Moon Knight. You’ve heard of that particular superhero, haven’t you? No, I hadn’t either until Marvel decided to make a TV show about him. Thankfully, Wikipedia is our friend here:
The son of a rabbi, Marc Spector was a former Marine and CIA operative who became a mercenary, despite his conflicted feelings about violence and morality. During a job in Sudan, he was appalled by ruthless fellow mercenary Raoul Bushman, who then attacked and killed archeologist Dr. Alraune. After saving the archeologist’s daughter and colleague, Marlene Alraune, Spector was then mortally wounded by Bushman before finding himself drawn to a recently unearthed tomb for shelter and placed before a statue of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Spector dies, but is then suddenly revived, fully healed. He claims Khonshu wants him to be the “moon’s knight”, redeeming his life of violence by now protecting and avenging the innocent. While early stories imply Spector is merely insane, it is later revealed Khonshu is real, one of several entities from the Othervoid (a dimension outside normal time and space) who were worshipped as gods by ancient Earth people.
I’ve never read it, but from what my Marvel comic-reading friends tell me, hopefully we’ll be lining up scenes like this:
The show is now heading to Disney+ in March and stars Oscar Isaac – who apparently wasn’t totally scarred by the superhero business when he made the terrible X-Men: Apocalypse – and here’s the first trailer:
So clearly not what I read on Wikipedia. It’s set in London and there’s obvious bits of the British Museum on display, for starters. Plus there’s Oscar Isaac’s accent. Hmm. He’s getting stick on social media for that, because it does have a touch of the Orphan Blacks about it (interestingly, of course, the star of Orphan Black, Tatiana Maslany, is going to be playing She-Hulk in another Marvel TV show soon).
However, to be fair, the character does have dissociative identity disorder so that might not be his real accent – Wikipedia does say the character is American – merely one of his other identity’s accents (he’s Stevie, not Marc at this point), so that could actually be part of the plot. Which does happen.
Anyway, I enjoyed the creepiness of the whole thing and him being bonkers (or maybe not), so the more I watch the trailer, the more I want to watch the show, so it’s done its job, at least.
