At first read, this issue of Moon Knight was pretty thrilling, but the more I look at it, the more inexplicable it gets.  It opens with a bunch of terrorists in high-tech suits of jetpack-armor, flying around at night and kidnapping pedestrians off the streets of Manhattan apparently at random.  But then Moon Knight swoops in on a crazy crescent-moon-shaped drone ship, complete with automatic weapons, missile swarms, crescent-shaped chaff, and flying mini-drones, capable of hostage rescue or exploding on command.  All voice-controlled, no less!  We even get a wonderful scene of Moon Knight’s moon-craft hiding in plain sight.  So he decimates the jetpack people, and it’s all totally rad.

Unfortunately, once he follows the lone jetpack terrorist to (where else but) an abandoned off-shore oil rig, he starts speaking in more than just clipped drone commands, and that’s when it gets kinda silly.  He finds a bunch of disheveled hostages chained up around a skeletonized corpse in the remains of primitive jetpack armor.  One of the hostages says that when “the flying men took us they told us… the raptor goddess would come for us.”  At this point I would mention that, to my recollection, neither Moon Knight nor Khonshu have made any reference to a “raptor goddess” in the course of this series.

Moon Knight: “You’re safe now.”
Some guy: “How can you be sure?  Do… do you now the raptor goddess?”
Moon Knight: “I know the type.  But the raptor isn’t coming for you.  She flew too close to the moon.  And the moon must also feed.”

Haha!  Because the moon is renowned for its hunger in mythology!  Delightful.  But then the crazy gun-wielding jetpack guy shows up, yammers about how they’re supposed to be friends and that the raptor goddess was going to make them angels and promises were made; he ends up shooting “the idol” and gets all distraught, giving Moon Knight the opportunity to punch ‘im real good.  I did like his line, “Don’t be so worried.  You can’t kill a god so easily.  If you could, everyone would be doing it.  Believe me.”  I liked that.  But then Moon Knight goes on to say, “But you can’t get faith and desperation mixed up, either.  Do that… and you’re only sacrificing yourself.”  And I was like, I don’t really know what you’re talking about.  And in the closing scene, when one of the hostages calls Moon Knight an angel, he replies, “No.  I’m like them… the ones who brought you here.  They weren’t angels.  Neither am I.  An angel doesn’t need to scream… for his god to take note.”  Haha, what?

So this issue was serviceable, and the aerial battle was big fun, but as usual, it makes me just want to go back and re-read the first six Warren Ellis issues in which Moon Knight was just a well-dressed lunatic investigating weird crimes by way of brutal beatings, instead of making cryptic observations about the nature of faith after blowing up nutjobs in jetpack armor who were kidnapping passersby to appease their… goddess?