The following contains major spoilers for Moon Knight Season 1, Episode 5 “Asylum” and WandaVision Season 1, Episode 8 “Previously On,” both streaming on Disney+.
Moon Knight has been compared to WandaVision because both shows explore trauma in the lead character’s backstory — something Moon Knight delves into during in the series’ next-to-last episode. In “Asylum,” Marc Spector and Steven Grant go on an emotional journey, revisiting their past (including the origin of Steven) and resolving their present. However, the episode goes beyond the apparent storyline with something more to offer, proving that Moon Knight isn’t just similar to WandaVision — it’s superior.
Moon Knight created three worlds in “Asylum,” making the series’ storyline a lot more complicated than WandaVision. In the first world, which the previous episodes focused on, Marc and Steven attempted to prevent Arthur Harrow from awakening the Egyptian goddess Ammit. However, a second and third world were created when Harrow shot Steven in the chest. The second world was a mental hospital in which Marc became a psychiatric patient of Dr. Harrow. The third world was portrayed as Marc and Steven’s afterlife. The interconnected and separated worlds became the battlegrounds for three different aspects of their being: body, mind, and soul.
WandaVision‘s second-to-last episode revolved around Wanda Maximoff’s grief being the trigger for creating Westview. Guided by Agatha Harkness, Wanda revisited her family’s and Vision’s deaths — without going into much detail. Her brother Pietro appeared in her early memories, but his death was only mentioned briefly. There were inconsistencies in the storyline, and though one could argue that the loss Wanda experienced throughout her life led to her devastating final breakdown, Agatha only tackled her early memories in search of the fundamental trigger.
In contrast, Moon Knight delved deep into Marc Spector having Dissociative Identity Disorder, providing viewers with a consistent, fully-developed storyline to contextualize his trauma. “Asylum” provided massive amounts of information in a limited run time, exploring the cause of and factors in play in Marc’s DID, Steven’s beginnings, the trigger of his recent personality overlaps, Khonshu’s manipulation and the eventual resolution between Marc and Steven.
Moon Knight showed healing from emotional trauma through the journey of Marc and Steven finding missing pieces in each other, creating many cathartic and moving moments to follow that hug from “The Tomb.” Viewers learned that Marc created Steven to cope with his mother’s abuse and his father’s negligence. In “Asylum,” confronting the trauma and the loneliness of being trapped in an abusive household with Steven by his side was a way of finding strength and resolution with the past. Forgiveness and self-acceptance happened when Steven protected Marc from being dragged into the sand of Duat after the two finally acknowledged themselves as one.
Moon Knight provided viewers a sense of closure while WandaVision took a different route, leaving more questions than answers. The series created a craving for more information (and an Agatha Harkness spinoff), while Moon Knight has already tightened all the loose ends before the season finale. Steven’s death represented the last step of healing, because Marc no longer needed Steven as a coping mechanism, and Marc has taken a complete emotional journey as opposed to Wanda’s open-ended one.
New episodes of Moon Knight stream Wednesdays on Disney+.
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