which is why I think if you're doing, which is, I think one of the, and it's ironic because one of the big issues that I had with a lot of the Netflix Marvel shows is they had too many episodes and it felt like it had this kind of like soggy soft middle section.
01:04:06
Speaker
If you do a moon night show and you do it like 10, 13 episodes, but instead of having like, you know, this idea of like, we have to have, it's like one big story stretched out over these 10, 13 episodes. I think you do these like one, two episode stories and you have it much more episodic. I think that would be a much more interesting way to do it because moon night is so much more about exploring these different characterizations, these different relationships than it is, you know, a big picture story type of thing.
01:04:34
Speaker
So that's interesting because one of the problems you mentioned with the Netflix shows is they're like 13 hour movies or they were just really long. I felt like the Netflix shows never had great
01:04:46
Speaker
single episodes. Whereas I think the moon knight show actually has like episode four I think is really really good. I felt like the the finale I really enjoyed. I kind of you know I liked the way that the premiere worked but it's still like a distinct unit of tv like you just watch that and it's a complete episode beginning to end. Whereas with like I remember with Daredevil
01:05:09
Speaker
or with, you know, God help me Iron Fist, things were just like happening sort of, and then it would just stop because they reached some sort of arbitrary minute limit. And I was like, yeah, okay, now we're going to start, you know, now this is over, we're going to move on to the next episode. But I never got that vibe from this series. I felt like they had a better understanding of
01:05:29
Speaker
episodic structure, things carried over. But I definitely saw that there was, oh, here's an adventure. Here's some part of this adventure that's happening. That's just this episode. Right. So but you're right. I think that, you know, maybe something kind of like
01:05:46
Speaker
Um, I don't know if you watch it in the CW DC show. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they did this thing in the CW shows where you would have a villain of the week and then a little piece of like a continuing story, right? So if you did that over eight episodes where you have these little like episodic moments like, Oh, you know, this week we're going to fight Bushman.
01:06:05
Speaker
And then the larger story, fighting against whoever Khanshu had a beef with, that would continue, right? I think the Marvel shows are very committed to telling like one story over an extended period of time, going back to WandaVision and even Falcon and the Winter Soldier. They're very, very focused on here's the story we're focused on, here's the thing we want, and we're going to accomplish it in this timeframe. They could
01:06:30
Speaker
be helped by having some of those more episodic, shorter, smaller stories, especially for a character like Moon Knight that has that in the history. You know, the reason I asked the question about like what story do you think should be adapted is I do think that there's something to be said for Hollywood adaptations where there's a clear through line of what the story should be.
01:06:54
Speaker
Like if there's already like an arc in a story, here's something, oh, I'm just going to pull it. I'm going to build it out of that. I think some of the, some of the wonkiness of this season could probably be attributed to Hollywood having to say like, okay, we've got all this stuff. Let's take all of the stuff, put it in a blender and then out comes the show.
01:07:15
Speaker
I think so too. And I think an earlier comment you made about this show kind of being Marvel almost responding to some of those criticisms. I think that's a very fair, I think that's a very good point. I think that's definitely playing into a lot of it. Like, you know, playing against the idea of him being Marvel's Batman. The idea of having, you know, a super villain who's related to the character or is like the dark mirror of the character in some way. All of that does kind of seem like they are, you know,
01:07:45
Speaker
almost kind of like afraid to go in those areas because they're kind of like prejudging what the criticisms will be and then just intentionally trying to do the opposite because of that. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, there are also
01:07:59
Speaker
you know, we're, we're what, you know, 10, 13 years in to, you know, this, this, you know, kind of amazing run, right? Actually even, even longer, right? So 2008, almost 15 years in. Almost 15, yeah. And yeah, so they've got to reinvigorate the brand somehow. And I think maybe the Disney Plus shows are giving them an opportunity to maybe play around with the format and to maybe try out as like test balloons to see what people are interested in, what they like about it, what they, you know,
01:08:28
Speaker
what they're responding to. I really, I wish there were viewership numbers for this show because I have no sense of how many people watched it or even how many people enjoyed it. You know, because I really do wonder like, I'm sure people tune into the premiere, but I wonder if they finished the entire series. If there was enough there for them to really say like, yeah, this was cool. I really want to watch more of it. Right. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not sure either. And I think that's one of the
01:08:55
Speaker
the issues you have with a show like this is, you know, how are we determining what the success is for it? It's right because you have very different standards from you have from like the Nielsen system or with box office numbers. So and they don't tell us what their standards are or what type of viewership numbers they're getting. So we don't really know. And a lot of it is just kind of like
01:09:21
Speaker
I guess maybe in some ways I can understand why they don't do this because then that kind of gives them the freedom to say like, well, we're going to kind of do what we want to do instead of doing what people are going to expect from us. So yeah, I think.
01:09:33
Speaker
Part of me is happy to see them trying new things and experimenting a little bit, but at the same time, I think the whole idea of episodic storytelling, it kind of feels like a lost arc almost because so many TV shows now are so geared to the long-form story approach that
01:09:54
Speaker
We kind of, and I think this is a problem with comic books in general today too, is that we've, we kind of forgot that you can do these short stories in like one issue or one episode. And, and I would like to see, if you're going to play with the format a little bit, I would like to see a little bit more of that. Like, you know, give us some more stuff that is more episodic. I think it would be interesting to see.
01:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that they're, I think Moon Knight's supposed to pop up in Werewolves by Night in the Halloween special, right? So it'll be interesting to see if they're supposed to be like one episode or maybe two episodes. It'll be interesting to see what they do with that because maybe they'll come back to that. Maybe they'll just do like, I would watch a 75 minute, you know, Moon Knight movie where he's battling one specific character and we don't have to worry about, you know, the overall implications.
01:10:44
Speaker
Though I have to say that I do like the fact that there aren't any heavy duty MCU connections to this. I like that it's its own thing and it feels distinct enough that it can stand on its own. Right. You know.
01:10:59
Speaker
Yeah, especially because I think Moon Knight as a character is a little bit like that. I figured we'll just do this all as one episode. So let's push into talking about the other three episodes as well. We can work those into this discussion. But I agree with you. I think it's one of the things that frustrates me about a lot of the MCU fandom is if they don't get
01:11:21
Speaker
all the cameos, they get annoyed and they get pissed off. And I'm just like, you know what? It's nice to see a cam... And I remember this with a lot of the Netflix shows or with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. when people were saying, oh, it doesn't have enough connections to the MCU. And I'm like, what the hell do you want? You want Iron Man flying overhead in every goddamn episode? I mean, it's okay. And you see that in the comics too. You have little connections here and there, but they're not gonna
01:11:46
Speaker
you know, throw cameos in every single issue because that's ridiculous. You know, these characters have other stuff to do. So, and especially when you're talking about these, you know, these, when you're getting these actors in, like you can't have Robert Downey Jr. popping up in an ABC TV show. Yeah, yeah. I do think that there's, well, I think there's also has to do with AIDS because I think you and I both remember when these Marvel shows
01:12:14
Speaker
even the DC shows, superhero shows, didn't have this level of detail or care. This is as far from the Roger Corman Captain America as we can get. That was a fantastic form. I think he did a Captain America too. There was a Captain America one, but he wasn't involved in that.
01:12:35
Speaker
Oh, okay. So yeah, this is as far as that, that mythical, like Roger Corman, Fantastic Four, as you know, we can, we can possibly have even, even the good stuff from that era, you know, related to Marvel, you know, even the stuff that was on like TV. I don't know if you remember watching the Hulk Thor Daredevil TV movie as a kid. I saw that and I was like, this is okay. It's not great.
01:13:00
Speaker
doesn't look anything like what I wanted, but whatever. So my comparison point for what a good comic book adaptation is like very different, I think, from maybe the younger MCU fandom who are like, hey, we need to get these in. I do think that this kind of functions as an interesting side area of
01:13:20
Speaker
You know, just, you know, like, Oh, here we're in the MCU version of Cairo. That was one thing I really loved is seeing like a realistic Cairo. I visited the city when I was in high school and I really loved it. And it's really nice to see like actual Egyptian people pop up in an MCU show. You know, whether it's the cab driver.
01:13:40
Speaker
having that conversation with a cabbie or having like Egyptian, you know, kind of thugs pop up. That was really fun. And I really enjoyed that part of it. I thought, wow, this is, you know, we're seeing not just like a character that's a little bit different, but a physical location in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we never get to see. So, you know, even the music is also like authentic Egyptian music, which is kind of cool.
01:14:07
Speaker
Yeah, they definitely leaned on the Egyptian influences a lot in that, which I thought it was cool. It's like, this is where I got these two sides of myself that are warring with each other. Whereas there's, I like all that stuff. I agree with you on all that stuff, but at the same time, as such a fan of the Moenk 80s and moon night stuff, I'm like, man, I wish we could have had more of that. Yeah, yeah, of course. So I've got that kind of push and pull a lot, but,
01:14:33
Speaker
And yeah, it is nice to see something that is not so, because yeah, like you said, when we were growing up, I remember watching Batman forever. And when Bruce says to Dick, the circus must be halfway to Metropolis by now. And I remember freaking out as a little kid, like, Metropolis, Superman's in the same universe. Dad, dad, Superman's in the same universe. And my dad's like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:14:57
Speaker
There we go, there we go. Yeah, I mean, that was exciting when you knew that there was those connections. So I think that that's really cool that we can have that. And I think there's a little bit of Marvel having its cake and eating it too, right? Like they're just like, hey, we can do this standalone story. I think it's also partly because it's really hard to fit Moon Knight into whatever the existing, you know, new young Avengers storyline that they're trying to do.
01:15:23
Speaker
And I wonder if they're going to have, I mean, I've read some theories that they're saying that they want moon night blade and.
01:15:31
Speaker
maybe Black Knight kind of like in a Midnight Suns or more mystical type team up at some point, which would be cool. But I don't think Moon Knight fits in that well with a lot of those other characters. We'll see if they can make that work. I think this version of Moon Knight might fit in a little bit better than as opposed to the comic book version because they're leaning so much on the mystical side of stuff. I think this one might fit a little, especially because we don't exactly know what kind of
Moon Knight Series and MCU Integration
01:15:58
Speaker
moon night we're gonna see with Jake Lockley. So that could definitely add more credence to that. Yeah, I could see a midnight sun things, but yeah, a lot of the stuff like I don't see.
01:16:10
Speaker
how you link this series more to the larger MCU without it feeling totally tacked on, right? I mean, I think they gave us a few little references here and there. They're very blink and you miss some type of things. And that's fine. I'm fine with that. On my list of grievances about this show, that's not even on there at all. Like I've got no problem with that aspect of it.
01:16:35
Speaker
So can I ask, as the show went on, I started to like things more and more, especially episode four, I thought was a real highlight. It felt like Indiana Jones a little bit in the MCU. And I thought that was a lot of fun, especially with the Layla character. And I thought that, speaking about episodic stuff, I felt like the twist and the ending of episode four was terrific. But you mentioned that as the show had gone on for you as a Moon Knight fan,
01:17:04
Speaker
you started to lose interest in it. So can you tell me a little bit about that? So it's just, to kind of show you of how they were kind of departing away from the Moon Knight comics, you have Anton Mogard in episode four, who actually is one of Moon Knight's classic villains in the comics, the Midnight Man. But he's, you know, basically the only thing that he's got in common with the comic book counterpart is the fact that he's this, you know, this kind of like art dealer, antiques dealer. That's about the only thing he has in common with him.
01:17:35
Speaker
And that's kind of a good way to look at it. It's like, it just, it's taking stuff further and further away from the source material. It's leaning, and they're not bad episodes, right? I'm not gonna say that this is a bad show or anything like that. It's very well done what they're doing. I think it's all really cool. I really liked Layla's journey and how she eventually, and I think even,
01:17:54
Speaker
the twist on the, the twist and the kind of like the revamping of the Scarlet Scarab character works pretty well in here. I think it's a good way to give her her own kind of superhuman identity and to kind of update a character that was nobody really remembers anyway. So, although I don't know, I don't know why you wouldn't just call her the Scarab when she's got nothing Scarlet about her, but that's another story. I mean, even the director, he had said that Marvel just kind of put the name on her after the fact.
01:18:25
Speaker
But other than that, like, I mean, it's just, it's good. It's just, it's just not moon night, right? It's kind of like how, you remember the Constantine movie with Keanu Reeves? Yeah, yeah, I do remember that.
01:18:38
Speaker
Good, perfectly fun movie, perfectly entertaining movie, but that's not John Constantine, right? As much fun as it is, as cool as it is to watch Keanu Reeves in that film, that ain't John Constantine, right? That's, you know, if you look over at Matt Ryan in the NBC show, that's John Constantine, right? So it's that kind of feel. Or also another good example is thinking about this Lucifer.
01:19:01
Speaker
loved the Lucifer TV series, right? So much fun to watch, beginning to end, just a total, you know, popcorn TV show, right? You know, Tom Ellis, brilliant performance, you know, so much fun watching him in that show. If you've ever read the Lucifer comics that Mike Carey did, completely different from everything in the show. Like the only things that are the same are you've got a character named Lucifer who's on earth, he's got a demon pal named Mazakine,
01:19:31
Speaker
and there's an angel named Amenadiel. That's about it. Everything else is completely different. Yeah, and I think that's also a function of like being on network TV, being on like the Lucifer comic. I mean, there's no way, I mean, that could have been like an HBO show, but no way is Fox. No way, no way, yeah. Yeah, like no way is that coming up as a live action adaptation. And I think, you know, that's where I think Moon Knight
01:20:00
Speaker
They did really, especially near the end, when I was rewatching the last couple of episodes with the fight scenes, they really leaned into the action part of it as well. I think that's another criticism that Marvel has heard a lot, is that their action is just not that good.
Moon Knight's Action and Future Directions
01:20:18
Speaker
And the third acts for most of their movies and TV shows people,
01:20:23
Speaker
you know, they don't seem to like very much, but I think this was actually a pretty good third act. You had a lot of nice little turn, you know, a few turns here and there. It was kind of interesting seeing two gods fight it out in addition to their avatars. I thought that was fun. I think it was nice to, you know, there was always like another little wrinkle that they put forward
01:20:48
Speaker
And, you know, I think it helped that I didn't have a strong attachment to the moonlight character that I kind of approached it, you know, and I said, OK, I guess we're I guess we're doing this now. I guess we're going to cross the Egyptian Sea of the Dead at this point. Right. Yeah, I definitely think, you know, like I said, my wife loved the show. She was much more invested in it than I was. Like every time
01:21:08
Speaker
You know, I got home on Wednesday night for work. She was always like, oh, it's time. New Moon Knight is out tonight. I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. Like she was the one who was remembering it and I wasn't because I wasn't as invested in it as she ended up being. And yeah, I think if you're not a Moon Knight fan, you're going to be a whole lot more invested in this show than if you are a Moon Knight fan.
01:21:28
Speaker
If you look online, I think you see a lot of those reactions are very much the same, like a lot of the the Moon Knight fans and they exist. We're not a big group, but we do exist. You know, a lot of them have been very cold on the series, whereas a lot of people who aren't really as familiar with the character really kind of dug it a lot more. And I think and I and I totally get that, you know,
01:21:54
Speaker
that just because it's not the same as the comics, that doesn't mean it's not valid. And like I said, you know, I love Lucifer. I love the Constantine movie.
01:22:01
Speaker
although it did take me time to get to those points, right? Like first time I saw Constantine in the theater, I fucking hated that movie. First time I saw Lucifer, I'm just like, this is really not what Lucifer is all about. And Lucifer, I ended up, you know, just cause it was such an entertaining show and it was just, it was on every week and I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. I'm like, all right, I'll watch to see what it's, I eventually,
01:22:27
Speaker
against my initial reactions became a fan of it. Same thing with Constantine. At first I hated it. Eventually I came around to liking it. Maybe I'll have the same reaction. And I don't hate Moon Knight, right? It's not something I despise or anything like that. It's just right now at this point in my viewing history with it, I am so much closer to the comics. In time, maybe I'll be able to come around to the show. But at this moment, it's a bit cold for me.
01:22:54
Speaker
So the way the character is right now, where would you like him to appear next? In addition, there may be a second season. If you can get Moon Knight into a project, like a future Marvel project, what do you think it would be? Do you see it as like Secret Invasion? Do you want to see him interact with She-Hulk? What would be the cool kind of fun thing? I mean, that's the hard thing because it's
01:23:19
Speaker
It's very much like you were saying about when he was with West Coast Avengers, it felt weird. I mean, even when he was in, you know, when Ed Brubaker was doing Secret Avengers, he put Moon Knight on the team and it felt kind of weird seeing Moon Knight on the team. It was nothing against those issues, but it was just, he always kind of felt like the one who doesn't,
01:23:44
Speaker
quite make sense to be part of this team. Also Nova too. I don't know why you put Nova on the Secret Avengers, but that's another story. Yeah, I mean, Nova at least has a history of being on a team. Like, Moon Knight seems like less of a team guy than even Wolverine. Yeah. People always say like, oh, he's not really a team guy, but he keeps popping up on teams. But at least there's something there. Moon Knight seems even less, like, especially if you're going with the, is he crazy, is he not, version of him. He really doesn't fit on a lot of these teams. Outside of like,
01:24:14
Speaker
And I feel like maybe Captain America tried using him for like secret missions during his secret Avengers time, that he would go on missions for things that like Captain America couldn't dirty his hands with or something like that. That I could kind of get. But for me, I would really like to see him maybe interact with Dr. Strange. I think that would be kind of fun. I think it would be kind of cool to see him
01:24:42
Speaker
you know interacting with some of the other uh you know some of the other legacy characters not the cosmic characters that i think we're going to get but seeing him maybe dealing with a with a daredevil
01:24:52
Speaker
or even a Punisher, maybe it's not the same type of Punisher moment that we saw from the comics, but maybe something else. It's also just kind of this weird, and I think it's the weird aspect of Moon Knight's character because he's not quite a mystical character. He's not quite a street level character. He's not quite an A-list character. He doesn't really fit easily into one of these boxes. So because of that, it's kind of hard to really,
01:25:20
Speaker
think about where I'd like him to be, who I'd like to see him interact with. I mean, like I said, the best moonlight stories have been kind of segregated from the larger Marvel universe. So and anytime he does interact in those larger ones, you get occasionally like, you know, like the Punisher moment. Right. That's a fun moment. But you can't really do a whole movie or whole TV show about that joke. No, that's true. And and all the other times when he's been involved, it's always just kind of felt like
01:25:48
Speaker
Like you were talking about, you know, the midnight suns thing and him, it's like, doesn't quite seem like he belongs here. Like I could see him in, but even in the werewolf by night when he, where he debuted, right? When he debuted in werewolf by night, the next time he appears, it's almost like a completely different character. So, yeah. I feel like, what is his origin story in that? Didn't Moen talk about like,
01:26:12
Speaker
the fact that he thinks that he's, you know, that he was just kind of somebody that he threw in there and then he helped him later. Yeah. That's basically what happened. Like there wasn't, like you read that first appearance and then you go and read like Moen's first issue of the moonlight series and night and day, right? It's like, it's kind of like you almost feel that, you know, some other guy was dressed up as moonlight in that first issue. Well, there you go. But dissociative identity sort of. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe it wasn't, maybe it wasn't different.
01:26:41
Speaker
Right. But yeah, and also, like, you're talking about the third act. One of the issues I had with the last episode, though, was actually the God fight, right? The whole, it did kind of feel like, and I had the same feeling when I'm rewatching Shang-Chi is, it feels like someone higher up at Marvel is like, hey, wait, wait, wait, we need a CGI, we need some CGI monsters fighting here in the background or something. And it took me out of it a little bit because I felt like the,
01:27:10
Speaker
Like you compare it to, Shang-Chi is a good comparison because you had this big CGI fight with all these demons and these otherworldly creatures fighting each other. And it felt really kind of hollow. Whereas what I wanted to see more of was the Shang-Chi Mandarin stuff. Whereas that was kind of overshadowed by this bigger fight with these dragons and all that kind of stuff.
01:27:38
Speaker
Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that with Shang-Chi, mostly because my favorite parts of Shang-Chi are like when he, when the bus fight is the part that I really like, right? Like if I really, you know, the third act really felt like, hey, let's get some big monsters in here so that people are kind of cool. But I feel like you could have busted out a couple of really big fight scenes at the end of some kind, you know, have him go back to his, you know, his sister or
01:28:07
Speaker
whoever and go back to that fighting arena, that would have been cool. Or show some more with Razor Fist, or even the Death Dealer who gets like, there's just that one brief fight scene. It seems like in all the trailers, all the lead up in the movie, he seems like he's going to be such a bigger focus. And then he just gets eaten by a CGI dragon, which is kind of a letdown.
01:28:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And very much kind of the same line because with Moon Knight and with Shang-Chi, a lot of the best action that you can do with those characters, they're very grounded, much more realistic type fight scenes, right? I mean, you're not dealing with characters like Iron Man or Thor who are a much better fit for that kind of like big CGI action. I mean, this is the time to,
01:28:56
Speaker
They're much more like, you know, much more like a Daredevil type fight scene where it's all very much grounded. It's real people, you know, throwing punches at each other. I wanted to see more of that and less of the giant CGI gods punching each other. So yeah, I definitely see, I actually really appreciated the fight scenes in this. I feel like the fight choreography is
01:29:18
Speaker
on par with what we, maybe a little bit less than what we saw with Shang-Chi, but they were pretty creative with how they use the multiple suits and the weaponry. I kind of dug the variety of weaponry that they had. I did get a huge kick out of the episode three fight where he gets stabbed by all those spears. I thought that was really awesome. I think that was a great like badass moment.
01:29:48
Speaker
And also the moon cape thing, it was a lot of fun. I thought that was great. Let's do that. I think they also kind of tried to maximize the use of konshu in terms of like, hey, I can turn back time. And I thought that was really visually interesting piece. And I thought that was fun.
01:30:11
Speaker
um so I think there's a lot of good you know there was a lot of good stuff in here in terms of just action and also telling us a little bit about each character because Stephen's fights were a little bit were just slightly different than Mark's and you know we never you know like Jake's fights are so shocking that we never even got to see them yeah right you know they were actually so overwhelming um so I actually really wonder where where they could take the character I do like that he's kind of
01:30:38
Speaker
At a point where he's got like at least one stable supporting cast member, and then maybe in a season two we get Frenchie, we had some of the other other folks involved as well. You know, and I think the other thing that was cool is, you know, Arthur Harrow fighting.
01:30:57
Speaker
uh moon knight that was handled pretty well even though i don't like the costume i think the fight seemed itself worked really well i kind of got a kick a little bit out of seeing kanshu having to fight on it a little bit um that was fun but i think it could have been handled you know if that was somehow removed i don't think i would have missed it
01:31:19
Speaker
I think the biggest thing I'd want if there's a season two, which is still a question mark at this point, they haven't. Oscar Isaac said he hasn't heard any discussions about a season two, he'd be interested in it. Kevin Feige has said that Moon Knight will be appearing again in the MCU, but again, he didn't say anything about a season two, so I think it was just more like he'll pop up somewhere else eventually.
01:31:43
Speaker
So I, but if they do a season two, I would like to see a much more grounded approach. I'd like to see them get involved with the Jake Lockley persona and like more of the supporting cast like
01:31:57
Speaker
the weights, the diner, crawly and the, and Frenchie and all those types of characters. I would have liked to see all that kind of stuff pulled in. And there's also something else that I wanted to quickly talk about because one of the criticisms I've seen a lot online was the criticism over the fact that there's not a lot done with the fact that Mark is Jewish. And
01:32:21
Speaker
I, on one hand, I can understand that criticism to a certain extent, but on the other hand, I think that a lot of that criticism comes out of a misunderstanding of the character because yes, he's a character of Jewish descent, he's got this Jewish background, his father's a rabbi, but very, he's not very, he's not really a practicing Jewish character himself, so it's not a really big piece
01:32:46
Speaker
of his character in the comics. It's very much a part of his backstory but not so much a part of his present. I'm not sure if you had any thoughts on that whatsoever. So it's interesting. I love the fact that it turned out I didn't know that he was Jewish prior to you know the scenes in like episode five and episode six where you see him wearing the yarmulke and I just kind of love that. I just kind of enjoyed the fact that
01:33:09
Speaker
I know I saw some complaints about Oscar Isaac not being Jewish himself or not being of Jewish descent because I believe he's Guatemalan, which I kind of didn't have a problem with, mostly because I think it was nice to have that level of representation because you don't have a lot of characters talk about their religious background. And especially in that context with the way they changed his
01:33:39
Speaker
his origin story a little bit so that the source of his dissociative identity disorder is really the abuse from his from his mother. I really think that that is is an important thing to kind of include because that kind of explains some of the you know some of the other elements of like you know sitting Shiva and it created like a cool environment.
01:34:00
Speaker
for that you know for that episode because especially since they're dealing with the death of his brother there's some very specific jewish rituals and rites that you get to see that i don't think you necessarily get to see in every in every movie and so i think it adds some weight yeah and i thought the that was one like that was a big change in the comic books is the the whole thing about the relationship with the mother the brother dying um and as much as i would have loved to see you know
01:34:28
Speaker
brother come back and be up here as Shadow Knight like in the comics or as the hatchet man, I did really like the way they handled the backstory. I thought that was so heartbreaking and especially the fact when
01:34:41
Speaker
And, you know, talking about seeding things through and going back and watching things from the beginning, like you see the abuse that Mark experiences at the hands of his brother. And then you go back and you watch the first episode and you see Steven, you know, leaving all these voicemails for his, basically being a mommy's boy. And it's like, how heartbreaking that is. That's like, you know, all this guy wants is, you know, he's wanted to have this close relationship with his mother and he just, and then that gets reflected in Steven. And she's like,
01:35:07
Speaker
Again, that's something that was totally divested from the comic books, but that was something that they handled so well. That was so well done. Yeah, I do think they did a really good job of just describing
01:35:20
Speaker
you know, showing a version of dissociative identity disorder. I don't think it's a perfect representation of the actual illness, just because I think that would be too rough for a more of a cinematic universe type show. But for the purposes of this character, I think they handled it with a lot of sensitivity. I think they showed how difficult it would be to kind of function with that.
01:35:41
Speaker
And there is some research that seems to indicate that it is like a coping mechanism for people. So I think that that seems to indicate, you know, those really handled very well. And I think that the other thing is that they included the mystery, the pieces of the mystery enough, so that when things tie together, you understand why Steven talks the way that he does. I remember when the first episode rolled out, people were like, why the hell is
01:36:05
Speaker
Oscar Isaac using his totally fake British accent. He's not doing a good job with it. But when you understand it at the very end, like, okay, this is based on something used to watch as a kid, that really has some value to it. And I really felt like the, I would have liked to have seen a little bit more about his family life, especially, you know, some of the stuff around Judaism.
01:36:29
Speaker
But I think that that could be explored further in a second season and could really add some heft to that because we don't get to learn a lot about his dad.
01:36:38
Speaker
We get to see a lot about his mother and how she reacts to the loss of her, you know, his brother. But I really think there's a lot more that they can dive into, and maybe they kind of saved some of that for another season. 100%, yeah. I think, yeah, that stuff was handled great, and I think there is more stuff they could explore, like you said. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, I believe his...
01:37:05
Speaker
It was abuse at the hands of his father, if I'm not mistaken, or just like, you know, or some sort of something about that. I think there had something to do with his father more than his mother. In the comics? In the comics, yeah, yeah. I can't remember 100%, but I think there was something about that. But yeah, they handled it well, and I definitely felt for him in those scenes. And again, Oscar Isaac is just doing such a good job in this. You know, I mean, even if you,
01:37:32
Speaker
Even if you're a little cold on the overall series like me, I mean, you gotta respect the work he puts into this series. Yeah, the two main characters, Layla and Mark Spector,
Diversity and Representation in the MCU
01:37:44
Speaker
I think
01:37:44
Speaker
the performances are very, very good. And it would be a shame not to see them show up in another Marvel project of some kind. Right, right. You know, especially like one of my favorite moments in episode six is when she becomes the Avatar, when Leila becomes the Avatar for Tarawa. And I love that moment where she has her costume and somebody actually asks her, are you an Egyptian superhero? And I love that moment. I felt like, wow, this is great because, you know,
01:38:14
Speaker
One of the cool things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and comics overall, but especially the way that this Marvel Cinematic Universe is rolled out, is people are starting to be able to see themselves in the universe in a variety of ways. And I think that holds a lot of meaning.
01:38:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah, you can't, I mean, me being a, being a cis white guy, it's, I've never been at a loss of representation, right? And it's, you know, it's always been like, I'm the default. So like in the action and adventure stories, it's, if, you know, there's like a 99.9% chance that the character is going to be white and straight. And, and yeah, but just like, I can't know what that's like for other people, but I can only,
01:38:59
Speaker
imagine how amazing it must be after going your whole life without seeing any and yourself represented and then to suddenly have that. And to have that for your kids, right? Like the director who's Egyptian, he talked about that moment and how he basically, he wrote that moment for his daughter. And yeah, that's a beautiful thing, I think. Yeah, but that's what makes Marvel fun, right? Like you can draw so much
01:39:29
Speaker
And every time you add, you know, another character like a moon knight, you get to see, you know, and get to see them interact with somebody else. You have so much, you know, depth from, from that. Like we're struggling to think about how moon knight's going to interact with some of these other characters, but you know, it's going to be fun. Yeah. You know, this is the, the kind of like.
01:39:48
Speaker
10-year-old boy, I've got all these toys in my toy box. Let me smash them together, type attitude that makes Marvel so much fun. So I think that's gonna be really cool to see some of these characters pop up.
01:40:01
Speaker
you know, maybe it's not a whole Moon Knight series, but you know, it would be a shame to let Oscar Isaac as this character go to waste by not using him again and something else. Now that I'm thinking about something else I might like to see is maybe another stab at the defenders, but not the way that Netflix did it, more like the old comics did. So like you, you know, have Doctor Strange, you have the Hulk, you have Moon Knight in there, you can have, you know, all these other, you know, kind of like,
01:40:27
Speaker
weird characters that kind of randomly get together. I think that would be really interesting to see. That would be great. I did not care for the Netflix Defenders series, so. Yeah, I mean, I was okay with it, but again, I love the Steve Gerber Defenders. I love the J.M. De Mateus Defenders. So that, to me, is sort of like when I watch the Netflix one, I'm like, it's okay, but that's not my Defenders.
01:40:53
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't have a problem with the characters per se. I just felt like the story, like it should have been maybe a two hour movie. Like if it went by faster, I might've forgiven a lot more of it, but they also wasted Sigourney Weaver. I think she was a good villain and they were just like, yeah, do something. And I hated the guy that played Iron Fist. So that made it really hard to watch for me. He was, you know what?
01:41:22
Speaker
My favorite, I didn't really care for him that much in Iron Fist or in Defenders, but when he popped up in Luke Cage season two, I thought he was perfect. Oh, yeah. He was okay in that. He was great in that. I thought he was so perfect in that, and I didn't understand why when they brought him back for Iron Fist season two, they didn't use more of that style of his character. So that was a weird choice, I thought.
01:41:45
Speaker
Um, yeah, I, you know, I, I just couldn't, I dunno, I didn't, didn't vibe with him very much. And I'm glad that, you know, glad Daredevil's coming in. I think that'll be, that'll be interesting.
01:41:55
Speaker
I don't know if they have plans on bringing Jessica Jones with Cage. Those actors don't care. There's a rumor that Jessica Jones is gonna be popping up in She-Hulk. I mean, I don't know how true that is, but we'll have to see. That's a good fit. Now that you said that, that's a very, very good fit for those two to be in the same, as good as Matt Murdock seeing She-Hulk in his own series. That'll be cool. Yeah.
01:42:20
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know where Moon Knight, you know, I don't know where he would pop up in some of the announced series. I heard, I saw somebody spitballing that maybe Blade and Moon Knight could have some interactions. I would love to see that.
01:42:35
Speaker
You know, I think that would be really fun. It's sort of Morbius Morbius. I mean, I don't think Marvel is going to try anything with Morbius after that movie came out. I mean, can Moon Knight just beat up Jared Leto? Is that possible? I mean, I kind of want to see him beat up Jared Leto, say that. There we go. I mean, we'll call him Morbius, but whatever. Yeah. You know, I did hear somebody suggest that they wanted Sam Raimi to direct Morbius, too, which would be fun. But I don't know, like,
01:43:05
Speaker
how much you know if I really want to want Sam Raimi to take his time to make more videos too. Yeah, I just want to see after multiverse of madness. I just want to see Sam Raimi do more Dr. Strange. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I really enjoyed I really enjoyed multiverse of madness as well. Yeah, I did too. And I just want to see like more of that stuff like you know, he's got the
01:43:27
Speaker
you know, just see him go nuts with the campy horror and stuff that he used to such great effect in that movie. Like, and the biggest, and we had actually just done it on a recent episode and hasn't been released when we're recording this yet. But when we were talking about the thing we came up with, that was like, you know, one of the problems with the movie is that it's not enough of a Dr. Strange movie. So I want to see, you know, Sam Raimi just go nuts on doing like a pure Dr. Strange movie. I think that'd be so much more fun.
01:43:56
Speaker
Yeah, I actually would, I think it might be really fun to let Moon Knight hang out with Dr. Strange if Sam Raimi was directing. Because one common thread in a lot of Sam Raimi movies is this idea of doppelgangers, different versions of yourself. That's why you fit so well with that multiverse of madness. You know, because if you, I'm gonna assume that you seem like Army of Darkness and Evil Dead 2 and all those, right? So there's always those multiple characters, you know,
01:44:23
Speaker
Ash being a different version of himself or, you know, you see that even in Ash versus Evil Dead, you see that pop up. So I would love to see him deal with, you know,
01:44:34
Speaker
Jake Lockley and all the different versions of Moon Knight and see how he interacts with Stephen Strange. I think that might be kind of fun, especially because Doctor Strange doesn't do a lot of physical combat. So having him pop up with Doctor Strange would be kind of cool. Yeah, that'd be interesting. I wasn't so sure about when you mentioned at first, but you just completely sold me on it. I'd like to see that.
01:45:01
Speaker
All right, Marvel, hire me to write this. Yeah. OK, anything else you want to say about Moon Knight? I think I've pretty much said anything I got to say about it. So I think one of the things I want to I really want to thank Marvel for is the fact that they actually hired Egyptian directors, Egyptians, you know, musical crews, a production crew on Moon Knight.
01:45:25
Speaker
because that really it's something that shows the level of care that they put into kind of representing Egypt and you know having spoken to some friends who are Egyptian that watch the show they really appreciated it they were like wow this is amazing that we're you know you can tell the music choices that they have in the end credits they're
01:45:46
Speaker
Egyptian musicians. It's really nice to see a Cairo that is a lived in city versus just like, oh, here's some pyramids. Now we're in Cairo because Cairo is a really awesome city. It's full of really cool people. It's a great place to visit. And it's the kind of thing where, you know, you're really getting the maximum value out of, you know, using the character. And I hope that maybe you can take, you know, this character and
01:46:15
Speaker
you know, add more stuff and put them into, you know, some of those traditional stories from the comics. And I would actually hope that the producers, I think Jeremy Slater and a few other people, or some of the writers and producers of the show, just look back and you could do sort of a six episode season with maybe some standalone episodes with a little bit of continuing story with some of the characters that, you know, some of the villains that you mentioned. And I'll also say that
01:46:45
Speaker
The moonlight show has kind of sold me on.
01:46:48
Speaker
exploring the character a little bit more fully. Because before the show, I was kind of like, I have no idea what the hell this is. I have no idea where I'm gonna go with this character. But you know what? Maybe I'll pick up some TVB's and see what's out there. And now that I know that Charlie Houston's run is a good one, maybe I'll start there. Yeah, the Charlie Houston run, it's a good one. It's more modern. It's got more modern sensibility. So it's, but the,
01:47:16
Speaker
The mowing stuff, it's also really good. It was very much ahead of its time. I don't think a lot of people could really, because it wasn't quite as gritty as you might expect from Daredevil, Frank Miller, but it also,
01:47:36
Speaker
It was also it so like it but it was it was a lot more cerebral as well. So it's like this weird mix between like Frank Miller and Alan Moore type stuff from the 80s. Like if you look at like some of the stuff Alan Moore was doing over like Swamp Thing or that kind of stuff. Right. A lot of that philosophical type of stuff. It had a lot of that in there, but it was
01:47:53
Speaker
I think it didn't really quite appeal to either audience that was into either of those things. I think that was kind of the weakness that it had back at the time. But like, definitely go back and look at, I think pretty much all the epic collections are from Moench's run, especially the stuff when Sainkevich was doing the art. Magical. Definitely. Definitely read that stuff. And also like the Jeff Lemire stuff was really good too, especially if you like the stuff when they were in the mental hospital. Lemire played a lot with that. Like all that came straight out of Lemire's run.
01:48:22
Speaker
Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, I hope that they can expand a little bit and
01:48:27
Speaker
you know, expand the supporting cast because I think it'll be more interesting to see Mark and Steven interacting with a bigger supporting cast, especially the way that, you know, if you go back to those like shadow type roots, that might be really cool. Yeah, absolutely. There's a, you know, there's a lot to be done with the character and I hope they don't let them sit in the shelf for too long. Yeah, agreed, agreed. Okay, so you want to tell people where they can find you?
01:48:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, you can find me on Twitter at IOS, you can find my book on Amazon. If you go to tinyurl.com backslash Amazon MCU, it'll take you right to the book. And if your company is looking for, you know, consulting services with hiring or team building or anything like that, you can find me at talentmetrics.io.
01:49:18
Speaker
Okay, well, Sai, thanks so much for coming back on. It was a lot of fun talking about Moon Knight. And as always, you're more than welcome to come back sometime.
01:49:27
Speaker
Yeah, great. Thank you so much. We're happy to be here. Thank you. All right. That does it for this episode of Superhero Cinephiles. Superherocinephiles.com is the website, SuperCinemapod on Twitter and Instagram. And if you sign up for our Patreon, you get these episodes come out a week early for you, and we got some other stuff that's going to be dropping out on the Patreon soon. So basically, you get that stuff no matter what level you're subscribed at. So subscribe at $1, subscribe at $100, whatever you want, you'll get the same content. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
01:49:58
Speaker
If you enjoy the Superhero Cinephiles, then you'll also love my companion podcast, the Superhero Cinephiles Book Club. All my Patreon subscribers get access to this exclusive podcast where I review superhero comics and graphic novels. Not sure what comics you want to read next or what you should dive into? I've got you covered on that. I'll be doing reviews, recommendations, and also talking to you about useful entry points.
01:50:19
Speaker
If you're interested in reading some comments and don't know where you should start, plus you'll get access to all episodes of the main show a week before everyone else. On all of this for as little as just a dollar a month, all you have to do is go to patreon.com slash SuperCinemaPod and you can sign up at any subscription amount to get started. Thanks so much for your support and please don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:51:02
Speaker
Thank you for listening, and as always, good night, good evening, God bless.