Review: Moon Knight Episode 1: The Goldfish Problem

Featuring blackouts, jump cuts, a one finned goldfish and a very tired Steven Grant. 4 stars.

Moon Knight soared into the MCU this week, bringing with him a menagerie of disembodied voices, dark hallway jump scares, things that go bump in the night, a shadowy mix of humour and horror and an all-around enjoyable, spine-tingling show. 

A dark and mysterious start to the series, Episode 1 focuses on bumbling but passionate museum gift shop employee Steven Grant (played by the fantastic Oscar Isaac) as he struggles through plagues of unconscious – finding himself teleporting around the earth and jumping through time, missing dinner dates, unable to sleep, and constantly late for work. 

After a brief coda showing Ethan Hawke’s antagonist, Arthur Harrow, placing smashed glass in his shoes (what sort of man is this!), the episode truly wakes up with Steven. Undoing his range of sleeping precautions, including chaining his leg to a post, encircling his bed with sand, placing tape over the door and solving puzzles to keep himself awake, it’s clear that Steven fears sleep, or more so what happens when he does eventually nod off. 

Oscar Isaac as Steven Grant in Marvel Studios’ MOON KNIGHT. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. ©Marvel Studios 2022. All Rights Reserved.

Right off the bat, this is a character study of Steven Grant. We follow him through his day in London as he misses his bus, is late for work and is misnamed by all his colleagues – “It’s Steven, with a V ” he claims, while clipping his badge on (a powerful statement of identity in a show where this isn’t always the case).

And in this time we learn a lot about this so-called Steven. 

  • He is quite passive and mostly unwilling to stand up for himself.
  •  He is very knowledgeable about Egyptian mythology – I mean if you even try to tell him there are only seven gods in the Enead he will very politely correct you (there are nine, remember this for later). 
  • He doesn’t have many – or any friends – spending his downtime calling his mum’s answering machine, hanging out with a gold statue man, and chatting with his one finned goldfish. 
  • He is goofy, idiotic, bumbling, quite sweet, and accidentally comedic – The perfect character to throw down a journey of despair, confusion, and fear and have viewers still rooting for him – I mean how can you not feel bad for little Steven! 
  • Oh yeah, and he is a vegan- so when he finds he has somehow organised a date to a steakhouse with a colleague, he is a little surprised – when have they ever even talked about meat before?

 This is just the start of a number of little plot holes appearing in his own life…

Despite his detailed efforts to not sleep, one ‘morning’ Steven wakes up, not in his quaint London flat, but in the Alps – he has a broken jaw, is called an idiot by a disembodied voice, and told to start running from goons with guns. 

What entails is a chaotic adventure including a cult leader Arthur Harrow weighing and sucking souls out of villagers, the non-confrontational Steven trying but failing to return the Sacrab he appears to have stolen, and a series of wonderfully well-executed jump cuts as our sweet pacifist continually blacks out, always waking to a stark juxtaposition – holding murder weapons, surrounded by dead (or very mortally wounded) goons, and in increasingly perilous situations.

Oscar Isaac as Marc Spector/Steven Grant in Marvel Studios’ MOON KNIGHT, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. ©Marvel Studios 2022. All Rights Reserved.

This was a wonderfully exhilarating chase scene, with audiences just as confused and out of the loop as Steven, we are truly along for the (very dangerous) ride. The ordinary Englishman subdues murderous bad guys whilst driving a muffin van along a cliff (to the tune of ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ of course), with no idea how he got there, why these people are after him, who the voices are or why he is holding a gun? 

And then suddenly, in an “it was all a dream” manner, Steven wakes back in England… weird.

Relief surges until he notices that his previously one finned goldfish now has two fins…weird.

He takes his fish to the pet show in a blender (“what the …fish”) where the owner claims she saw him yesterday… weird. 

Steven heads to his date (flowers and chocolates in tow- awe Steven we love you) but gets stood up. Upon calling her, he learns that it was Steven that stood her up -2 days ago- and it is currently Sunday, not Friday as he’d thought… weird. 

The weirdness spirals and the confusion, sadness and despair echoing across his face is heart-wrenching… (Well done Oscar Isaac!). Seeing Steven sadly eating chocolates alone just solidifies the lonely, lost nature of this poor soul.

Steven finds a flip phone in his apartment with hundreds of missed calls from “Layla” and this is where the horror aspects of the show really kick off. Lights start flickering, shadows start moving, his reflection appears to talk to him and Steven races toward the elevator.

The long, dark hallway looms down towards him as a ghostly figure (Khonshu) gets closer and closer, Steven (and audiences) panic rising as it rears its (amazingly designed) skeletal head and lunges out with one hand…

Oscar Isaac as Steven Grant and Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham) in Marvel Studios’ MOON KNIGHT. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. ©Marvel Studios 2022. All Rights Reserved.

And no it’s just a little old woman getting into the elevator as Isaac lets out a scream. A hilarious execution of humanising comedy alongside fear-inducing mysteries. This mix of genres adds just the right amount of naturalised humour and lightness to the unauthorised adventures of Steven- but not for long as creepy music returns…

Steven turns face to face with Khonshu before, once again, jump cutting awake on a bus with a scared yell, and is plagued by ‘hallucinations’ of the creature and Arthur Harrow on his journey to work. 

The premiere begins to wrap up after Steven is ambushed in the museum by Harrow, who explains the history of Ammit the judgement god, before weighing Steven’s soul which is apparently “Full of Chaos”. Steven is allowed to escape (for now), however, while leaving work later that night he is attacked by a jackal. This scene is particularly interesting as the camera focuses on Steven running, not on the impressive CGI creature. We all know that Marvel isn’t afraid to show off their CGI creatures, so this just adds to the realistic first-person perspective and dream-like status of the show – is anything ever real if we only see snippets of it through Steven’s eyes? 

Oscar Isaac as Marc Spector/Steven Grant in Marvel Studios’ MOON KNIGHT, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. ©Marvel Studios 2022. All Rights Reserved.

Trapped in the museum bathroom, surrounded by mirrors and with the creature closing in, Steven is panicking; panic which only increases when his own reflection begins speaking to him, as if separate from his body, a new consciousness. Which of course it is (although not particularly new). Here we meet the authoritative mercenary Marc Spector, Isaac’s other dual character, who, just as the jackal smashes into the shocked Steven, promptly summons the (gorgeously designed) Moon Knight suit and smacks the jackal into the dust.

And with one last epic look to the camera, a trailer shot I assumed would come much later in the show, we blackout on Episode One (although be sure you don’t miss the cool credit images depicting fascinating Egyptian iconography and dual symbolism).

The premiere of Moon Knight really is about setting up this character study of Steven Grant and laying the trail of breadcrumbs for the mysteries to come. It looks at who Steven is, and how he reacts in situations; reactions of fear and flight that are vastly different to the alternate personality of Marc Spector and create very important character cues for later in the series. Comic fans may find this first episode tamer than what they were expecting (particularly when the fight scenes cut across the bloodier elements of Marc Spector’s murders), however, I really enjoyed the superb mix of darkness and humour that truly places audiences in the shoes of this lost, confused, sad character. 

The real beauty of Moon Knight so far is in the genuine first-person perspective the audience receives, forcing us to follow Steven’s sweet but unhelpful and unreliable narrator through blackouts, jump cuts and a day to day existence that just doesn’t add up. It effectively amplifies the mysteries and horror of the story and creates an informative and immersive depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder. The glitch-like execution of some of those cut shots was remarkable at leaving us on edge and in a very exciting way, and as such the first episode creates a mysterious mix of more questions than answers – definitively leaving you wanting more. 

Line of the week: Steven is just so unassumingly entertaining so this week’s favourite line is a tie between a costly mistake and his nervous ramblings. 

  1. When he is tricked by Harrow into not bowing along with the fanatics his honest and perfectly delivered “Oh Bullocks”
  2. When cornered and lectured by Harrow about Egyptian avatars, he rambles “Avatars, blue people, love that film, oh do you mean the anime?” This just gets me every time – and is all the more entertaining considering the MCU’s ‘competitive’ relationship with the formerly named ‘blue people film’.

Episode 1 of Moon Knight is streaming on Disney Plus now, with five more episodes arriving weekly.