“We absolutely must tell LGBTQ+ children that they belong in this world and they deserve to be loved,” Sugar wrote to EW in an email. “This way we can be together even when we’re apart,” Ruby says. So she rides back and asks Sapphire to marry her. Though she seems happy to Steven, Ruby reveals she can’t be truly happy without Sapphire.
Ruby goes off to be alone and pursue a Western-style life. Ruby and Sapphire had merged to form the warrior Garnet, but they split after this reveal. Over the course of this story, Rose Quartz was revealed to be the still-alive Pink Diamond, who’s been leading an invasion plot against Earth. Perhaps it’s too much of a generalization to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is designed for children, but it’s absolutely designed in a way that isn’t meant to exclude them.This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Even with the MCU’s light geopolitics and frequent friendly gestures toward the military-industrial complex, at the end of the day, the franchise is carefully designed to remain firmly family-friendly, with mostly bloodless violence and nothing too frightening or intense. The MCU could arguably be better without its fixation on comic book heroes as paramilitary agents, and every step away from that (like Shang-Chi) is appreciated. However, sometimes the focus on four-quadrant storytelling collides with the ambition of the story in a given MCU installment - as this week’s Moon Knight illustrates.
“Asylum” is among the darkest, most intimately devastating stories Marvel Studios has ever told. It’s an episode about a man’s fractured mind finally shattering as he revisits the most traumatic moments of his life. It’s fraught, terrible stuff, delivered with a light touch that might be too light. The horror is frequently undercut with moments of humor, and a reticence to center that horror onscreen. This is frustrating in an episode as crucial and internal as “Asylum.” Picking up where “The Tomb” left off, “Asylum” shows Marc Spector and Steven Grant (both played by Oscar Isaac) seemingly trapped in a psychiatric ward run by “Dr. Harrow” (Ethan Hawke), who is trying to convince Marc that the events of Moon Knight thus far are a fiction devised by Marc’s brain as a coping mechanism. Taweret (voiced by Anotonia Salib), a fertility goddess resembling a hippo, offers Marc and Steven another possibility: They’re dead, and currently being judged in the desert afterlife known as the Duat.Īccording to Taweret, Steven and Marc’s hearts must be weighed on the scales of judgment in order to determine whether they will remain trapped in the sands of the Duat, or proceed to a reed-filled paradise. However, the balance of the scales are in flux, as they were when Harrow tried to use his own powers to weigh the two men’s guilt.
Steven and Marc must work together and - to quote David Lynch - fix their hearts or die. With this directive, “Asylum” takes its shape, with Marc and Steven wandering the asylum’s halls to revisit their mutual past. Each door along its white corridors hides a memory, and in visiting these rooms, Moon Knight’s writers fill in just about every gap in the show’s backstory thus far. Viewers are shown how Marc took responsibility for his brother’s death in childhood, how that death led his mother to turn abusive and resort to alcoholism, and how Marc invented the Steven Grant persona, patterning it after his favorite movies, to help him withstand that abuse. As Marc gets older, the wall between himself and Steven gets higher, with Marc bearing all the pain.
Eventually, he’s discharged from military service and into a mercenary career, while Steven gets to live in bumbling ignorance.