The first episode of Moon Knight is quirky and odd, kind of funny and very confusing. It introduces us to Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), a hapless gift shop employee at a London museum, who knows far more about Egyptian mythology than his superiors. He binds himself to his bed each night, yet still finds himself in strange and sometimes dangerous places when he opens his eyes.

It's hard to know what's going on, really, although a mysterious voice calls to him from an unseen place, and someone who looks just like him but speaks with much more confidence sometimes appears in the mirror, to Steven's great confusion. The eponymous Moon Knight doesn't appear in the first episode, until the final few seconds before the end credits.

The second episode continues the pattern, both intense and bewildering. It seems to offer answers but raises more questions. I guess it's good screenwriting, because you want to know more.

Let me say this up front: Back in the day I used to read comics avidly, and I read fairly regularly through at least one incarnation of the Moon Knight character, although it was abruptly canceled, then relaunched with significant changes, and I lost interest. So I come to this Disney+ series with some slight knowledge of Moon Knight's backstory but I'm by no means an expert. From that standpoint, I found early episodes of this six-part series intriguing and a lot of fun.

Anyway, we eventually meet Marc Spector, the mercenary who also occupies Steven Grant's body. Initially at odds, the two personalities learn to work together; Grant, a frustrated academic who just got fired from his gift shop job, has vital information on Egyptian history and lore, while Spector has fighting skills, the voice of Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham, acted by Karim El Hakim), an Egyptian lunar god, in his ear, and a wife, Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy) ... who's something of a black market archeologist and is seething from being abandoned. She, apparently, wasn't aware of her husband's divided personalities, although she did know about the Khonshu thing.

Meanwhile, Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) and his followers are trying to awaken the goddess Ammit (voiced by Saba Mubarak), a crocodile-faced "devourer of the dead" who, like Khonshu, punishes the unjust. The difference is, she doesn't wait for crimes to happen, she looks into people's futures and, if it looks like they're going to sin someday, kills them immediately. Grant/Spector has in his/their possession a mystical scarab that points the way to Ammit's tomb, and Harrow wants it. And soon there are the avatars of other Egyptian gods contending that Khonshu, not Ammit, is in the wrong. (Except for Tawaret, a jovial hippopotamus goddess of childbirth and fertility who also ferries the dead to the afterlife; she's on Khonshu's side.)

There's a lot of conflict and some well-choreographed fights in the series, but fighting isn't the point of the show. In fact, a lot of the early fight scenes take place during Steven Grant's blackouts, which means they're off screen for viewers. (Which is actually kind of disappointing.)

There's some philosophy and psychology at work, too, and a lot of threads to unravel to get to the end ... which is somewhat bewildering. Moon Knight was engrossing but, let's be honest, I often had no idea what was going on. There are also some family dynamics and emotional reckonings that are hard to watch.

By the final episode ... well, I wanted to see how it ended, but I wasn't enthralled by the story as much as I was by other Marvel shows over the past year or two. It's uneven in its pacing, and the stakes never feel terribly high, by Marvel standards.

I'm glad I watched Moon Knight, but it still ranks last among its peers.