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selenakI liked, but didn't love it. (Though I dearly wish I could have done, for the obvious reason.) Partly for tangible reasons - which I'll get to in the spoilery section of the review -, and partly for reasons that are all about it emotional resonance, which has nothing to do with objective criteria. Of the Marvel tv shows, Jessica Jones and Agent Carter, different as they are from each other, grab me on a deeply personal level, Daredevil and Luke Cage do not. (And I still haven't gotten around to Agents of SHIELD.)
What's great about Luke Cage: definitely the Marvel show with the best sense of place, says the non-American tourist who's been to Harlem all but two times. Even with that qualification, though: for all that Daredevil has both Matt and Wilson Fisk go on and on about "my city" re: Hell's Kitchen, I never got a sense from the show of what Hell's Kitchen is like as opposed to other sections of tv and movie New York. In Luke Cage, Harlem is definitely a character, and main locations such as Pop's Barber shop or Cottonmouth's night club aren't ornamental but crucial to the plot, and part of several people's characterisation.
Also, this is a good ensemble show; it builds up its characters, gives them important relationships with each other, not solely with the hero. And not to delay stating the obvious any longer, all but two or so of the minor supporting characters are black, and so, articles about the show tell me, are the writers, which is still unusual enough to be noted in the publicity for the show, apparantly. There is no attempt to pander to the audience by inserting one of those supposed audience surrogate white characters into the narrative, and the show is the better for it.
And one more general observation: it's an unabashedly geeky show, with Luke as well as several other characters often depicted reading and discussing novels as well as movies. (Even in the last scene of the season finale.) I love that about it.
With all those virtues, what's keeping me from loving the show?
For starters: it has what must be one of the most annoying, laziest written villains in the entire MCU, and that's saying something, given such wonderfully written masters of subtlety and wit like the Red Skull, Eccleston's Dark Elf or far too many Ninja's in Daredevil's second season. How badly written and over the top acted a villain is Diamondback? On a Caleb-from-Buffy's-seventh-season level, that's how bad he is. (If you haven't watched BTVS: Caleb is an evil misogynistic mad preacher working for the First Evil, or otherwise known as an employment opportunity for Firefly's main actor when Firefly was cancelled.) Bah.
Now thankfully, Diamondback isn't the sole villain. He doesn't even show up in person until half the season is over, and the other villains are far more interesting people than he is. The dysfunctional cousins, Mariah Dillard and Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes, are my type of messed up love/hate family relationship, with their backstory shown as having damaged them without excusing them, and Mariah's ascension from supporting villain to main villain (who ends the season winning) of the show is well done. I also very much approve of Shades, who is my kind of smart Lieutenant To Villain: not blindly following, knowing when first Cottonmouth and then Diamondback are acting stupidly, and coming up with effective counter measures.
But the fact of the matter remains: the season's Big Bad is neither of them, and from the moment Diamondback shows up, and spouts one horrible cliché after the other ("Do you know when a snake is at its most dangerous? When it's cornered!" is one typical groanworthy line, and that's when he's not quoting the bible in typical evil mad villain fashion), he's marring my viewing experience. Now in theory, his backstory with Luke could be my jam, since they, too, turn out to be family, and grew up together. But we don't get any flashbacks to their younger days until the season finale, and plenty of one note evil from D. in the present. It's hard to care about their relationship or be invested in Luke's not wanting him dead for quite a while when all you get is a boring madman doing evil things and taunting our hero. (Just a point of comparison: the original X-Men movie might be in retrospect quite flawed, but it managed with just a few minutes of screentime between Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, and no flashbacks at all, create a deep connection between antagonists and hint at a rich backstory. Plus, of course, Ian McKellen's Magneto wasn't depicted as a ranting madman but a tragic figure.)
Diamondback isn't the only problem I have with the show. The scene which absolutely broke my suspension of disbelief was when Mariah uses an incident where a young black man was brutalized by the police to whip up a crowd and manipulating it into.... demanding more lethal arms for the police. You could almost see the writers' conference checking various goals: Mariah needed to be shown using her specific skills as a politician in an evil fashion threatening Our Hero by scapegoating him and creating a situation where the sole weapon that can harm him will be mass distributed. Fine. But letting her do so in this particular manner made no sense whatever: which crowd, angry at the cops having beaten up yet another of their own while they're hunting the supposed scapegoat, will see giving said cops MORE weapons as the solution?
Element I can't make up my mind about, both whether they're good or bad creative decisions and how I feel about them: Reva. On the one hand, I was glad to see her in the big flashback episode, becoming a person as opposed to the backstory plot device she was by necessity in Jessica Jones. On the other hand, I can't help but suspect the later revelation that Reva was lying to Luke the entire time they were together and that she, in fact, had been a willing co-organizer of the human experiments going on in the prison (at least until he broke out and they became an item) was less in order to make Reva a complicated person (reformed villain rather than saintly dead wife) and more to enable Luke to move on emotionally. Which he promptly did. In fact, his reaction to the Reva revelation was so underplayed that you had to wonder whether this was the same person who responded the way he did when he found out Jessica had killed Reva and not told him about it in Jessica Jones. In both cases, it's an betrayal, but given that Reva had been his wife whom he'd been with for years, you'd think he'd respond with more than basically "ah well, now I know, that's over with".
Even within this same show: Misty's reaction to finding out her partner Scarf had been corrupt got more screentime and more emotional depth. Misty got to display anger, hurt, self-blame for not seeing it, lashing out at others, and through it all the additional torment that she still cared about the dead Scarf, even knowing what he'd done, because the (friendly) affection between them had been real.
Given the very premise of Luke Cage is a man who can't be hurt by outside force -Kryptonite special bullets not withstanding -, emotional vulnerability is pretty much the only way you can make him someone the audience can fear for. In Jessica Jones, where he was a supporting character, he was most certainly vulnerable. Here, despite losing, as per Hero's Journey, his Wise Old Mentor, first refusing, then heeding the call, and fighting the dark figure of his past - not so much. Other than the standard hero vulnerability of fearing the villain will go after People I Care About.
None of this means, btw, that Mike Colter isn't appealing in the central role - he makes Luke quietly charismatic with a sense of humor, and I'd take him over Matt Murdoch any day. And did I mention he's into debating favourite books and movies?
So all in all, flaws not withstanding, it was a show I enjoyed watching. But not one that leaves me with the urge to rewatch, if I had the time, or with the need for more.
What's great about Luke Cage: definitely the Marvel show with the best sense of place, says the non-American tourist who's been to Harlem all but two times. Even with that qualification, though: for all that Daredevil has both Matt and Wilson Fisk go on and on about "my city" re: Hell's Kitchen, I never got a sense from the show of what Hell's Kitchen is like as opposed to other sections of tv and movie New York. In Luke Cage, Harlem is definitely a character, and main locations such as Pop's Barber shop or Cottonmouth's night club aren't ornamental but crucial to the plot, and part of several people's characterisation.
Also, this is a good ensemble show; it builds up its characters, gives them important relationships with each other, not solely with the hero. And not to delay stating the obvious any longer, all but two or so of the minor supporting characters are black, and so, articles about the show tell me, are the writers, which is still unusual enough to be noted in the publicity for the show, apparantly. There is no attempt to pander to the audience by inserting one of those supposed audience surrogate white characters into the narrative, and the show is the better for it.
And one more general observation: it's an unabashedly geeky show, with Luke as well as several other characters often depicted reading and discussing novels as well as movies. (Even in the last scene of the season finale.) I love that about it.
With all those virtues, what's keeping me from loving the show?
For starters: it has what must be one of the most annoying, laziest written villains in the entire MCU, and that's saying something, given such wonderfully written masters of subtlety and wit like the Red Skull, Eccleston's Dark Elf or far too many Ninja's in Daredevil's second season. How badly written and over the top acted a villain is Diamondback? On a Caleb-from-Buffy's-seventh-season level, that's how bad he is. (If you haven't watched BTVS: Caleb is an evil misogynistic mad preacher working for the First Evil, or otherwise known as an employment opportunity for Firefly's main actor when Firefly was cancelled.) Bah.
Now thankfully, Diamondback isn't the sole villain. He doesn't even show up in person until half the season is over, and the other villains are far more interesting people than he is. The dysfunctional cousins, Mariah Dillard and Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes, are my type of messed up love/hate family relationship, with their backstory shown as having damaged them without excusing them, and Mariah's ascension from supporting villain to main villain (who ends the season winning) of the show is well done. I also very much approve of Shades, who is my kind of smart Lieutenant To Villain: not blindly following, knowing when first Cottonmouth and then Diamondback are acting stupidly, and coming up with effective counter measures.
But the fact of the matter remains: the season's Big Bad is neither of them, and from the moment Diamondback shows up, and spouts one horrible cliché after the other ("Do you know when a snake is at its most dangerous? When it's cornered!" is one typical groanworthy line, and that's when he's not quoting the bible in typical evil mad villain fashion), he's marring my viewing experience. Now in theory, his backstory with Luke could be my jam, since they, too, turn out to be family, and grew up together. But we don't get any flashbacks to their younger days until the season finale, and plenty of one note evil from D. in the present. It's hard to care about their relationship or be invested in Luke's not wanting him dead for quite a while when all you get is a boring madman doing evil things and taunting our hero. (Just a point of comparison: the original X-Men movie might be in retrospect quite flawed, but it managed with just a few minutes of screentime between Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, and no flashbacks at all, create a deep connection between antagonists and hint at a rich backstory. Plus, of course, Ian McKellen's Magneto wasn't depicted as a ranting madman but a tragic figure.)
Diamondback isn't the only problem I have with the show. The scene which absolutely broke my suspension of disbelief was when Mariah uses an incident where a young black man was brutalized by the police to whip up a crowd and manipulating it into.... demanding more lethal arms for the police. You could almost see the writers' conference checking various goals: Mariah needed to be shown using her specific skills as a politician in an evil fashion threatening Our Hero by scapegoating him and creating a situation where the sole weapon that can harm him will be mass distributed. Fine. But letting her do so in this particular manner made no sense whatever: which crowd, angry at the cops having beaten up yet another of their own while they're hunting the supposed scapegoat, will see giving said cops MORE weapons as the solution?
Element I can't make up my mind about, both whether they're good or bad creative decisions and how I feel about them: Reva. On the one hand, I was glad to see her in the big flashback episode, becoming a person as opposed to the backstory plot device she was by necessity in Jessica Jones. On the other hand, I can't help but suspect the later revelation that Reva was lying to Luke the entire time they were together and that she, in fact, had been a willing co-organizer of the human experiments going on in the prison (at least until he broke out and they became an item) was less in order to make Reva a complicated person (reformed villain rather than saintly dead wife) and more to enable Luke to move on emotionally. Which he promptly did. In fact, his reaction to the Reva revelation was so underplayed that you had to wonder whether this was the same person who responded the way he did when he found out Jessica had killed Reva and not told him about it in Jessica Jones. In both cases, it's an betrayal, but given that Reva had been his wife whom he'd been with for years, you'd think he'd respond with more than basically "ah well, now I know, that's over with".
Even within this same show: Misty's reaction to finding out her partner Scarf had been corrupt got more screentime and more emotional depth. Misty got to display anger, hurt, self-blame for not seeing it, lashing out at others, and through it all the additional torment that she still cared about the dead Scarf, even knowing what he'd done, because the (friendly) affection between them had been real.
Given the very premise of Luke Cage is a man who can't be hurt by outside force -
None of this means, btw, that Mike Colter isn't appealing in the central role - he makes Luke quietly charismatic with a sense of humor, and I'd take him over Matt Murdoch any day. And did I mention he's into debating favourite books and movies?
So all in all, flaws not withstanding, it was a show I enjoyed watching. But not one that leaves me with the urge to rewatch, if I had the time, or with the need for more.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-07 06:44 pm (UTC)So I'll come back when I've seen more, LOL
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Date: 2016-10-08 04:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-07 10:36 pm (UTC)Diamondback didn't work on so many levels. He was badly introduced, and too over-the-top to really care about him, and he makes it retroactively strange that he managed to rise to power and have someone like Shades be so loyal to him. They should have given him more space to develop and save the craziness for his inevitable superpowered return next season...
The sense of space is something I liked most about the show I think. The minor characters were good, too. You got a feeling of a neighbourhood, a community.
I also appreciated that finally, Claire got something more to do than mop up wounds and look exasperated at Matty's angst. With Sonia Braga as her Mom, does it make her officially the one none-supervillain member of the Derevko family?
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Date: 2016-10-08 05:01 am (UTC)I'm trying to figure out when over the top villains work for me, because sometimes they do - you can't be more over the top and crazy than Caligula in I, Claudius, and he was a quintessential element of the show, after all. But Diamondback - ugh.
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Date: 2016-10-08 09:16 am (UTC)For over the top villains it depends on the environment, I think: Luke Cage was going for a very down-to-earth, realistic setting, so having a typical comic book villain crash onto the scene seemed much too jarring. I'm wondering if it was partly on purpose at least where Diamondback's bizarre plan was concerned: he and Mariah were trying to set up Luke as a dangerous freak of nature, so playing him as completely out of control could have been meant to serve that purpose.
But still. Wyllis, if you want to annoy your father, just plant yourself outside of his nursery home (or wherever he currently is, he at least still seems to be alive) and yell sermons all day that are slightly factually wrong. It'll probably more satisfying for everyone involved.
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Date: 2016-10-08 09:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-08 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-08 02:53 am (UTC)Well, the Hell's Kitchen of Daredevil simply doesn't exist - it's completely and totally gentrified and has been for ages. If the Marvel version of it lacks specificity, it's at least partly because they're kinda making it up from whole cloth. Harlem is also well into its gentrification, but it's retained its character a lot more. Plus IMO it had more individual character and history in the first place.
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Date: 2016-10-08 05:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-08 02:18 pm (UTC)I'm on the same page as you: enjoyed it, unfortunately not left with the burning desire to rewatch/have more.
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Date: 2016-10-08 02:28 pm (UTC)Mariah after the beatings makes herself the spokesperson of the Harlem community on this matter, which means her party can't dismiss her as councilwoman because that would make an already incindiary situation explode. (This is her using her skills and the situation for her benefit but without that weird non-logic.) She then, through minions, launches a rumor that Luke is actually an agent provocateur from the cops in order to justify them cracking down on the community. (This is her scapegoating Luke to the community.) The resulting unrests are more than enough for the mayor to go for the offer from Hammer Industries to buy more powerful guns.
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Date: 2016-10-09 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-10 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-10 11:15 am (UTC)Some of the dialogue, the pacing of the show, and the reactions people have, all feel pretty unbelievable to me. Especially the 'give cops more guns!' bit. There is NO WAY IN HELL African Americans would be all 'YOU KNOW WHAT THAT SOUNDS LIKE AN EXCELLENT IDEA', considering the climate in the States around the subject, lately. Or the fact Shades has spent months in jail with Luke, then he spends days staring at him when they meet again, and it takes him FOREVER to go: "... WAIT A SECOND!"; I just can't believe by shaving his beard/hair Luke pulled a Clark Kent xD
Also Diamondback. For the first half of the season we were given the impression the guy knew what he was doing, that he was sort of directing things from behind the scenes, but then they introduce him and he's just all about chaos? I can't make those two 'versions' of him fit.
I don't know, I really really like all of the characters, and I'm *maybe* gonna watch the second season if there ever is one, in the hope they'll actually sit down and try to make an effort to make the show better /o\
(Btw, my dad lived in New York for 9 years, and when we watched Daredevil together he was all grumpy about the fact they kept claiming to be in Hell's Kitchen when the scenes were actually shot somewhere else, so that may be why Hell's Kitchen feels incredibly generic in the show /o\)
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Date: 2016-10-11 10:25 am (UTC)And I haven't yet met a reviewer, not even the most enthusiastic ones, who could make sense of that "let's give the cops more guns YAY" scene.
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Date: 2016-10-13 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-14 06:26 pm (UTC)