Luke Cage S01E01 Review: Power Man

Luke Cage, Season 1, Episode 1: Moment of Truth

Now I wasn't sure I was going to even watch Luke Cage at all, at least not until Iron Fist or Defenders show up and I have to scramble and marathon the series to catch up with it. Mostly because, well, Luke Cage himself isn't a very interesting character to me. Sure, he shows up in a couple of Marvel comics I've read, he's like in every single video game including one of my favourite games as a child (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance) but he's never really appealed to be. He's just this big black dude with strong muscles and super-strength and indestructible skin.


But hey, Luke Cage was pretty cool in Jessica Jones (only a single line here tells us of his exploits there, though, so no need to play catch-up to enjoy this show), and he's cool enough so I thought I'd give this show a spin. Full disclosure, though -- I'm not American, and I'm not black, so a lot of the cultural and social references absolutely fly over my head. Like the opening scene, where they spend like five or six minutes talking about some football nonsense that I absolutely have no freaking clue what they're talking about.

(Yeah, I know it's basketball. I'm not that dumb. But it's funnier to feign ignorance.)

The first episode kind of opens quite slowly, with very little action or superhero stuff. It's just a bit of a setup of the neighbourhood that Luke lives in, showing all the people congregating in Pops' barber shop (including a cameo by Turk Barrett of Daredevil fame). He's holding two jobs, one as a barbershop with this happy and very nice and very friendly old dude called Pops that's like the nice uncle to all the boys in the neighbourhood, and a second job washing dishes and serving drinks at a club. It's been some time since he owned a bar of his own in Jessica Jones, and he's going through some hard times, being behind on his rent to the Chinese landlady and just trying to stay in the background while people are talking about baseball and getting punished for swearing inside Pop's barber shop.

Part of it is because of the whole mess during the events of Jessica Jones, and part of it is because he's still unable to move on from Reva. Now Pops is introduced quickly as the only one who knows about Luke's powers, his ambiguous fugitive/experimental labrat backstory, and like us he's trying to get Luke to help people like 'those folks downtown'. Like Jessica's slow first episode, though, Luke is down and out and he needs a bit of a push to finally make a difference. I have a feeling Pops will go the Uncle Ben route as this show goes on...

But we cut away to the main villain of the piece, Cornell Stokes, a.k.a. Cottonmouth. Cottonmouth's the nickname that all his flunkies give him, but he hates being called that. There's a bit of a too-quick introduction that only becomes clear on rewatch, with a barrage of new characters being introduced within a minute, all the while a shoot-up is happening while juxtaposed with Cottonmouth telling his business partners that everything's going to be fine.

Cottonmouth is pretty quickly established as being a gangster, though not quite a card-carrying villain in a way that Wilson Fisk is. He's making deals with his cousin Mariah, who's like the new mayor of Harlem or something like that, and this other gangster Domingo. There's some kind of deal going on, where Hammer industries explosives that are very, very powerful (yay Iron Man 2 references!) being sold that the three people involved get something out of it...

But the small details from the slow opening end up coalescing together in a small conspiracy that fucks up Cottonmouth's deal. Luke is forced to stand in to cover the 'sick' barkeeper, Dante, in Cottonmouth's club. Luke briefly sees one of the kids that work in Pops' barber shop, Shameek, walk out with a gun, but doesn't really do anything about it. Turns out that Dante, Shameek and Chico (another kid from the barber shop) are betraying Cottonmouth, and are stealing the money from the little deal between Cottonmouth and Domingo's little deal. During the scuffle, Dante gets killed by Shameek when the former freaks out over killing one of Cottonmouth's guards.

So despite all the slimy confidence as a boss, Cottonmouth's first outing as a villain isn't all that great, and it's cool to see how he's going to handle this. Like Wilson Fisk, Punisher and Killgrave before him, it's going to be interesting to see the flaws in our villains, and the format of a multiple-episode mega-movie Netflix series is probably one of the best formats to tell a story that's both about the villain as much as the hero. And Cottonmouth has to answer to an agent of another player, Diamondback (who's a Marvel villain that I actually know!), this white dude called Shades. Who wears shades. Very appropriate. Shades tells Cottonmouth that Diamondback wants to see him win, and despite Cottonmouth confronting the possibility of Diamondback taking over, Shades mollifies Cottonmouth pretty quickly.

Of course, while all this is going on, Luke Cage has no idea of all the gangster stuff going on and flirts with one of his patrons, an 'auditor' that ends up spending the night with the dude. Oh, and Luke briefly sees Shades as he walks towards Cottonmouth's office, and apparently recognize him from some flashback? He hyperventilates and panics and almost thinks of skipping town, so I guess it's something from whatever mysterious organization gave Luke his powers?

Whatever the case, Shades and Cottonmouth's other agents find Shameek, and we see that Cottonmouth, well, he doesn't take to having his money stolen very nicely, and brutally beats Shameek the fuck to death. The lady that Luke sleeps with turns out to be a policewoman, and she finds out the body, and starts to draw connections. Yeah, police lady's definitely going to be an important character. So the setup for the whole gangster plot, with Cottonmouth hunting down Chico with the threats of Domingo, Diamondback and whatever Cottonmouth himself is planning, are all somewhat hinted and established.

We end things with the Chinese landlady having her restaurant attacked by extortionists that basically demand donations for Cottonmouth's mayor cousin, Mariah, with some barely-disguised 'keep Harlem black' racism. Of course, Luke shows up with a hoodie, with Shameek's death and Pops' words shaking him enough to let him take action, and it's very awesome and cringe-worthy to see that one gangster's fist absolutely shatter quite graphically on impact with Luke's fist. Luke owns the fight with the four gangsters, refuses to take money or be hired (Heroes for Hire reference there), before walking out.

It's not the best opening, let's put it that way. While the setup for the setting and conflict is kind of well-done, the opening is so grindingly slow that anyone who isn't already interested in Luke Cage probably won't really care that much. And compared to the pretty cool openings for both Daredevil seasons and even the opening to Jessica Jones that I have on record stated to be very underwhelming... this one also feels even moreso. It's a bit strange just how little we see of Luke himself in this first episode, with a good chunk of the most interesting screentime devoted to Cottonmouth's organization, actually, and I'm definitely a lot more interested about Cottonmouth and his cool gangster plans more than anything involving the main hero himself. No, we have to listen to people talk about nonsense boring everyday stuff and long, long panning shots of the adimttedly gorgeous club and the performers in it. Thankfully Netflix drops a dozen episodes on our laps at once for our viewing pleasure, and the story definitely improves in quality from here on out.


Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Not a terribly huge Marvel geek, but I know enough about Luke Cage to point out some Easter Eggs. Pops' nickname for Luke Cage, "Power Man", was his superhero handle for a fair bit before he simply discarded the codename entirely. The whole "for hire" thing is a reference to "Heroes for Hire", which was Luke Cage and his buddy Iron Fist's comic-book title and little team-up name.
• Cottonmouth buys explosives from Hammer Industries, belonging to Justin Hammer, an antagonist introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Iron Man 2 and having a short cameo in the Marvel One-Shot episode Hail to the King. 
• We get a short scene of a random DVD salesman in the street trying to sell people Blu-Rays of video of the Avengers incident.
• Pops brings up that time that Luke's ex shot him in the face with a shotgun. Said ex is Jessica Jones, and Luke's confrontation with her, as well as the story of how Reva died, is told in Jessica's show. This site also did an episode-by-episode review of Jessica's show, so if you're interested, check it out!
• Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin, is mentioned during Cottonmouth and Mariah's discussion of a power play gone wrong. Fisk's attempt to take over Hell's Kitchen is told in the events of Daredevil's first season. One of the policemen notes the various gangs and dismisses it as being too much to track -- some of these gangs met their downfall at the hands of Punisher and/or Daredevil during the events of Daredevil's second season, which is supposed to take place more or less around the same time as this series.