Review by Michael Isenberg.
MAJOR SPOILERS.
I binge-watched Season 2 over the weekend, and obviously any series must have something going for it to keep me saying “one more episode” every time the credits roll. Marvel’s trademark humor is well in evidence, much of it revolving around Luke coming to terms with his own fame, one manifestation of which is that he is frequently stopped on the streets of Harlem for selfies. There’s even a Luke Cage app which use the tags on all those selfies to track his whereabouts. When Piranha, a rich investment broker, hires Luke for a party, and insists that he wear a bullet hole-ridden hoodie, Luke groans stoically, “Cosplay.” When Luke refers to police detective Misty Knight as his sidekick, and she demands to know why he isn't her sidekick, he breaks the fourth wall, Deadpool-like, and says, “It’s my show.”
Some scenes are nothing short of gripping. One that stands out for me (and here's the spoilers part) is the “Rum Punch Massacre,” in which crooked nightclub owner and ex-councilwoman Mariah Stokes wreaks vengeance on the family of the Bushmaster, who had previously set fire to her house—with her inside. Mariah and her gang show up guns blazing at Gwen’s, a Jamaican restaurant owned by Bushmaster’s family and named after his mother. As if the slaughter of innocents at gunpoint isn’t horrific enough, Mariah then sets fire to Bushmaster’s uncle. When he doesn’t die fast enough, she shoots him. The scene plays out twice, once in real time, once in Detective Knight’s imagination as she reconstructs the crime (It’s a thing she does). Both versions are worthy of a Tarantino movie, with Quentinesque touches such as exterior shots of the restaurant strobing with gunfire; the hesitant, suspenseful, will-it-or-won’t-it ignition of the fire; a brassy score straight out of a Spaghetti Western; and close-ups of a drinking bird—reminiscent of the old wooden pump in the climactic scene of Kill Bill Part I. Brilliant! The only thing missing is a slo-mo sequence of Mariah and company approaching looking cool, but then there are plenty of those elsewhere in the season.
The talented Alfre Woodard turns in a nuanced performance as the sometimes repulsive, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes even sexy Mariah. Theo Rossi’s ever present smile made me rather like Mariah’s henchman-slash-boyfriend “Shades,” despite the character being a dirt bag. But it’s Luke’s show and Michael Colter brings a quiet dignity to the title role which can be intimidating or likable as the scene demands.
Indeed, the character has come a long way since his birth as part of Marvel’s attempt to cash in on the 1970s Blaxploitation movement. For background, I turned to Nerds who Read's expert on all things comical-historical, Kerey McKenna, who explained to me, “Old Luke Cage knocks down Doctor Doom's Castle Door, yes that Doctor Doom, Nemesis to the Fantastic Four, because Doom's embassy stiffed Cage on a $200 bill.
“New Luke Cage says that it happened [and] kind of humble brags about it as his old crazy days before he became a pillar of the community.”
Indeed, the difference between the brash Luke Cage of the 1970s and the slow-burn Luke Cage of the 2010s is right in their tag lines: “Hero for Hire” vs. “Hero is your word. Not mine.”
(I love the way the debut appearance screams "Sensational Origin Issue!" on the cover as if Luke Cage were already a thing.)
The cerebral 2010s Cage gives a great deal of thought to what a hero is, and is never sure whether he lives up to that.
Alas—and this is my only significant complaint about Season 2—there’s one sense of “hero” that the writers overlooked: the literary sense. The hero is supposed to drives events. Luke doesn’t do that. The arc of the season is basically the conflict between two villains, Mariah and Bushmaster, with Luke merely responding to events, weighing in first on one side, then on the other, as his conscience struggles to do what’s best for Harlem.
Luke Cage isn’t the first franchise to be tripped up on this. James Bond spent most of Goldfinger as a prisoner, merely along for the ride (and that’s widely considered the best Bond ever!). And, as Amy Farrah Fowler pointed out on The Big Bang Theory, Raiders of the Lost Ark would have ended exactly the same if Indiana Jones had just stayed home.
More spoilers: Luke might just as well have stayed at home as well, washing his hoodie. He was not instrumental in taking down either villain. Mariah’s eventual comeuppance comes, not at his hands, but rather courtesy of Shades. Shocked by the brutality of the Rum Punch Massacre, and simultaneously dealing with feelings of insecurity that he’s losing Mariah’s affection, he turns state’s evidence. Mariah’s reign as Queen of Harlem comes to an abrupt end behind prison bars.
As for Bushmaster, he turns out not to be such a villain after all and then, having burned himself out on holistic steroids, he quietly slips away to his home island of Jamaica to recover.
Indeed, plotline seems to be the weak point of The Marvel/Netflix Defenders universe in general. The franchise got a promising start with the awesome first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones. But frankly, the subsequent entries in the series haven’t lived up to that promise. We’ve had an overcomplicated Daredevil Season 2 featuring the most incompetently conducted legal trial in the history of legal trials, a less than compelling Jessica Jones 2, an Iron Fist whose plot was mainly driven by the fact that the title character was an idiot, and a short Defenders (only eight episodes) that took four episodes to start defendering. Hey, Marvel, you’ve got some great characters here. How about slowing down the production schedule a bit to get the plotlines right?
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
