We’re finally in Egypt! This week’s episode of Moon Knight, “The Friendly Type”, was written by Beau DeMayo and Peter Cameron & Sabir Pirzada, and directed by Mohamed Diab. It’s a much-more action-oriented episode, I think, and takes us from the requisite rooftops to the markets of Cairo, up the Nile, into the desert, and even inside a pyramid. But Marc Spector can run as fast as he wants, and fight as many goons as he wants, he’ll still have to face Steven in the mirror, and Khonshu… well, just kind of hanging around in the background intoning things and yelling at him.
But how important are Marc’s problems when Arthur Harrow draws ever closer to Ammit’s tomb?
Spoilers ahead!
Recap
We open on Layla expositing while having a passport made by an older woman—an aunt? A family friend? It’s unclear, but whoever she is, she gives Layla halva what I think is Turkish Delight from a plastic canister in her desk.
Anyone who shares their Desk Canister Candy is a friend.
The exposition tells us that Layla has some trauma related to her father, who taught her archeology, which is why she now steals artifacts from the black market to repatriate them to their home countries. As she reminds the woman, “they were already stolen.” [British Museum meme?] As much as I HATE exposition, this is a neat way to tell us who Layla is, where she’s going, where her sympathies lie, and it makes for a nice callback to the excellent opening scene of Black Panther.
But they may not be passporting or expositing quickly enough! Arthur Harrow has used the scarab and found the site of Ammit’s tomb!
Wait, he already found it? Just like that?
I thought they were going to draw it out.
Meanwhile, Marc is pursuing people across rooftops like a good superhero. He finds a contact he needs to speak to… just as that contact is being gutted by three of Harrow’s goons. They fight, and now we come to the kind of exposition I really love, as we learn more about Marc Spector in this five-minute sequence than we knew before. He’s a great fighter, he enjoys it, he treats it like he’s working out with a dance partner until things go too far, he likes going too far, and he brawls, mostly using his fists and any stuff that happens to be lying around rather than classical weapons. But he does check himself at one point, and tries to go easy on a kid who’s clearly terrified of what he’s gotten himself into.
This doesn’t end well, but Marc does try.
When Marc catches his reflection in a knife’s blade, that gives Steven an in, and the next thing Marc knows he’s in a cab to the airport. Marc wrests control again and chases the goons through the market, but, with terrible luck, manages to slam Goon #1 into a wall that just happens to be directly next to a mirror. So there’s Steven again, pleading with him to stop all the violence. They blip in and out again, with Marc reawakening to all the goons dead except for the kid. Steven insists he didn’t do it, and then there’s Khonshu bullying Marc into dangling the boy over a cliff until he tells him the location of Ammit’s tomb.
But Khonshu, unusually for a god, underestimates the power of fanaticism. Marc holds the kid by his scarf, the kid cuts the scarf and falls to his death rather than betray Ammit.
Khonshu tries Plan B, and creates an eclipse to get the other gods’ attention and call a meeting of Ennead. Marc goes to the meeting (inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, no less) and is met by the avatars of Hathor, Horus, Isis, Tefnut, and Osiris. None of them are too happy to be there. Khonshu uses Marc as a mouthpiece, bellowing about Harrow rather than simply explaining what’s going on, and suddenly Harrow himself has been summoned, and goes full Cult Leader Voice on the other avatars, sounding soothing and reasonable as he tells them that Marc is “a deeply troubled man”, and that “Khonshu is taking advantage if him the same way he abused me.”
Since Marc can’t really refute the claim that he’s troubled, the gods side with Harrow. Once again Marc’s illness has been exploited. His requests for help are ignored. The council breaks up without doing any investigating of their own….which leads to an interesting point. WHY THE HELL DO THE AVATARS OF THE GODS TRUST ARTHUR HARROW? Is it just because he used to be one of them? Is it because they automatically dismiss anything Khonshu says? I get not wanting to meddle in the affairs of humanity or whatever, but you could just say, “If Ammit comes back, that’s a people problem, not an Ancient Egyptian pantheon problem” rather than seemingly listening to Harrow—who is very obviously not trustworthy!—and allowing him to humiliate Marc. Plus if you know Khonshu abused Harrow doesn’t it make sense that maybe, just maybe, Harrow could be up to something specifically to spite his old Master?
I mention all of this only because it was a little bit of an off note for me when they took Harrow’s side.
Hathor is the only one who seems to think Khonshu may have a point. She hangs back and give Marc the name of a scribe to look up—or more accurately, an ex-scribe, who may have left clues to the location of Ammit’s tomb in his sarcophagus. Marc’s attempt at contacting the black market fizzles out, but luckily Layla shows up. The two go back and forth about their relationship (and the fact that she has a reputation and really shouldn’t be back in Cairo), and she takes him to a man named Anton Mogart who has a collection of artifacts, including the scribe’s sarcophagus. Naturally this meeting goes about how you’d expect, but worse. Marc and Steven get into an argument over deciphering the scribe’s coded message, and by the time they start cooperating, Mogart has turned the guns on them. Harrow shows up again, and tries to force them to have breakthrough therapy moments on the fly in front of a bunch of henchpeople. Per Harrow, Layla does everything she does because she Can’t Process Her Father’s Murder, and Marc is afraid that if anyone sees the real him they’ll decide he isn’t worthy of love, which is the Thing He’s Truly Afraid Of. And while Harrow may be correct, none of that should be tossed out during a battle, come on. Harrow destroys the sarcophagus, and possibly the constellation code, under a pretense of showing Mogart Ammit’s power.
The battle itself goes in a bunch of different directions. Marc-as-Moon-Knight fights people hand-to-hand, then suddenly he surrounded by guys on horseback with spears. Layla fights Mogart’s right hand man, and once again becomes my favorite person by throwing shattered glass in his face, using her lower center of gravity to unbalance him, shoving herself off sarcophagi to gain leverage—basically doing al the things a small-ish person actually has to do to survive a fight to the death. At one point Steven takes over, transforms into Mr. Knight and tries to call a time out, and then has to call Marc back in when he gets skewered.
They finally win, Layla grabs the scraps of cloth that hold the code, and they bolt out of the desert. More arguing, first between Layla and Marc, then between Marc and Steven, until Marc finally lets Steven take over again. He easily patches the cloth together to show the constellation which will give them the location of Ammit’s tomb, huzzah! Except… this was mapped over 2,000 years ago, and the location won’t be the same. It looks like the end of the line, until Khonshu points out that he remembers how the sky looked that night, because he remembers every night.
Man am I ever glad I’m not Khonshu.
The disgraced god and the Egyptology nerd finally work together. Khonshu infuses Steven with power, and the two turn the sky back through the centuries until they land on the right night. Layla uses her (modern) tablet to map the sky and fix the point of the tomb, and the rest of the Ennead work a spell to trap Khonshu in a tiny ushabti statue of himself. As he’s pulled away, he asks Steven to tell Marc to release him.
Steven faints, Layla freaks out, and Harrow turns back up in the pyramid to taunt his old master.
May you be well when you hear this
I know I talk about the mirrors a lot, but…
STEVEN APPEARS IN A KNIFE BLADE DURING A FIGHT AND TELLS MARC TO STOP FIGHTING??? WHAT???
I’m imagining all the writers sitting in the writers room—or writers’ Zoom maybe?—listing off every type of mirrored surface they could think of and then finding contexts for them.
I have to say that this was a slightly weaker episode for me. It felt a little too much like the writers were stringing fight scenes along as threads between exposition, and some of the exposition was a bit clunky. Layla’s great, and May Calamawy is great playing her, and I don’t want her whole role to be “I’m doing this for humanity Marc, not you! Oh but wait, can we rehash our relationship to give you an opportunity to say something cruel to me?” It’s unnecessary. We all know he lied to her, hid his illness, that he was trying to protect her but also somewhat making life easy for himself, but also torturing himself, but also he’s being cruel to push her away. It’s obvious that she likes Steven a lot, and that Steven is utterly twitterpated by her. I think we can all agree to where the tensions are and move on with the Mummy-esque shenanigans while these crazy kids try to work things out.
But having gotten that out of the way: as always Marc is pretty terrifying when he really leans into his mercenary nature. And the Ennead was fantastic—I just wanted a little bit more with it, and a bit more to showcase each of the gods.
Everything about Marc and Steven fighting over the constellation code was perfect. The way Marc doesn’t want to let him in, the way Khonshu keeps meddling, Steven being pissy with Marc but eager to help all the same. The moment when Marc walks away from Layla to let Steven take over was gorgeous. Of course he doesn’t want Layla to see this. (And of course she wants to be part of it, because she still loves him, and she’s starting to love Steven.) But the way he rips the rearview mirror off the truck so he can look into it, the way Oscar Isaac just shifts his face a little bit and then becomes Steven, saying “Cheers mate” to Marc and diving straight into deciphering the code with no fuss.
Harrow is terrifying, but I’ll talk about that more in a sec.
And, best of all, how beautiful was the scene of Khonshu and Steven-as-Mr.-Knight, working together at last, not to do anything violent but instead to turn the sky back? I mean it’s a beautiful scene, visually, but how fantastic is it that the writers found a way to involve Steven, to make his skills and knowledge just as useful as Marc’s? And finally to hinge their success on the idea of Khonshu himself making a sacrifice, after everything he’s put Marc and Steven through. Now he’ll be trapped in stone, just as either Marc or Steven is trapped in a corner of their shared mind while the other is in control of their body.
Schrader Scale (of Judgement)
The Schrader Scale is a bit more nebulous in this episode than in the first two. That is, until it very much isn’t. See the thing that’s animating Arthur Harrow, and the element that makes this show work so well (for me, at least) is the real, palpable joy he shows as he comes closer and closer to releasing Ammit. The lives that will be lost are inconsequential. When he finds the site of Ammit’s tomb and rejoices with his followers, that happiness was as real as the menace he exudes at Mogart’s compound, and the casual cruelty of what he does to Marc when the Ennead meets. He genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing at all times—or, more accurately, that Ammit is doing the right thing through him.
In the episode’s final scene he finally faces off with Khonshu. The god is trapped in a small statue. A gift shop trinket Arthur can hold in his hand. And he confesses, to Khonshu, that he “enjoyed doling out pain on your behalf. It is the greatest sin I carry.”
In this scene we see Arthur alone (or as alone as a person can be when they’ve had multiple gods in their head), and we see that he’s willing to lay himself bare. Or so it seems for a moment. Because then he goes on, saying, “your torment forged me. I owe my victory to you.”
But, wouldn’t that be Ammit’s victory? Or really the victory of justice itself? And if he’s truly so committed to justice above all, should he really be meeting his old, defeated Master in private for what can only be described as a spiritual “In your FACE” moment? Or does he mean it? Does he genuinely see the victory of Ammit as a result of the time he spent suffering under Khonshu’s will?
The great thing about this scene is that I genuinely don’t know. There’s so much nuance at work here that I can’t tell if Arthur is gloating, or thanking Khonshu. This is the main reason I thought refracting the show through my love of Schrader would be useful: it’s really fun to watch as Hawke and Isaac layer complexity upon complexity in what could have just been a fun Marvel take on National Treasure.
Also just to make sure no one missed this: I haven’t heard it before, but in this scene, as Arthur faces Khonshu, we can hear the glass in his shoes clink with each step he takes.
So…without the shoe-glass-sound this rates a 3 on the Scale, but with it, I think we land at a solid 5.
I can not read the hieroglyphs!
Arthur, to Khonshu: “You’re getting desperate, old bird.”
***
Steven: “We’re inside The Great Pyramid of Giza!”
***
Layla: “It’s like I’ve not known u at all!”
Marc: “You haven’t. You don’t.”
***
Khonshu, to Marc: “I summon the gods, you summon the worm.”
***
Steven, to Layla: “E voila!”
Really what Leah Schnelbach wants is a My Dinner with Khonshu scenario with the god and Arthur Harrow meeting up for a wide-ranging conversation that plumbs the very depths of creativity and humanity’s hunger for meaning. But with action sequences. Come talk about all that important stuff in the Café des Artistes that is Twitter!
Weakest episode so far but still enjoying it enough
“I mention all of this only because it was a little bit of an off note for me when they took Harrow’s side.”
We saw at the end that the avatar that took the lead in siding with Harrow was already working with him in secret (that was the guy who let him in to see the bitty Khonshu statue), so the fix was in.
Okay, if it was neither Marc nor Steven who killed those goons, who was it? Did Khonshu take over directly, or is there somebody else in there?
I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to tape something together using the loose desert sand as your only surface. That was an utterly terrible idea on the director’s part. At least lay down a tarp! Or stay on the hood of the car, where they were already working.
Speaking of terrible ideas, Khonshu is an idiot. He didn’t have to sacrifice himself and get himself imprisoned just so they could figure out the star positions 2000 years ago. Just go to a university and ask an astronomer. Stellar motions can be computed and extrapolated forward or backward in time with considerable accuracy. Heck, there’s probably an online program that could do it.
So how the heck do the Egyptian gods fit into MCU cosmology? Are they advanced aliens like Asgardians? Are they related somehow to the Celestials? Weren’t the Eternals actually the basis for a lot of Earth’s mythology?
@2 They didn’t have alot of time to really go to a university, find an astrologian, and able to do the calculations that fast. Layla is doing it as they are doing their star thing. they know that Harrow is out there right now digging, and he’s been doing everything he can to delay them or stop them. Seeing how the show itself says that Layla pretty much doesn’t trust musuems, they proably don’t have someone who can help that quickly.
@3/Steven: Like I said, there are online resources for calculating historic star positions. Here’s a thread listing several of them: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/456114-past-star-positions/
Layla was holding a tablet right there, so it would’ve taken them at most a few minutes to Google such a program, enter the correct date and viewing position, and get a historically accurate star map.
It was a really smart move to pin the point of view on Marc and have the time skip happen when Steven comes to the fore. I was worried they would drop that disorienting effect once the two alters started talking to each other. Having a third alter is alarming and a neat way to keep the confusion of the first episode going.
Between the eclipse and the night sky rewind, this firmly bounces off the integration problem of the MCU–even putting aside the issue bringing a fresh batch of gods into things. I don’t know who’s keeping track of that sort of thing these days but it should be raising some major red flags. Though I doubt we’ll see any outsiders poking their noses in.
The third personality in Marc’s body is presumably Jake Lockley, the third personality from the comics. Originally Moon Knight’s streetwise cabbie disguise (in the vein of Matches Malone or if the Shadow was also Moe Shrevnitz), Jake was reconceptualizef as Marc’s most ruthless personality in the late 2000s.
Presumably, at least. Who knows what twists the show runners might have up their sleeves?
@@.-@ Well, that is another thing. they don’t know the exact date. they have a approximate 2000 years; probably more than that, and Khonshu…well is kind of overdramatic. He might not know the exact day as in a calendar date, but he does remember what the stars looked like when she was sealed away. So it would be easier for him to do the dramatic star reversal. also, in a story perspective, it would be boring for layla to juts check her computer when they got a perfectly overdramatic pidgeon who is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the mission, which might be brought up earlier. After all, harrow likes to go on and on that Khonshu is using everyone, but we see he’s actually willing to sacrifice himself. he does believe in his mission to get himself imprisoned, and i guess marc to bust him out.
she gives Layla what I think is Turkish Delight from a plastic canister in her desk.
That, my friend, was halva.
@8: HALVA! Of course! I’ll update the post – I didn’t think it looked powdery enough to be Edmund Pevensie’s Downfall.
I agree not quite as good as the first two episodes but still very enjoyable, there was a nod to the discredited ‘Orions belt as the Pyramids of Giza’ theory when Layla held the tablet up to the sky but thankfully they didn’t go there.
Layla was my favourite character this week, closely followed by Harrow with the creepy ending. May Calamawy and Ethan Hawke worthy foils for Oscar Isaac.
On the downside not sure why we needed the sub Game of Thrones style horse back confrontation.
Still a solid 7 out of 10 episode.
@7/Steven: “Well, that is another thing. they don’t know the exact date.”
Yes, they do. Khonshu specifically said he remembered “that night.” And even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t need to pin it down to a single day. Stars don’t move that fast — as it says on that site I linked to, the fastest ones move on the order of 1 arcsecond (1/3600 of a degree) per year. So as long as they have it within a few years, the map will be as accurate as they need.
“and Khonshu…well is kind of overdramatic.”
That is exactly my point. He sacrificed his freedom unnecessarily because he went for the big dramatic use of his powers rather than waiting to consider if there was an alternative. Hence, Khonshu is an idiot.
@8 & 9: Honestly, I thought they were just marshmallows. I only know Turkish delight from Narnia, and I never heard of halva. (Is halva loaf better than none? Can you halva cake and eat it too?)
@11 i wouldn’t call him an idiot, more willing to go to any costs of his mission. he DOES want to stop Ammit from being free; thats the real point of the scene, he would go against the rest of the Gods in order to stop her. He was deseperate.
@12/Steven: If he “went to any costs” when he didn’t remotely need to, that’s a dumb move. If the writers wanted to create a situation that forced him to make such a huge sacrifice, they should’ve come up with a problem that couldn’t be solved with five minutes on the Internet. Somehow, they knew enough about astronomy to have Steven (the character, not you) point out that stars move slowly over the centuries, but they didn’t know enough to realize it was a ridiculously easy problem to solve. It’s like showing someone selling their first-born child to gain a piece of knowledge they could look up on Wikipedia. I don’t care how desperate the writers made them, it’s a bad writing decision to build their desperation around something that there’s no good reason to get desperate about.
@8 I thought the candy was a marshmallow. It looked too white and squishy to be halva. But now that you mention it, the taste of halva has emerged along with lots of happy memories from the delis my dad used to take me to, and I realize I have not had halva in far too many years.
I definitely got the impression that at least one of the blackouts, there was yet another personality taking over the body shared by Marc and Steven.
Even though they’ve found the temple, it is apparent they are a long way from gaining access.
This episode was a bit more disjointed, and I agree with others that Google would have been easier than using the heavens themselves to compute ancient star positions, but I am liking where things are going.
FWIW, I thought it was Turkish Delight, haha!
I agree that this was a weaker episode, for a few reasons:
1)All the stuff already mentioned with the stars. Also, kind of similar to the climax of the Eternals, what exactly happened there and does this have bigger implications? Did Khonshu somehow actually physically move everything around? And are people who saw all this happen just gonna be, ‘welp, just another day in the life in the MCU?’ I also was trying to figure out if the Egyptian gods were somehow Eternals or something like that but I don’t know enough about all the Marvel cosmology to say.
2)For some reason it also felt kind of weird that they are able to track down this black market sarcophagus and stuff but apparently have no way of spying on/finding Harrow’s dig in the desert?
Regarding Harrow…in a weird way I think he is sympathetic here. I honestly think Khonshu is kind of a dick (especially as of the previous episode) and so perhaps Harrow really WAS exploited/hurt by him, hated what he had to do as his avatar, etc…it’s just that now he’s also taking that pain in another direction and has convinced himself it’s better to just eliminate the evil before it can happen (perhaps also due to Ammit exploiting him). I didn’t get the impression he was gloating, per se, but really does feel traumatized by him. guess at least for now I do think he genuinely believes in his cause.
@15/Lisamarie: “Did Khonshu somehow actually physically move everything around?”
I assume it was an illusion, or maybe some kind of time window viewing the past, and I’ll assume it was localized to the vicinity of Egypt unless I’m told otherwise. It’s way too ridiculous if it actually physically happened. Just moving the Moon for that eclipse would’ve caused devastating sesimic upheavals on Earth.
“For some reason it also felt kind of weird that they are able to track down this black market sarcophagus and stuff but apparently have no way of spying on/finding Harrow’s dig in the desert?”
The gods other than Khonshu don’t use their powers to meddle in Earthly affairs. Presumably Hathor’s avatar knew about the sarcophagus the human way, by tracking the black market antiquities trade or hearing rumors that Mogart had it.
Sure didn’t look like halvah to me. (@CLB — At least among the Jews in my family and geographic region of the Northeastern U.S. it’s pronounced häl-(uh)-‘vä.)
The council breaks up without doing any investigating of their own
I could tell when Harrow appeared that he’d win them over, because that’s how these things usually go, but even given the room’s general mood of animosity towards Khonshu and Harrow’s golden tongue it’s awfully odd that neither the gods nor their avatars had a way of fairly easily checking out what we’d just been shown Harrow was up to at the site of Ammit’s tomb.
we can hear the glass in his shoes clink with each step he takes
Yep. {shivers}
Part of the problem with a shared universe is indeed that something like the swirly night sky would trip figurative alarm bells with at least the likes of Dr. Strange and Wong. My assumption until the cuts to flabbergasted onlookers was that it was a purely visual representation local to our protagonists but clearly it was not — although it damn sure had to be a purely visual representation nonetheless, rather than the actual movement of heavenly bodies. A sampling of reactions among bystanders (this one scared as hell, that one shrugging it off as yet another day in this crazy universe) would’ve been appreciated.
Not that I’d rather this show weren’t taking place in the MCU. Just that story points like that have implications.
The conflicting pantheons is/are a whole other conversation…
I agree with CLB. Surely there’s a program that dials back the sky like that. Heck, I’m surprised it’s not in the app store. Anyway, I also agree with the reviewer that this was a weaker episode, probably my least favorite, but I still enjoyed it alright.
@16: “It’s way too ridiculous if it actually physically happened.” – I mean, in the Eternals a Celestial literally burst out of the planet’s core and started to emerge from the crust and it warranted a feature on the nightly news as a cool new curiosity but nothing more so…I don’t even know what is ridiculous physically in this unverse!
(I might be a a bit nitpicky, but that honestly almost ruined the movie for me. I certainly accept a certain amount of disbelief in my comic movies but that just stretched it to my limit.).
@20/Lisamarie: It’s a matter of scale. A Celestial bursting out of the Earth is absurd, yes (the energies released should’ve pretty much melted the planet’s crust and killed every living thing on Earth), but it’s just one planet. Moving every celestial body in the observable universe is orders of magnitude more preposterous.
I agree with CLB @2: the scene at the end with the other avatar showed the fix was in at the trial, which is why they sided so quickly with Harrow.
While watching, I thought the forger was Layla’s mother, but aunt (or family friend) makes a lot more sense.
And was I the only one that got the impression that Marc was actually involved in Layla’s father’s death somehow?
@22 oh yeah, I’m fairly sure that the guys at the dig site he ‘executed’ that was mentioned in the previous episode included Layla’s father. (Although I’ve also heard speculation it was the third alter.)
Hi, Is it weird that Moon Knight’s suit is bullet proof but not a bit more lance proof? At first I though maybe Moon Knight has a wood vulnerability but it looks like they might be metal tipped. And I don’t think the henchmen were super powered. Khonshu is old school and has been awake for thousands of years to remember all the nights. Making the suit bullet proof shows he keeps up with the times. Thank you
@24/Mike: In real life, according to my quick Googling, Kevlar bulletproof vests can generally be penetrated by knives, spears, etc., because of the way they can push through the fibers and separate them. There are some kinds of Kevlar that are designed to be stab-resistant, but it’s a different configuration from bulletproof vests. A bullet is quite light and expends its momentum on impact, while a lance is much heavier and has continuous force being applied to it by the wielder, so it makes sense that the former would bounce off while the latter can get through.
Alternatively, they said something about the “healing” suit, and though the lances penetrated Moon Knight, they didn’t incapacitate or kill him. So maybe the suit doesn’t block bullets, maybe it just quick-heals the damage they cause.
Very much the weakest episode so far, and notable for the number of idiotic things that happened which were – even in this universe – unbelievable. To wit:
1. Super-rich guy has an ancient mummy + sarcophagus in excellent condition just sitting open to the sea breeze? C’mon, people.
2. Our Hero just manhandles ancient cartonnage instead of, oh, I don’t know, taking pictures of it on his phone to study later???
3. Khonshu manipulates the entire fricking SKY instead of Our Heroes using a readily-available app on their phones to look up the night sky on A Particular Date?
:throws up hands in frustration: The story could still have progressed the same way without acting like the modern world doesn’t exist.
I have an app on my phone that does the stars thing. And I agree: why in the world is that sarcophagus stored like that?
I’m glad we got to see Chekhov’s spears in action, although I would have enjoyed seeing them put to more use via horseman. At least he didn’t die onscreen…perhaps we’ll get a Steve from Stranger Things redemption arc where a couple episodes later the cavalry come riding in from the desert and turn the tide of a losing battle with Harrow in favor of Team Konshu. (At the very least, the demonstration of purple power might be a clue that we will later see them saddle up on Harrow’s side?)
I had been wondering when we’d see another personality show up in Steven/Marc’s body; to me the credits montage hints heavily at there being more than two facets of our beleaguered hero.
I’m glad I’m not the only one irked by the whole ‘we have to turn back the sky to figure out what the stars were like!’ thing. When I heard that, I paused the show, went to my laptop, and pulled up my astronomy program (which I got for free!) and rolled back about ~2000 years in about all of 30 seconds. But I guess manipulating the universe, probably ruining a lot of satellites and GPS, and getting yourself imprisoned for potentially eternity works too.
@27/Marie: “And I agree: why in the world is that sarcophagus stored like that?”
It seemed to me that the rich guy was putting it on display for his guests at the party he was throwing. I doubt it was stored that way routinely. And I can buy a rich guy being reckless with the preservation of an ancient artifact for the sake of showing off to his guests.
25. ChristopherLBennett
Thanks for the response. It looks like in the comics, MK had his own man made suit like Batman that used Kevlar and had 2 way radio. Khonshu didn’t provide him with one.
The app thing was a bit weird. They were in the middle of the desert so maybe they couldn’t download the right app at that time? Khonshu did just moved the moon so that might affect satellite communication? Or maybe they just didn’t have Starlink? Maybe they thought to download an app in the city but didn’t think of the 2,000 year lag because adrenaline rush?
@30/Mike: I’m still not convinced that the time pressure was urgent enough that Khonsu had to sacrifice his freedom rather than wait a half hour or so to get into wi-fi range.
More to the point, the parameters of the story are only the way they are because the writers chose to make them that way. So the problem isn’t the characters’ failure to realize there’s an app for that, but the writers’ failure to either realize it or explain it in-story in a way that wouldn’t have had half the viewers (and reviewers) saying “Hold on, why couldn’t they just…?” If you have to invent your own handwave to patch a story hole, it’s still a story hole.
On the point of “why did the gods trust Harrow”: I noticed that he never actually denied the charges, or lied in any way. Quite possibly, you *can’t* lie in that position, or any lies would be immediately detected. With that kind of assurance, the gods are lazy/not paying attention and he’s able to talk around the questions until he gets them diverted onto the issue of Marc’s state, feeling like he’s adequately cleared himself and not noticing that he didn’t.
FINALLY the real hero of the show gets some significant screen time. But when is Harrow going to start making outrageous puns?
#therealarthurharrow