Luke Cage S01E09 Review: Abalone Man

Luke Cage, Season 1, Episode 9: DWYCK

The previous episode felt like just a rush to get from point A to point B, introducing Diamondback and having a confrontation between Luke and Diamondback, plus Claire and Misty. Here we get some exploration around the characters, mostly Mariah Dillard, Misty Knight and Diamondback. There's a fair bit of Luke Cage scenes too, of course, since he's the character whose name is the title of the show, but the big character developments happen for these side characters. And it's very much needed. I've gone on about how interesting Mariah's character is, especially after the flashback and comparisons with Cornell back in episode 7, and Luke is a character with a fair amount of screentime... but the focus on Misty and Diamondback is definitely well done and much needed.

Misty has been a constant character since the first episode of the series, but beyond her Sherlock Scan abilities and filling the One Decent Cop (tm) role, she hasn't really... done much that really endears her to me. The role as a resident of Harlem and someone close to Pops is filled very well by Bobby Fish, Chico when he's alive, and honestly every other random Harlem resident that knows Pops. And the fact that she's been more obstructive than helpful in the few most recent chapters -- last episode in particular -- has really made me wonder why I should really even root for Misty Knight at all. Whereas I've ranted about just how annoyingly shoehorned in Diamondback is. Other than Cottonmouth and Shades talking in hushes about Diamondback, we know jack shit about the character, and then he shows up and he's randomly Luke's long-lost brother or whatever.

Let's breeze through the Luke Cage scenes first. Luke gets a lot of scenes, but they act more like little intermissions between the character-heavy Misty and Mariah scenes. Luke basically recovers from the two Judas missiles in his chest and stomach, and just wanders around town with his hoodie. It's a bit of a strange transition from the previous episode to this one where Diamondback didn't really make an effort to chase down Luke when he falls to the dump truck, while he gives off a speech here to Shades, Zip and his goons that Luke ain't dead until they find the body. Um, okay. Anyway, Luke just wanders around and sees that the reputation he builds up so much prior to Cottonmouth's arrest has blown apart. Between the police hunting him on charges of killing Cottonmouth and Mariah's continuing character assassination of Luke through the media.

Luke gets confronted by two policemen, and while he tries to talk his way out, he ends up fighting. I mean, he's dying and he needed to get help quickly. There's a cool bit where Luke shields Cop #1 from Cop #2's gunfire, but the video from the policeman's car records Luke throwing Cop #2 towards the policeman's car's windshield, looking all the world like a metahuman rampaging. There isn't any reason for Luke not to go for his 'grab gun and twist it, then walk away', and instead go for the 'throw dude halfway across the street block' move, though, so this bit also felt kind of forced and, of course, doesn't help his case.

Luke manages to meet up with Claire without much of an incident, who uses five minutes of googling to find out about Seagate Prison, its kinda-secret experiments and the doctor that worked there. Um, wow? I know it's kind of to make Claire somewhat useful, but really? This kind of makes Luke, Cornell and Misty look somewhat dumb for not googling 'mysterious prison experiments' in the first place. There's some kind of tie-in to Reva's USB stick, but they still can't log into that thing. They manage to drive off with Luke groaning but not dying, where they meet crazy crazy dr. Burnstein, who's a cup of coffee away from being a Golden Age mad scientist.

On the way Luke gives a bit of a backstory about Willis Stryker, a.k.a. Diamondhead. Luke claims to know Willis as his best friend, but not his brother. Huh. Anyway, Burnstein unlocks Reva's hard drive, and everything is apparently is there... including Killgrave data? No real discussion about that end because this is Luke Cage, not Jessica Jones, and Burnstein reveals that even without Reva's begging, well, Luke's already part of the program. There's a bit of a medical scene where they use an IV line to extract blood from Luke's throat mucous membrane, and apparently Luke's unique DNA was what synergized with the abalone DNA or whatever that was involved in the science process. Yeah. Wolverine has cool alien indestructible metal bonded to his skeleton, Luke Cage gets... abalone. Okay. There's some talk about some very comic book-y crazy acid bath with temperature thing to get Luke's skin weak enough to extract the Judas missile pieces. Luke tells Claire to not trut Burnstein, but goes ahead with it. The episode ends with Luke flatlining, but we're not fooled. This is episode 9, not 13.

Anyway, all hail the abalone powered man.

So let's continue with the first character to get a lot of character development, Misty Knight. She spends the entire episode with a psychologist, and while this might kind of hurt pacing a bit with all the characters being so relatively passive, it's very interesting talk. The nice psychologist asks Misty just why she basically went for career suicide for assaulting what's basically a nice innocent lady. Misty tries to act tough, going all "I break people in the interrogation room, I know how this works" but eventually divulges information about stuff like her love life, when questioned. Misty tells the psychologist the pains of living with super-memory. Yeah, it's super useful when she's reconstructing crime scenes, but it also makes her inherently suspicious of people, it makes others see her as kind of a freak, and she can't ever forget stuff that hurt her.

Chief among stuff that hurts Misty? Scarfe's betrayal. Misty truly trusted Scarfe, sees him as a mentor, and Scarfe's betrayal leaves a very lasting scar on Misty -- which explains why she doesn't trust Luke Cage despite Luke being so obviously nice. We get her to talk about a lemonade story, how Misty leaving her cousin to talk to a handsome dude back when she's a kid caused her to disappear, and her cousin's only found dead and beaten up later on... which is a tragic story, and explains why, like Luke, Misty is so concerned about fixing her hometown and making a difference instead of pursuing a bigger career elsewhere. Misty briefly pulls the gender double standard card, but the psychologist, while not dismissing the very real problem about gender inequality at work, points out how Misty has gone rogue, going after Luke and Claire without a partner or permission, and striking out against a civilian.

The psychologist points out the biggest problem in Misty's psyhche at the moment, which is the lack of control when Diamondback held her own gun towards her head. It's a very nice, vulnerable moment when Misty rants about just how helpless she was in that situation, forced to her knees and knowing that she might die there and then shot by some random killer in an alleyway. She notes how there are ten ways that she could've grabbed her gun back from Diamondback, and stuff like that, but she froze and nearly paid a deadly price. It's a nice way to have Misty come to terms with her own issues quickly without it being unnatural, and it's all apparently a ploy by chief Priscilla Ridley.

You see, Ridley is angry at Misty for lashing out at Claire last episode, but she's reasonable, and she's the one that threw in the psychologist there, I bet. Ridley notes how Luke has attacked cops and doesn't trust them, but Misty is different. They need Luke Cage to question him, guilty or not guilty, but they also need Misty's head to be in the game.

Diamondback gets a cool scene when he shows up on Cottonmouth's old office, with a 'smoke and fire' speech where he shoots one of Zip's goons in the leg, distracting them with his hand folded into a fake gun and moving triumphantly in the air, while his other arm, hidden and unnoticeable at his hip, aimed a real gun to shoot someone. It's a cool scene, and he's definitely a take-charge person. We just don't know that much about him, though we did get a very cool scene between him and Shades. It's revealed that, yes, Shades took his own initiative in playing Palpatine with Mariah Dillard, as well as causing Cottonmouth's death. Diamondback respected Cottonmouth enough to not want him dead, and was almost ready to kill Shades, but Zip shows up and saves Shades, giving a reason that, well, Shades is more useful alive than dead.

Again, Diamondback isn't entirely boring or flat, but we still know scant little about him other than he likes to take charge. And he's all about control and he hates Luke and he sometimes quotes the bible.

And mostly Diamondback is just eclipsed by Mariah who's just so much interesting. Sure, Mariah isn't as effective, experienced or scary as Diamondback, but she's just so much more interesting. She might have killed Cornell in an angry, possibly well-justified and well-deserved fit of rage, but killing her own cousin, which by her own admission is a boy that she practically raised herself, is something that haunts her. She talks to Cornell's corpse about how Cornell wasn't abandoned, not per se. It's just that his father died due to a drug overdose but really wanted him, whereas his mother just panicked and ran away, leaving her at Mama Mabel and Mariah's doorstep. And Mariah has always been trying to protect Cornell from all the gangster shit, which... y'know, definitely is shown in the earlier episodes with Mariah's insistence that Cornell get out of the gangster mob boss business. And considering there's no one in that room other than her and her cousin's body, it's definitely from the heart.

Shades shows up and kind of forces Mariah to take the place of her departed cousin in the hunt for Luke Cage, in the place of the mobster food chain. Ironically, despite all her talk about how she is different from Mama Mabel (a scene very unsubtly has her slam Mama Mabel's portrait face-down on her table) and trying to distance herself from the family business, it's no doubt that she has the gravitas that a criminal leader needs, perhaps moreso than the excitable, childlike Cottonmouth.

Her first order of business is quickly to hunt down Domingo, and ask, nay, order him to gather all the other local crime family bosses, because she wants a smooth transition. She's a politician that knows how to negotiate and not let her ego get in the way. There's a cool moment where her assistant Alex just tries to spin her familial tragedy as a way to advance her political standing, which Mariah praises, which is a cool moment. Mariah meets up with Domingo and the other crime bosses, and claims that she wants out of the crime game and is going to sell Cottonmouth's connections to them.

And then Diamondback shows up and murders everyone nonchalantly, sparing only Domingo (who didn't have any sort of beef with him) and Mariah. Diamondback apparently didn't have any idea what's going on that Mariah and Shades are planning, but Mariah doesn't flinch. Put on the spot and wanting out of the game not less than five minutes ago, she quickly gives Diamondback the idea of selling the Judas bullets in the light, selling them to the police as a way to kill two birds with one stone -- have the police join the hunt for Luke Cage, while give Diamondback lots of money by selling money. But Mariah's in way too deep now, because Diamondback forces her to basically be the broker.

So yeah, Mariah definitely has the talent to be a criminal boss, to succeed where her cousin had failed, but she doesn't want this particular legacy of hers. Mariah and Misty have two of the most interesting character growth in this episode, and honestly it kind of makes me forgive the very slow and ultimately uneventful episode, and Diamondback still kind of being kind of... well, crazy and killing and threatening to kill everyone and apparently having some kind of personal vendetta with Luke, but honestly he's kind of one-dimensional compared to the work done on making us care for Cottonmouth and Mariah.