Of all the ways I could measure my life—hours, days, years—I think the best and most telling metric is how long I've spent waiting and waiting (and waiting), for the Big Bad in a Disney+ Marvel Cinematic Universe jam to show up.
Who could forget the primordial days of WandaVision, when we all sat around wishing Mephisto would show up? How about Loki's He Who Remains, who, sure, we welcomed into our universe, but mostly showed up to service the big screen? Don't get me started on Hawkeye's bungling of Kingpin, who appeared up via a grainy flip phone PNG only to get his ass smashed by a car. This is all to say: Marvel, if you dangle a carrot, one with a little red superhero cape on it, throughout an entire season of television, you undercut everything going on in the damn show. The reveal never meets the hype.
So as I queued up the first episode of Moon Knight—which is now streaming on Disney+—I was expecting to watch a full hour of Oscar Isaac's Steven Grant tool around London, fumbling around his place of employment (a museum gift shop!), before an at-the-absolute-last-second tease that he just might superhero when we see him again next week. Praise the great Oscar Isaac, this does not happen. The team behind Moon Knight must've paged around the Multiverse of Marvel Reddits—realized that fans spent every series chasing the Easter Eggs hanging from their own tails—and decided that the action would start now, immediately, and all at once. It just might be the best thing to happen to the MCU since the Spider-Men. (Or Simu Liu. We love Simu Liu at Esquire.)
Within the first minutes of Moon Knight, we see exactly what we showed up for: Ethan Hawke in full Marvel Villain mode and Oscar Isaac delivering the character study he's long teased for his MCU debut. It's as if Moon Knight started with its second episode, the one where the action goes up two (or in this production's case, five) gears and the mystery begins to spool. What's Moon Knight's mystery? Well, it's not a fancy, world-destroying wearable. Or the backwash of Captain America's super soldier serum. The thing that drives Moon Knight along is exactly what it should be: Isaac's staggering portrayal of a man with dissociative identity disorder. Living with severe mental illness, Stephen Grant shifts between being his own savior and his own greatest enemy, having to chain himself to bed at night so his other personas don't destroy his life.
Moon Knight has its flaws, sure. Producer-director Mohamaed Diab's choice to skip the shallow end and hurl viewers into the deep of the Marvel wave pool might lose the series some fans. Many longtime MCU followers might find themselves unhappy with the show's lack of references to the larger superhero world, too. (So far crossover indications are low.) But I'd rather play catchup than spend one more minute of TV trolling around for a Mephisto reference.
