Moon Knight episode 3 has arrived, and takes place entirely in Cairo, the show leaving England for the first time. It has Marc, Steven and Layla attempting to find Ammit’s tomb without the scarab that was lost to Harrow, and doing so requires both consulting with and angering the Egyptian gods. Not great.
However, there was one brief moment that stood out in the show that had nothing to do with the gods, per se. While we have gotten to know Marc Spector, the ex-soldier who can hold his own in a gunfight or fistfight, and Steven, the mild-mannered historian, there appears to be a third party emerging more dangerous and unpredictable than either of them.
We see this at least once where Marc blacks out, only to wake up and discover that he has murdered two of the three Egyptians he was trying to extract information out of. He blames Steven, but obviously that’s not Steven’s MO, as he protests when Marc is even punching people. And while Marc is lethal, even he seems shocked by the violence, or at least shocked by the fact that he didn’t do it.
So what’s going on here? Looking at the comics, I’m not so sure that the answers are necessarily hiding there, and it’s possible we may be moving in a different direction.
There is a third major personality in the Moon Knight comics besides Marc and Steven named Jake Lockley. But he’s a cab driver, not a raging psychopath, so it seems unlikely that this is him emerging.
However, readers of Moon Knight comics also know that Moon Knight can go extremely hard when he wants to, and as of last week, fans were a bit disappointed that when Mr. Knight was introduced, he was kind of a joke, the Steven version of the Moon Knight suit. In the comics, meanwhile, Mr. Knight has proven to be one of the most brutal forms of Moon Knight. So I do wonder if that’s what could be coming out here. One theory I had was that maybe this Khonshu himself taking over like we saw in the chamber, but I don’t think it works like that. This would seem to be a third, more violent, less restrained personality.
By the end of the episode, both Marc and Steven have lost their connection to Khonshu, as he messed with the sky too much(?) which made the other gods mad so they sealed him away in stone. What I’m wondering now is that without their pair of superpowered suits at their disposal, if Marc/Steven will be forced to turn to this third personality to do some fighting on their behalf. But again, Marc himself does seem more than capable in combat, so I’m not sure if this third personality could be a force working against them instead. We’ll find out more in the last half of the season here.
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