Luke Cage, Season 1, Episode 8: Blowin' Up The Spot
The episode finally pulls the curtain on the ever-elusive Diamondback, who has been referenced, name-dropped, hinted and given all sorts of buildup throughout the previous seven seasons. Well, not really. We just know that he's Shades' very mysterious and apparently very powerful boss. And honestly we don't even know that the gunman that launched the Judas missile at Luke Cage is even Diamondback until halfway through the episode, and you might be forgiven into thinking that he's just a random mook until he shouts "CAAAAN YAAAA DIGGGG EEEET" in the most ham-fisted way, and even then Luke's recognition only marks him as someone from his past. Who claims to be his brother, a fact that Luke is absolutely confused by. Also Diamondback.
Yeah it came without much buildup, since all we had about Diamondback is that he's this mysterious backer with a cool name. While he's not an interesting character, he is an interesting antagonist. He does portray a pretty obsessed tracker that goes around smashing ambulances, launching rockets and taunting Luke at every opportunity, so there's that, but honestly for a series that has made a name out of building up its characters, switching from the complex, multi-layered Cottonmouth and Mariah to this crazy bazooka-shooting gunman seems like a step-down.
That said, the show does a wonderful job at showing how hurt and vulnerable Luke is, with the hiding-in-hospital bits with Claire having absolutely no idea how to get the bullet pieces out (build a fucking magnet heart protector with a box of scraps!) from Luke's invulnerable body. There's a bit of a reference to the operation in Jessica Jones, where she managed to drain the cerebral hemorrhage by inserting a tube through Luke's eyes, but that doesn't work here thanks to the cells pushing the bullet pieces (that exploded within Luke's body -- I thought it was weird the Judas missile was just a bullet compared to its earlier portrayals). There's a stupid scene where a full-size tweezer is used to pull one of Luke's cells under a microscope -- tweezers are HUGE compared to cells! But I guess the viewers back home don't care? It irks me, really. You can talk about how they used abalone or whatever to give Luke's skin elasticity that causes it to be really hard to break, and I don't care that it doesn't make sense that you can thread a needle from the eyeball to the intracranial ventricles but not take a sample from Luke's soft tissue. It's sci-fi shit that I'd gobble and I'll forgive them for not knowing, but come on, showmakers, that tweezer/cell thing is just dumb.
While the honestly procedural Diamondback/Luke fight and Luke-suffering-in-an-abandoned-hospital is going on, we've got Mariah and Shades covering up the murder. We get a pretty cool back and forth between their cover-up post-murder and Mariah explaining her cover story to Misty and the police. It's pretty cool, how there's like this subtle combat between Shades' cover-up tutorial 101 and Misty's Sherlock scanning. They got that one club hostess from episode one, Candace Miller, to testify that she saw Luke Cage run away from the scene of murder, pinning Cottonmouth's murder on the hero. With Luke Cage himself indisposed (did Shades know this?) and Misty herself doubting Luke's innocence (last episode did have Luke go "I really want to kill Cottonmouth, but I won't") Mariah spins a story about how Luke Cage is this dangerous uncontrollable monster that killed her cousin who, at this point in the story, is believed to be innocent-until-proven-guilty as far as the media and the law understands.
Of course, despite Mariah and Shades' attempt, Misty gets to pick apart holes in the story. Mariah mentions a private entrance, but despite allegedly being Cottonmouth's mistress, she doesn't know about that. There's blood in the showers that Candace claimed to be hiding in, albeit very bleached. Misty herself has met Candace before while going undercover in Cottonmouth's club, where Candace was too afraid to even deliver drinks to Cottonmouth alone and needed Luke to hang with her. Candace almost breaks until Mariah's lawyer comes to the rescue. Very cool moments for Mariah, that's for sure, that makes her transformation from a morally-ambiguous politician (aren't all politicians?) to a card-carrying villain. Playing around with lawyers and lying through her teeth are skills that already come naturally to her, so it isn't a jarring transformation.
Mariah also flexes her power by being super friendly with chief Priscilla, and while to be fair Misty was being very rude and accusative to a woman who, without really any significant proof, has lost a beloved relative. I mean we know that Mariah was the murderer, but honestly there were a lot of other ways that Misty could hint or try to dig for information without feeling like a callous jerk. And, to be fair, Luke Cage being missing really doesn't give Misty too much leeway to move and any sane police chief, especially one who knows that Misty has a grudge against Cottonmouth, would know that Misty's not being especially objective. I'm not really feeling Misty's character here and while I know that the show's trying to get her to be super-Sherlock-y and see what normal investigators couldn't see, we don't exactly get to, y'know, understand how Misty went to 'something's not right' to 'the cousin of the victim is the murderer!'
Misty calls Luke, but considering the dude's bleeding to death with a psychotic maybe-brother hunting him down, Harlem's hero can't really show up for questioning at the police station since he's bleeding half to death. Misty heads off to arrest Luke by a phone tracing program, which happens relatively quickly. Diamondback kind of takes his time to reach there, and manages to hold Misty hostage, and basically holds her at gunpoint before going off and saying that she'll hurt later, because Carl likes her. It's a bit odd, honestly, for her to randomly freeze up like that, but it's a plot hole that'll be addressed in a future episode.
There's a scene where Shades throws his weight around and basically takes over Cottonmouth's organization, ordering Zip and his cronies around. It's a bit of a nice little scene for the lesser characters, I guess.
Anyway, the climax happens at this opera building which is definitely a very scenic location for a superhero throwdown, with Diamondback getting the altitude advantage and shooting powerful weapons at Luke, who finally unleashes the full power that he's been using only defensively throughout the season, and, yeah, Luke's still as destructive as he was back in Jessica Jones. This is when the revelation that his daddy is also a preacherman, the Luke I'm your brother thing, the Diamondback identity, and also the fact that he's responsible for dumping Luke in Seagate prison. It's a bit too introdumpy for the sake of a bunch of revelations, but the problem is that we don't even know that Luke finding out that his brother is alive (or if he had a brother), so this revelation kind of fell flat. The fight ends with Luke being wounded, shot near the chest and falling into a garbage truck. Diamondback just kind of leaves him, which was odd.
While this is going on, Claire is arrested by Misty, and, well, Claire has just faced a bazooka-shooting maniac, not to mention an army of ninjas and soulless zombie children weapons just a couple of weeks back. A very obstinate and bull-headed Misty Knight is nothing to Claire, who works through the interview with a very calm demeanor to Misty's increasing anger, and, yeah... I usually only barely tolerate Claire's self-righteous, ultra-naive world views, but here she's definitely not in the wrong. She asks some armour-piercing questions to Misty, and this ends up causing Misty to flip out and choke Claire. She's got a rough day, but between her rude treatment of the supposedly-grieving Mariah, her distrust of Luke and this absolutely brutal treatment of Claire (who really did nothing wrong!) really doesn't paint Misty Knight in a positive light at all.
Overall there are some really good bits, especially the Mariah parts, and superhero rock-em-sock-em scenes are always welcome. But Diamondback is a bit of a disappointing villain especially with the random string of revelations, Misty Knight has became kind of all over the place, Luke spends his time grimacing and fighting, and Claire is... well, she's inoffensive but she really needs to do something beyond just being "Luke's nurse" and "Luke's conscience".
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