I just watched the first two episodes last night, and the third just now. It's not really grabbing me, it seems very dull and sketchy and by-the-numbers in a way I haven't seen from the MCU since, I guess, Thor 2. It's not as overtly shoddy as "Inhumans," but it doesn't feel well-paced or thought out. As has been mentioned, I figured out what was going on despite having only the vaguest awareness of "Moon Knight is Batman if he was actually nuts" almost immediately in the first episode once we combined Steven's "sleepwalking" with people telling him about things he didn't remember doing, and just kept being ahead of the show in a way I don't think was intended. Like, I was already asking, "Why would a married man be coming on to woman when he knew he had no way to actually make the date?" and then it gets answered with the reveal of the third personality, which gets no further exploration in this episode, so next week there's going to be a big twist that I already figured out (with some help from the rest of you about the "shocking" part). It just feels really padded out.
Then there's the part about the shifting night sky being excessive considering that Layla's tablet could certainly already do that, and also the fact that celestial navigation doesn't work like a GPS. They'd need a very precise time and a very complete note of the sky (or a specific star) to get anything useful, and I don't think ancient Egypt had navigation-grade mechanical clocks. But that's just movies not knowing how the sky works, the thing that really bothered me was, how did Layla know to gather the fabric from the burned mummy? She was way the hell outside the building, she didn't hear Steven and Marc talking about it, the bodyguard didn't comment when he saw Marc messing with the artifact, she just somehow knew where the clue was.
Hard to imagine a Disney/Marvel show not having the budget to have something in another language properly scripted and coached. I mean, Barbara Eden spoke actual Persian in the I Dream of Jeanie pilot. It's not rocket science. But, c'est la vie.
I haven't been taking notes, but I've been getting the vibe this show is stretching its budget with a lot less grace than I'm used to seeing, both from the MCU and just in general. Some of it has dramatic justification, like cutting around the fights in the first episode, or the ghost-jackal not affecting anything during the museum chase, but by the second time there was a fight with an invisible monster, and we were mostly seeing it from a perspective where it
was invisible, I started to get suspicious. There were also some very conspicuous bluescreen (or LED wall) shots, like Marc looking out the window at the pyramids, and I suspect the boat ride in this past episode, as well. It could also have been the virus, but I just feel like I'm watching them gradually run out of money as the show goes on.
My point is that if I'm not just mistaking a stylistic choice for a practical limitation, not getting a proper dialogue coach for a two-line exchange seems like a very easy corner to cut.
