After the lacklustre Loki and the curiously insipid Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney+ bounds back to form with a chunk of Marvel that is, to borrow the show’s own London idiom, proper bonkers. I confess – I hadn’t read the Moon Knight comics and was blind to the mythology, but the TV adaptation is all the better for knowing nothing about what’s coming your way. If you thought the torrent of big-budget television had dulled its capacity to surprise, get ready for this.

Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) is a shuffling no-hoper who works in the British Museum gift shop by day. Even the people he works with keep forgetting his name. He’s a book nerd with a particular interest in Egyptology – an interest that will come to be very convenient for the plot of Moon Knight, which is all to do with angry deities cutting deals with mortals and reaping vengeance.

Isaac speaks like the actor Rafe Spall (slamming duff accents is always fun but to these ears Isaac is entirely convincing as a Londoner), at least he does when he’s Steven Grant. But at night he tapes up his doors and shackles himself to the bed, because he’s been having some very, very bad dreams of late. These involve another manifestation of himself, called Marc Spector, who is a kick-ass secret agent on some kind of mercy mission for the god of the moon Khonshu, who talks like F Murray Abraham (it is F Murray Abraham). They also involve Ethan Hawke wearing a cardigan that would give anyone nightmares, leading a cult dedicated to the god Ammit and walking around with broken glass in his sandals.

As that suggests, Moon Knight throws everything and the kitchen sink at its story. It even throws an actual sink and smashes it to bits in one of the opening episode’s climactic fight scenes. Yet it does it all with the raucous aplomb a blank Disney chequebook gets you. If you grew up watching people pretending to shoot each other in The A-Team with plastic guns and one exploding car, the action scenes alone in Moon Knight will knock your socks off.

More than just pyrotechnics and CGI there’s the also now-customary Marvel tone, whereby wry humour, silly jokes, sudden horror, high fantasy and men holding staffs can co-exist, sometimes within a single sentence. This is a high-wire act that has been honed to perfection over the course of the near-300 films that make up the whatever-verse, but by now the writers have got it down pat.