From WandaVision’s grief narrative to Loki’s admittedly dark ending, and the very serious issues raised during The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Marvel hasn’t exactly been treading lightly when it comes to its Disney+ offerings. This bodes well for the upcoming Moon Knight series.
Moon Knight isn’t a character that goes well with the tone the MCU has, in general, set for its movies. Marc Spector is no Tony Stark, or even Steve Rogers. He’s a much more tortured, dark hero, whose story is rooted in a mental health issue. This means that for the show to strike the right tone, Marvel needs to allow the show to be as dark and serious as it needs to. Before the Disney+ shows, whether Marvel could strike that tone or not was up for debate. Now, it’s easy to see Moon Knight being treated the way it deserves.
That isn’t to say that Moon Knight is at all comparable to the aforementioned properties. WandaVision was a show centered on grief, but the sitcom touch did add some levity to the way it was presented. Plus, even though Wanda and Vision hadn’t gotten that much screen time before, they were already familiar to audiences. They didn’t need to be introduced while still managing to balance a tone that, in the show, turned sadder and sadder as reality became harder and harder to escape. Instead, WandaVision took advantage of the established feelings for the characters.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, on the other hand, drew from reality. That’s both easier and harder to do, as the show grounded the very issues affecting its heroes on the issues affecting society at large. This, of course, gave the show a darker tone, but it was still one that was very familiar to viewers. It’s a serious subject the show dealt with, to varying degrees of success, but it was still not that far out from the norm.
Meanwhile, Loki just basically blew up the entire MCU, and did so on purpose. The questions of free will vs fate the show introduced are interesting and complex, but they’re also philosophical questions. There are no answers to be had. This means that fans can engage in the thought process without worrying too much about what it means to think one thing or the other. There are no repercussions.
However, for Moon Knight, it’s much more real. The show doesn’t just need to strike a darker, more serious tone. It features a darker, more serious character, one that doesn’t work if the show doesn’t find a way to maintain that seriousness. Marc Spector’s background is that of a military man – former Marine and CIA agent – turned mercenary. And that’s before anything even happens to him. Soldier of fortune is the baseline with him.
If we add to that the moon-based powers given to him by the Egyptian moon god Khonshu, and his Dissociative Identity Disorder, Spector becomes not just a more complicated character, but one that only works in a show with a different tone than the MCU has, by large, struck so far. This doesn’t mean the MCU isn’t filled with complex, interesting characters. But it’s easy to understand Tony Stark using humor as a defense mechanism, or Steve Roger’s man-out-of-time shtick being played for laughs. It’s much harder to imagine Spector working within the same context. Particularly as the show will have to deal not just with a pretty traumatic background, but a mental health issue.
Marvel has dealt with a lot of diverse personalities in the MCU so far, but it’s mostly stayed away from mental health issues. There have been some mentions of PTSD, like Tony Stark in Iron Man 3. There was Sam Wilson’s attempts to reach out to Steve in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and later Bucky during The Falcon and the Winter Solider, not just as a friend, but as a trained counselor. And there was the group therapy Steve was seen attending at the beginning of Avengers: Endgame. But all of those have been incidental.
No storyline has ever truly focused on it. No storyline has had to. This will all change with Marc Spector, and for both his sake and that of the show’s success, it’s a good thing that Marvel has been experimenting with darker, more serious storylines in its properties. If Moon Knight is going to be successful Marvel will probably have to go much darker than it ever has before. Considering how much of what comes in the MCU going forward is riding on the success of Moon Knight, let’s hope that the MCU is really and truly ready to give this character the storyline it deserves.