Back to Basics

Daredevil Season 3.
Review by Michael Isenberg.

The Marvel Defenders universe is in trouble. After an enthralling start in the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the subsequent entries in the franchise just haven’t had the same punch. In the past few months we’ve had a second season of Luke Cage in which the title character might just as well have stayed home washing his hoodie, and an Iron Fist installment which was just like Black Panther but boring. There was practically zero buzz about either. Two weeks ago, the news broke that Netflix had cancelled Iron Fist, followed by last week’s announcement that there would be no third season of Luke Cage either.

So it is encouraging that Season 3 of Daredevil, released on Netflix this weekend, gets back to the fundamentals that made the franchise so great to begin with.

The first season introduced lawyer by day/Daredevil by night Matt Murdock, his law partner Foggy Nelson, and their office manager (not secretary) Karen Page. They teamed up to fight organized crime in Hell’s Kitchen in a taut and gripping story.

Season 2, in contrast, was all over the map. The force of multiple plotlines spun the team of Nelson, Murdock, and Page in three different directions.

But if Season 2 drove them apart, Season 3 brings them back together. It’s a bumpy road—they act at cross purposes more than once—but eventually, they reunite. As if to symbolize their return to their roots, Daredevil even wears his Season 1 homemade black costume, instead of the custom-made horned red body suit traditionally associated with the character. What brings them back together is their Season 1 nemesis, the Kingpin himself, Wilson Fisk.

Fisk is a fascinating character—thanks to his contradictions. Despite a brutal disposition—he began his violent career at age 12 when he murdered his father by smashing his skull in with a hammer—he would move heaven and earth for those he loved: his mother Marlene, and his romantic interest Vanessa. He’s so protective of the latter that he might not, to coin a phrase, beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly (Whether Vanessa wants that degree of protectiveness is another question, one that is answered in Season 3). Fisk was also a man of vision: he wanted to demolish the slums of Hell’s Kitchen and replace them with gleaming, modern towers. That anyone might oppose that vision—the people who call those slums home, for example—was a source of genuine bafflement to him; one almost feels sorry for him. At least until the next time he beats the bloody crap out of someone with his bare fists.

The plot of Season 3 starts slow. Daredevil is broken in body and spirit as the result of having a building collapse on him at the end of last year's The Defenders. It takes an episode and change before he begins to Daredevil again, and this part is a little boring; it’s not like there’s any suspense as to whether that’s going to happen. The Kingpin meanwhile, who was imprisoned at the end of Season 1 and barely seen in Season 2, has cut a deal with the FBI to transfer him from the slammer to house arrest in a luxurious penthouse hotel suite, in exchange for turning state’s evidence. Daredevil and friends don’t like that and start poking their noses into the situation. Kingpin retaliates by getting his own Daredevil. Ah, the Marvel Universe, where there’s always a fight between superheroes with similar powers. It’s not until mid-season that we discover just how much the Kingpin has manipulated the FBI—and that he has a larger plan than merely getting better accommodations.

The Kingpin’s plan involves a certain amount of political intrigue, and this being 2018, those are perilous waters. Anyone creating a series for mass consumption must navigate a narrow channel to avoid pissing off one side of the political divide or the other. Daredevil manages to pull this off using the same solution as the recent season of The Man in the High Castle: give something to everybody. Conservatives will see parallels to current events in the way that the FBI has been thoroughly corrupted by the Kingpin’s machinations. And for my left-of-center friends, they will see their calls for Medicare for All vindicated by the character arc of FBI agent Ray Nadeem: it's set in motion when his sister-in-law’s health insurance is cancelled in the midst of cancer treatment, bringing financial ruin on the family (didn’t Obamacare fix that?). And then there’s this speech, which Kingpin delivers at a press conference:

You’ve been manipulated, poisoned into believing the news media’s fake story, that I am evil, that I am a criminal. Quite the opposite is true. Because I challenge the system, because I’ve told the truth and tried to make this city a better place, the people in power decided to tear me down, to tear me down with false allegations.

Sound familiar? Well, the Kingpin is a Manhattan real estate tycoon.

As with most entries in the Marvel Universe, Daredevil 3 has its share of plot weaknesses, if not actual holes.

There’s a big reveal about Daredevil’s past which, IMHO, is lacking any real emotional resonance. It merely serves to pad the run time by having Daredevil sulk for an episode.

We get a big reveal about Karen’s past, too. It takes up large chunks of Episode 10. Like Eleven’s Chicago journey of discovery in the latest season of Stranger Things, it’s a complete side quest that temporarily derails the arc of the season.

As for the heroes’ plans, none of them seem to work. At one point, a discouraged Karen complains to Foggy, “Do you know what happens when you make a plan? Fisk has already thought of it and he’s made it part of his plan.” Trouble is, the Kingpin is so adept at delving one yard below the mines of Daredevil and company that he would have had to foresee things he couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

Then there's the final three-way battle between Kingpin, Daredevil, and the other Daredevil. It’s got some good fighting—the two Daredevils match the Kingpin’s brutality blow for blow—but it’s completely pointless. The season would have ended exactly the same with or without that fight.

And yet, despite these flaws, I couldn’t turn it off. I binge watched all thirteen episodes in two days. There were other things I needed to do this weekend, but every time I started on one, I ended up saying, “I’d rather be watching Daredevil.”

Daredevil is back, baby, and I hope it marks a turning point for the battered but still standing Defenders franchise.

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 Photo credit(s): IMDB

It’s Luke’s show. But…

Luke Cage: Season 2.
Review by Michael Isenberg.
MAJOR SPOILERS.

I like Luke Cage: both the character and the series. It’s refreshing to see a program which celebrates black people and black culture, confronts police harassment and racism head on, and yet is not too cowed by political correctness to also take on the tough issues that have torn black communities apart, like gang violence, fatherlessness, and corruption.

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