S01.E05: Asylum

[Kate47]

I keep thinking of that quote from Dr Harrow, “do you think you created Steven to hide from all of the awful things you feel you’ve done in your life, or do you think Steven created Marc to punish the world for what your mother did to you?”

I don't have any analysis on it, but it keeps coming back to me like a puzzle box.

[Kel Varnsen]

On 4/27/2022 at 7:09 AM, steelyis said:

Kudos to Marc's dad for trying to hold everything together. You don't see men being the supportive, emotional rock of a family in media very often. But also boo to him ignoring how unhinged his wife was. The woman should have been locked away! Ugh. I'm nauseous just thinking about what she put her son through!

The way they showed how the mom's behavior progressed was really well done. First they were at the service for the little brother and she was pretty terrible but you could maybe almost somehow see where it came from. Then they show her treatment of Mark going across several birthday and it is so much worse, and then to top it all off they throw physical abuse on top of that.

[SnarkShark]

Of interest:

 

 

[Ottis]

So this entire character and show is actually about DID and not about a superhero? I ... think ... I ... LOVE IT! Maybe.

I have zero background on Moon Night, so everything is new to me. Now, though, I can't tell what actually has happened and what was made up by Marc.

I assume Mac was indeed a mercenary, and perhaps he was actually there when Layla's dad was killed? But are the Egyptian gods and the Moon Night powers real, or is Marc just a really good mercenary with perhaps a third personality that is angry and talented and comes out in combat?

But Layla said he has a suit, so .... is there an actual suit? And if so, is the suit god-related or just something super hero-y that allows Marc's third personality to be more deadly?

Anyway, I had no idea DID was coming, I thought it was all related to the Egyptian gods thing, so seeing that some or all of what we *thought* was true might not be true at all and may be DID is awesome. It will be less awesome if all the gods stuff is true, though, and the DID is confined to Marc/Stephen and even Khonshu stumbled into that without knowing about it. In effect, the DID is a side story.

[Silver-hyren]

On 4/27/2022 at 3:49 PM, vb68 said:

Thinking about this some more, it's a little confusing on why "the scales were balanced" after Steven is gone. Marc's a mercenary, who as we have repeatedly been told and shown, was involved in some shady operations. Steven was the one who was purely good at heart and really did want to do the right thing. For the scales to be balanced, it seems like their fates should had been flipped. But what do I know? 

On 4/27/2022 at 11:01 PM, Snapdragon said:

I think it's supposed to be that since Steven was created as a coping device and a way for Marc to hide from his mother's abuse, Steven now being aware of all the bad parts of Marc's life, and forgiving him for them, caused Marc to face his demons and find closure, thus healing him and making him balanced.  

Taweret says something to the effect of the scales aren't balanced because the hearts are only half full. Marc is the dark side of Steven, Stephen is the light side of Marc. Steven didn't fall into the sands until he acknowledged he and Marc are the same person (darkness and light blending together). I saw that scene as symbolically Marc, having worked through his trauma, letting go of (reabsorbing?) Steven and the two halves of the hearts becoming one.  Granted this analogy doesn't factor in the third Alter, but since he's still in the sarcophagus maybe his heart doesn't factor into the balancing equation. 

 

[Wynterwolf]

36 minutes ago, Silver-hyren said:

Granted this analogy doesn't factor in the third Alter, but since he's still in the sarcophagus maybe his heart doesn't factor into the balancing equation. 

Unless... the way Marc's face kept changing to having a broken nose and then not was a signal that Marc and Jake were switching without it being obvious, but Steven was still somehow outside and separate from them. So you could be exactly right about Steven being accepted into the whole with the other alters, so to speak (I apologize if that's bad terminology, I'm not sure how else to say it). The mother dying seemed to change things between the alters and that was when Steven started waking up in strange places. 

Edited April 30, 2022 by Wynterwolf

[SnarkShark]

5 hours ago, Ottis said:

So this entire character and show is actually about DID and not about a superhero? I ... think ... I ... LOVE IT! Maybe.

I have zero background on Moon Night, so everything is new to me. Now, though, I can't tell what actually has happened and what was made up by Marc.

I assume Mac was indeed a mercenary, and perhaps he was actually there when Layla's dad was killed? But are the Egyptian gods and the Moon Night powers real, or is Marc just a really good mercenary with perhaps a third personality that is angry and talented and comes out in combat?

But Layla said he has a suit, so .... is there an actual suit? And if so, is the suit god-related or just something super hero-y that allows Marc's third personality to be more deadly?

Anyway, I had no idea DID was coming, I thought it was all related to the Egyptian gods thing, so seeing that some or all of what we *thought* was true might not be true at all and may be DID is awesome. It will be less awesome if all the gods stuff is true, though, and the DID is confined to Marc/Stephen and even Khonshu stumbled into that without knowing about it. In effect, the DID is a side story.

There are issues of Spider-Man where he doesn't fight any villain.  There may even be ones where he never puts the costume on and only appears as Peter, although that'll be rarer.   What defines a Superhero story isn't always as clear cut as a fight or a suit.

Marc Spector's internal story is quite valid as a superhero story.  He's certainly not the only comic book character to do this.  Look up a character called The Sentry.  They're unlikely to ever use him in the MCU, but his mental and emotional issues make Marc's look like nothing in comparison.  

While we're invited to consider the idea that Moon Knight and Khonshu aren't real, because this IS a superhero universe, I do think we're expected to understand this is more Marc's question to analyze and not ours.  We're expected to watch this with an assumption it ties into the rest of the MCU, thus making it real.   The DID is only a side story in the sense that externally, to the rest of the world, what Harrow is doing is more important.  But from a narrative standpoint, it's more of the story than the threat from Harrow. 

Edited April 30, 2022 by SnarkShark

[Ottis]

38 minutes ago, SnarkShark said:

There are issues of Spider-Man where he doesn't fight any villain.  There may even be ones where he never puts the costume on and only appears as Peter, although that'll be rarer.   What defines a Superhero story isn't always as clear cut as a fight or a suit.

And those ... I'm not as interested in. Not as a superhero story, anyway. If I want to see Average Joe fighting his depression demons, there are many shows (and people, some of whom I know) that feature that. Not nearly so many shows about a superhero I've never heard of whose powers appear to come from an Egyptian god - and whose DID in fact makes him a superhero with actual costume.

38 minutes ago, SnarkShark said:

While we're invited to consider the idea that Moon Knight and Khonshu aren't real, because this IS a superhero universe, I do think we're expected to understand this is more Marc's question to analyze and not ours.

Agree. However, as I noted, watching Marc explore what is real to Marc isn't interesting to me. I was enamored with the realization that what I had been pondering as a straight superhero story was in fact a guy with DID who might have been *imagining* the superhero story. That was a very cool moment for me, because not many shows surprise me. But if the rest of this show is that, and not about a real world (featuring superheroes), then I'll stop watching. I'm not saying that direction is a bad one. It's just not interesting to me.

Edited April 30, 2022 by Ottis

[johntfs]

On 4/29/2022 at 5:06 AM, Spartan Girl said:

*sigh* Yup. And it’s also another example of the MCU’s misogyny in changing canon to make female characters the villains. Kate’s mom being a crime boss instead of her dad, turning Sharon Carter into the Power Broker, and now retconning Marc’s mom into an abuser. Ugh.

Would you rather women be heroes, victims and supporting ornaments only to male characters?  Looking back over the MCU most of the "bad guys" have, in fact, been guys.  Villainous part are generally considered to be the "fun" meatier roles.  Should women be denied those roles in service to some false "female empowerment" narrative?

[Spartan Girl]

5 hours ago, johntfs said:

Would you rather women be heroes, victims and supporting ornaments only to male characters?  Looking back over the MCU most of the "bad guys" have, in fact, been guys.  Villainous part are generally considered to be the "fun" meatier roles.  Should women be denied those roles in service to some false "female empowerment" narrative?

There’s a better way for the MCU to do that instead of vilifying female characters that were good in the comics all in the name of making them more “interesting”. If that’s not a false empowerment narrative I don’t know what is.

Edited May 1, 2022 by Spartan Girl

[Wynterwolf]

51 minutes ago, Spartan Girl said:

There’s a better way for the MCU to do that instead of vilifying female characters that were good in the comics all in the name of making them more “interesting”.

Exactly. Plus there was no intention here of making her "more interesting", this was just a short-hand narrative device to minimize & sidestep the inconvenient canon fact that the character is Jewish and that his faith was an integral part of his canon story in the comics.

 

19 hours ago, Ottis said:

and whose DID in fact makes him a superhero with actual costume.

Except his DID predates him meeting Khonshu by decades so one has nothing to do with the other. His DID complicates his life in general, which includes his affiliation with Khonshu, but they are being presented here as completely separate things. All of the alters are real people, and all of them have their own experiences, that the other alters may or may not be aware of. But everything that's happened to them is real (in the context of a super hero show). This episode with it's depiction of the asylum is within the system's mind & the limbo between death and life that Tawaret inhabits, so isn't real in a physical sense, but that's separate from what the system has experienced in the 'real world'. 

[johntfs]

27 minutes ago, Wynterwolf said:

Exactly. Plus there was no intention here of making her "more interesting", this was just a short-hand narrative device to minimize & sidestep the inconvenient canon fact that the character is Jewish and that his faith was an integral part of his canon story in the comics.

 

Except his DID predates him meeting Khonshu by decades so one has nothing to do with the other. His DID complicates his life in general, which includes his affiliation with Khonshu, but they are being presented here as completely separate things. All of the alters are real people, and all of them have their own experiences, that the other alters may or may not be aware of. But everything that's happened to them is real (in the context of a super hero show). This episode with it's depiction of the asylum is within the system's mind & the limbo between death and life that Tawaret inhabits, so isn't real in a physical sense, but that's separate from what the system has experienced in the 'real world'. 

Yes, the show cleverly side-stepped Marc being Jewish by making sure to show him wearing a yarmulke outside his own home during his mother's funeral reception.  The story line with Marc's mother wasn't about disrespecting Judaism, it was about respecting DID in addition to, yes, simplifying and focusing the narrative.  DID is highly unlikely to be triggered by some one-time event (like getting beaten by anti-Semites).  It's much more likely to arise out of an ongoing intolerable situation like physical, emotional and psychological abuse and neglect at the hands of his mother. 

You want to use the anti-Semite thing?  Okay.  Who are they?  Why did they go after Marc in particular?  What was it about that attack that caused Marc's DID?  What happened to the anti-Semites?  Are they still around?  You can let something like that play out over the years and decades of a comic book's run, but the Moon Knight show has six episodes and unless you want to refocus the plot of the show on Marc fighting Neo-Nazis that broke his mind, there's probably not enough room to cram all that stuff in there.

The abuse story line is cleaner and frankly smarter because it focuses the story directly onto the three people who were broken by Marc's brother's death: his mother who was consumed by grief and blame, Marc who is drowning in grief and guilt while being the target of his mother's toxic emotions and his father, who was apparently paralyzed by his love for his wife and remaing son to the point that he never got help for the former and never intervened to protect the latter.  The story gives the audience a visceral, immediately understandable reason for Marc's DID: he created another (or two or more) persona(s) because he could not trust the two people closest to him, his parents, to nurture and protect him.

[Wynterwolf]

I'm not Jewish so I think it's more appropriate for me to link to other voices with more insight than me:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

Storytellers make choices. That's their job. Those choices are always going to affect different members of the audience in different ways, I like to learn from people who have a different perspective from mine.  

[AnimeMania]

Picture of Taweret's Voice Actor carrying Taweret's head on a stick.

 

[Camera One]

The was basically a flashback episode that revealed the backstory of the character and answered a lot of "mysteries" behind the circumstances.  It was pretty well done, but I think I've seen enough similar types of episodes that it didn't feel too innovative.  The psychiatric hospital provided a slightly more interesting way to get from flashback to flashback, I suppose.  

I did like watching the interactions between Marc and Steven.  I actually thought they would re-combine into one person at the end (with a recombination of hearts).  Steven "dying" was really sad since he was more interesting and relatable to me than Marc.  I suppose it made sense as Marc had now faced his past head-on and no longer "needed" Steven as an escape mechanism.  

Taweret was fun though the hippo head looked too cartoonish.  

[WatchrTina]

On 4/27/2022 at 11:10 PM, tennisgurl said:

I have always been interested in ancient Egyptian mythology and I think this show has done a great job exploring it, coming up with a lot of epic visuals and weaving it into both the action and the more personal story of Marc. 

I, on the other hand, have only a passing familiarity with Egyptian mythology . . . or at least that was the case until the TV show "American Gods" came along.  Due to THAT show I feel like a freaking amateur Egyptologist and I am loving how the scraps of Egyptian religion/mythology that I learned on THAT show are enhancing my enjoyment of THIS show.

May I add that "Taweret temping as guardian of the afterlife" is just the best thing ever and the animator who is responsible for her adorable little ear wiggles deserves a raise.

 

[Dandesun]

4 hours ago, WatchrTina said:

May I add that "Taweret temping as guardian of the afterlife" is just the best thing ever and the animator who is responsible for her adorable little ear wiggles deserves a raise.

 

If Disney/Marvel couldn't get hippo ear wiggles right they should just pack it all in and call it. They had that shit down in 1955 (hey Jungle Cruise!) so the fact that Taweret was so engaging and ear wiggly... well done indeed.

[Affogato]

On 4/30/2022 at 9:59 AM, Ottis said:

So this entire character and show is actually about DID and not about a superhero? I ... think ... I ... LOVE IT! Maybe.

I have zero background on Moon Night, so everything is new to me. Now, though, I can't tell what actually has happened and what was made up by Marc.

I assume Mac was indeed a mercenary, and perhaps he was actually there when Layla's dad was killed? But are the Egyptian gods and the Moon Night powers real, or is Marc just a really good mercenary with perhaps a third personality that is angry and talented and comes out in combat?

But Layla said he has a suit, so .... is there an actual suit? And if so, is the suit god-related or just something super hero-y that allows Marc's third personality to be more deadly?

Anyway, I had no idea DID was coming, I thought it was all related to the Egyptian gods thing, so seeing that some or all of what we *thought* was true might not be true at all and may be DID is awesome. It will be less awesome if all the gods stuff is true, though, and the DID is confined to Marc/Stephen and even Khonshu stumbled into that without knowing about it. In effect, the DID is a side story.

If I remember correctly originally in the comics you think he is ‘crazy’, it is all in his head, and it is revealed that the god thing is real. I only read a little of it when it first started. The mental issues are pretty fanciful though, it serves the story.