So! Moon Knight s all wrapped up, and that finale was pretty good! I mean, the pacing for that last
episode was very strange, this show definitely could have done with another episode to space it
all out a bit, and certain parts of the episode felt more like first drafts than final versions,
but generally speaking it ties this series up well and certainly better than some other
Marvel Disney+ projects. But this video isn t just about the finale. Instead,
I want to focus more on Moon Knight as a whole, and dig a little into the uneasy relationship
this show sometimes has with its darker elements. Because I made a video after the season premiere,
after that first episode came out boasting something of a different tone to what a lot
of people had been expecting. There should be a link to it onscreen now, so I d suggest you give
it a look if you haven t already, because in some ways, this video is kind of part 2 of that one. In
a nutshell, though, I was interested in the ways that first episode seemed to self-consciously
swerve away from any really violent sequences, or any more uncomfortable imagery like the
lack of blood we see from Harrow s sandals, or those scenes where Steven dissociates
and returns surrounded by corpses. My point wasn t that this was bad it was that this trend,
visible at the same time that Marvel was quietly cleaning up gory and darker scenes from old shows,
was worth thinking about. I had a lot of comments saying that I was being an edgelord,
that I just wanted to see more violence for the sake of violence, and that I was generally just
a big stupid dummy, but I don t think those were necessarily fair. I was careful to title that
first video Moon Knight AND Marvel s Maturity Problem , and I thought that spending half its
runtime discussing the MCU s wider reluctance to commit to more brutal ideas made it sufficiently
clear that I wasn t criticising some lack of maturity in Moon Knight, but discussing its
seemingly haemophobic production aesthetics in the context of a wider problem outside of the show but
maybe I should have been clearer on that front. The reason I m bringing all this up, though,
isn t just to whine about mean internet comments, it s that I think some of the things I discuss in
that first video ended up being pretty relevant to some of the directions Moon Knight ended up
taking. The main point I made in that first video was that while violence, blood, gore,
all of that stuff doesn t lead directly to deeper, more mature storytelling, incorporating these
aspects does allow darker, more complex stories to be told if the project in question explores them
intelligently. And I think we do see this in Moon Knight albeit in a bit of a strange way.
Let s take the way the show cuts away from moments of severe violence, and then drops us back into
the aftermath. This happens a lot throughout the show, and there s a few different levels to it.
Most obviously, it s a cool cinematic trick to represent the disorientation
of dissociation. Past that, the show implies that these missing hyper-violent interludes
actually mark the emergence of the hidden alter Jake Lockley. It s a really interesting nonverbal
indication of what s happening it s show, not tell, done to perfection. This storyline
is told in a fascinating way, throughout the background of the series, and in this regard,
these moments of dissociation are crucial. But as I suggested in that first video they do seem to
serve another function; to keep the show rated TV-14. In the eyes of the censors, a bunch of
bodies covered in blood is one thing but showing the way they got into that state is something else
entirely. There s a difference between showing brutality and showing the brutalised, between
seeing dead people and seeing people killed. Given how stringently the MCU has avoided harder ratings
for much of its existence, I don t think it s possible to view these scenes of violent
dissociation without considering this angle. That s why this whole thing s a little strange.
The show builds this Jake mystery, suggests at this extreme trauma, not through violence so
much as the conspicuous absence of violence. And, like I said, this strategy works for the
story that this season of Moon Knight was trying to tell using violence and gore as narrative
markers to construct this particular mystery. But if this story was told in a different way,
if it went any further, the effectiveness of this technique would quickly cease.
If the character does indeed return in a future marvel project, as many are speculating,
maintaining this pattern is going to lead to diminishing returns. Because now Marc and Steven
have reached an equilibrium, the continuation of these violent blackout episodes is the inevitable
next stage of their journey. It s not going to be long before they figure out the existence of Jake,
and if Marvel attempted to tell that story without showing any of these missing moments,
it ll be a deeply unsatisfying watch. That flips the good part of these moments on it s head the
show-not-tell dynamic would be entirely reversed. The way Moon Knight cut away from these moments
of violent dissociation was a neat trick and it allowed the writers to tell a fascinating story
while keeping the rating down. But the irony of not showing these moments of dissociation,
of building the Jake mystery in this way, is that it s inherently unsustainable. Sooner or later,
so long as the Moon Knight story continues we re going to see this version of Jake Lockley in
action that is, if the writers want to deliver a satisfying story. But I don t really see how
they d be able to do that while keeping the TV-14 rating, since Marvel have said multiple times
that Moon Knight really pushed the limits of how graphic and violent
they re allowed to get. And while Season 1 handled this tension in an original and interesting way,
you have to wonder what came first the idea of Jake as this hidden, ultraviolent alter,
or the corporate need to censor moments of graphic violence. If it s the latter if this version of
Jake was born out of the *need* to cut away from the more intense scenes I think there is reason to
worry about both the future of this character, and the future appearances of characters who
thrive in similarly dark stories. Because there s a real tension beneath the surface of this show
between the story that s being told and the story we re allowed to see.
And on this note, I also want to talk about Arthur Harrow s feet. But not in a weird way! Well,
maybe in a kind of weird way, but in that first Moon Knight video I made a big deal out of the way
the show conspicuously opens with this big scene showing Harrow crushing some glass in his sandals,
and the very obtrusive way we don t see any blood leaking out in the following tracking shot. A few
people in the comments suggested that, after a long time doing this self-flagellatory podiatric
routine, he s probably got big ol callouses on his feet. And yeah, that s a perfectly reasonable
possibility, but it sort of misses the point I was attempting to make. I wasn t trying to Cinema Sins
it, to say hey, it objectively makes no sense that there s no blood here, and as such it s a
careless mistake on the part of the studio. I was more trying to argue that the absence of blood
callouses or no callouses was, intentionally or not, an early indication on the show s part that
the more gory details of this story wouldn t, and perhaps COULDN T be the focus. And given what we
ve discussed above I think that prediction panned out fairly well, and that I was right to suggest,
as I did at the end of that video, that we should bear in mind this absent foot-blood, and what it
might represent, for the rest of the season. And I swear I m gonna stop talking about old-man-feet
soon, but I do want to tell you a little theory of mine. You ve heard of game theory, you ve heard
of film theory? Well, this is FOOT THEORY. We see, as the mental illusion of the psych
ward winds down in episode 6, a set of bloody footprints inside Ned Flanders Harrow s office.
The purpose this detail plays within the scene is to show us reality bleeding into this imagined
realm, and to firmly assert its illusory nature. These bloody footprints are a detail from real
Harrow, and his spiky sandals, appearing on Fake Harrow and the principal indicator to Marc that he
s correct about what s actually happening and what isn t. But and please do correct me if I m wrong
Marc s never seen Harrow s bloody feet in the real world. Maybe he s heard the crunching glass,
but I don t believe he s ever witnessed this symbol of reality in the real world, and
I don t THINK we have either. As a result, this moment doesn t quite work,
since it s not bringing back something real that Marc or the viewer has seen before. Why is Marc
associating bloody footprints with Harrow, if that s not a detail we ve seen? Here s the foot theory:
at some point, maybe even in that first scene in episode one, an early cut of this series showed us
Harrow leaving a trail of bloody footprints. Maybe this was even a visual motif which reappeared as
the character did, maybe not but I think this was a detail included at some point,
and it was cut to appease censors. Maybe showing mild body horror like this in the opening
minute of a TV show was deemed just too much for TV-14. In an alternate cut of Moon Knight,
where the bloody footprints are a familiar spectacle for us by the last episode,
this moment makes a lot more sense, both in-and out- of universe. That s the foot theory,
and I d love to know what you think of it below. So, yeah, I think I was right about Moon Knight,
in that there s a real tension underneath the surface over what gets shown and what doesn t.
Luckily, the minds at Marvel were aware of this tension, and wrote around it deliberately abusing
the perspective of the camera in order to build a mystery and tell a story. But that s not going to
work forever, and I ve seen plenty of people who were already fed up with it by the show s end.
But was I right, in that first video, to tie these concerns in with what I termed a maturity
problem , visible elsewhere in the MCU? Well, maybe I wasn t, no. While the things we ve been
discussing here are absolutely LINKED to maturity, it s not a 1:1 match, and the exploration of
trauma we saw throughout this show, particularly in episode 5 was, for the most part, really well
done. There s emotional maturity here, and a keen, sensitive approach to a lot of heavier topics
including mental health. I ve been involved in a couple of discussions in my discord server with a
user affected by DID, and it does seem like Marvel got a lot right on that front here. All that being
said, I still don t think I was wrong to discuss the compulsive sanitisation of the visual in the
context of maturity though perhaps I should have worded that discussion more carefully.
Maybe I ll talk more about this show sometime in the future, because there s some interesting
stuff I ve never really mentioned like ideas of objective and subjective morality,
and the kinda sus way Marc s sparing of Harrow is framed. But for now,
that s that for Moon Knight here, so make sure you comment #ReleaseTheHarrowFootBloodCut down below.
Big thanks as always to my Patrons onscreen now, and especially Kevin Douglas and Ian Fyfield.