Luke Cage, Season 1, Episode 10: Take It Personal
While I don't expect show makers to know the intricacies of dealing with a medical emergency, as someone who works in a medical profession I honestly would appreciate not being so utterly daft that it sounds like the whole medical scene is written by a five-year-old. I mean, yeah, the sci-fi super-elastic-super-tough abalone cells are something that doesn't exist in real life and I can buy the whole weirdness of having to use superheated acid mixed with saline solutions to soften it to undergo the operation. I get that, I mean, this is the superhero genre. But apparently, Claire Temple, who despite being a nurse, somehow knows a lot, lot more about the elasticity of Luke's sci-fi cells that she's only making guesswork about more than the doctor who actually designed the experiment in the first place? And dropping live wires into an acid pool to jump-start someone's heart and saying how it's some "follow your instinct" shit? It's laughably dumb, and the super-confident way that Claire says it makes it look like she's like a bad parody of Batman. She can suddenly do the operation while dr Burnstein only wrings his hand in the background, and apparently two Jericho missiles that explode into a cloud of shrapnel leaves only two or three pieces that can be removed in two minutes with the delicacy of picking up a peanut with a tweezer. I get that Claire is one of the main characters, and putting her in a moment of importance is good for her character development, but this one is just kind of, well, dumb.
Add that to shoehorning Claire as Luke's love interest, which kind of worries me since Claire started off her career as Daredevil's love interest and if comic canon is any indication Luke/Jessica is the official pairing, so if Claire ends up snogging with Iron Fist in his show it'll kind of be an unfortunate bit where Claire just goes from diddling one superhero to the next.
Diamondback, meanwhile meets up with Mariah in a secret hidey-hole and she's been kind of rising in the ranks, though not relatively willingly. There's a bit of a talk on 'black fear' on Diamondback's part, and he's going full in with Mariah's plan to sell guns. And we get this scene of a nice, old policeman called Albini that the show emphasizes is nice by having him go around talking to random people in he street and buying socks for his wife. And Diamondback goes around with a power glove and punches the poor dude in the chest to death. And he walks away with his hood waving his hand in the air shouting "I'm Luke Cage!" It's... something hammy that I'd expect out of a Silver Age comic and would feel right at home if this had a lighter tone like Flash or Agents of SHIELD, but doesn't exactly fit the tone of the show. I laughed my ass off at that scene and love it for its wacky hamminess, but that's probably not the intent of that scene.
There's a bit in the police station where we learn that, yeah, Albini was as nice to his family and the other policemen and it drives everyone angry. Misty tries to defend Luke, but considering that she has absolutely no evidence that Luke is innocent -- and the whole 'Luke throws cops violently' video is honestly a very good reason for the NYPD to distrust Luke at this moment. And we get a bit of chaos and some chilling scenes that probably hit a bit too close to home for American viewers where policemen go around beating up black youngsters demanding to know where Luke Cage is. It's not without bad reason, of course, from the policemen's point of view they're hunting a dangerous superpowered criminal that just killed one of their own... and the show is careful enough to show both white and black policemen doing the brutality. But it's definitely being portrayed as a negative thing, with Mariah being absolutely furious that her precious Harlem is being turned upside down.
The most horrifying scene for any viewer, I think, is the sight of Lonnie, the kid who had several scenes in the first two episodes as the kid that Luke protected from the bullets. He's very awesome since his mom is a lawyer and he knows all his rights, but the one policeman that happens to be interrogating the kid -- who's like eleven years old or some shit -- was very close to Albini, who was his instructor or some shit, and absolutely brutalizes the poor kid. We don't see the deed but we see the aftermath of the kid's bloodied face and it's... well, a scene that gives a bit of a pause and definitely inspires a bit of an outrage.
I definitely understand the kid's mother when she shows up and absolutely flips out at poor chief Priscilla, and threatening to unleash a social media storm that this has to stop. It's such a shame that this is all relegated as a B-plot and used by Mariah to spin public opinion to support her, riling up support to get the policeman to... buy guns that can hunt down Luke Cage. There's a bit of a clunky change from "the policemen are beating up our kids" to "give the policemen super-guns!" And, yeah, Mariah's speech sells it while I'm watching the show -- the lady's played by a great actress -- but now that I'm writing a review it seems an odd direction to take. We get the random inclusion of Boone who at this point of watching the series I even forgot existed.
While all of this is going, Misty has a bit of a more self-centered view that's also looking at the bigger picture at the same time. She's more concerned about who attacked her instead of investigating or hunting down the big Luke Cage, and no one in the force really cares about her other than Priscilla checking in every ten minutes or so to tell her to get off her ass and hunt Luke. She discovers the name Willis Stryker, and discovers Luke Cage's Carl Lucas identity, and confronts Domingo for a bit, and honestly her scenes in this episode really felt like padding.
Luke himself, well, is involved in a bit of a nonsense bit. The Reva/Burnstein bit should've been world-shattering to him, but other than him moping for a bit it doesn't really seem to affect him. After the unexpectedly wacky and very comic book-y acid bath scene, we get this rather long-winded moment of Luke angsting, and the question of whether the goofy and helpful yet mysterious Burnstein could be trusted or not. Luke wants to know about Reva, and we get to see a series of video recordings of Reva profiling Carl Lucas from day one in the prison, and she definitely knows about the fight trials, which is part of the whole criteria for being subjected to the Wolverine experimentation. The fact should be devastating, that Reva's love and her married life with Luke might even be an act... but other than throwing a tantrum and destroying every single thing in Burnstein's lab to stop him from repeating the process, he just doesn't really do much about it.
Oh, and Burnstein still ends up getting the data anyway, so the tantrum ends up being moot. Burnstein only wants to use Luke as this hypothetical fountain of youth and sees him as nothing more than a walking experiment that is successful... but this is all kind of glossed over and I for one wouldn't mind for the Reva-betrayal bit to get explored.
Instead we just get a bit of moping near a beach, with the weird line of "I'm in love with the idea of Reva, not her specifically", and the question of trust issue on why he should trust Claire being more or less "just 'cause". And while all the mess is going on in Harlem... Luke goes on a sightseeing tour to his old church-house? Really? It's a very, very well-done shot of Luke seeing the trashed church house then quickly transform into the old church house, but it felt a bit superfluously unnecessary when Luke could've flashbacked to it near the beach or on the ride back to Harlem.
The revelation is that, well, Carl's father, the great reverend Lucas, fucked his secretary and created Willis Stryker, the bastard child. And Luke just never really accepted or realized this. And Willis was the reason that Carl was put into Seagate Prison, taking the fall for his old best-friend-slash-bastard-brother, and even now he seems willing to take the blame for it. It's a bit irritating that a huge amount of Luke's screentime is devoted to this instead of the slightly more natural story of angsting about Reva, and the lack of flashback to the existence of an asshole overbearing father or a childhood best friend prior to Diamondback's introduction a couple episodes back.
Luke (and Misty) end up showing at the big anti-Luke rally... for some reason, and naturally all hell breaks loose. Misty gets shot, and everyone (especially Diamondback's goons) are shooting at Luke Cage.
It's a very clunky and uneven episode. There's a fair amount of focus on Diamondback, but not on the man himself and what makes him tick. He's still a rather disappointing and one-dimensional antagonist compared to Cottonmouth or Mariah. Misty, Claire and Luke's stories all kind of ground to a halt and are pulled in different directions that aren't as entertaining as their buildup. Misty in particular, despite having a lot of great character development last episode, felt tacked on and unnecessary in this one. So yeah, I dunno. I just didn't really feel this episode, which felt like a way to rush the plot developments of the second arc to a halt to set up the final battle in Harlem's Paradise.
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