Luke Cage, Season 2, Episode 5: All Souled Out
Well, howsabout that ending, huh? This entire episode features a suspicious lack of Bushmaster other than briefly being mentioned by Luke Cage when he's questioning people, and that ending more than makes up for it. It straight-up goes into horror when Bushmaster's plans (at least I assume it's Bushmaster's plans) apparently went off smoothly off-screen when, simultaneously, Misty Knight discovers Cockroach's decapitated corpse, Mariah Dillard opens her Family First clinic to find a whole lot of severed heads strung up like a morbid display, while Bushmaster's minions try to abduct poor Piranha Jones and if Luke and Shades hadn't been around, he'd probably end up with the same fate.
That's actually a pretty damn skillful move of less-is-more, as I'd imagine that a longer episode of showing Bushmaster cutting away at these three people would be simply more graphic than the subtle way of how Shades is complaining that "Ray Ray" never shows up and Comanche just assumes he's under the police payroll, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that Mark Higgins is merely pissed at the way Mariah blackmailed him in the previous episode instead of, well, straight-up being reduced to a head.
Meanwhile, the rest of the episode is pretty neat, too, exploring with the themes of having to make deals with the devil and embrace darker parts of themselves to succeed in life. Mariah Dillard is perhaps slightly reverse to this, although she does give this big speech justifying making money off of guns and blackmail and it's all right now that she's going to go legit and do something productive to the society. Yes, it's also Mariah just trying to build up a reputation, but it's hard not to sympathize with Mariah's point of view about how at least she's trying to be clean. She ultimately loses the support of Tilda, though, and Shades seem not quite content with what's going on, even asking to buy out Harlem's Paradise from her... if nothing else, to get Mariah to get out of town because Shades can sense that something's not quite right. Good thing for him that the heads that ended up rolling wasn't his or Mariah's, but blood has been spilled.
Misty Knight's story is also likewise detached and self-contained, but easily the strongest Misty has been in this season. As she struggles with the new mechanical arm that Danny Rand fixed up for her (yay!) she also starts to remember scenes in the past that might've shown that Scarfe might not be such a nice mentor after all. The scene where he 'magically' discovers an incriminating gun, the little 'joke' he makes to gauge if Misty would plant evidence (that gauging scene was actually amazingly subtly acted, and if we didn't know Scarfe was corrupt it'd easily fly over our heads)... and yes, Misty is a good policewoman and wants to put away the abusive shithead Cockroach for good, but in the eyes of Cockroach's wife? Misty as a police officer can't do jack shit, and she ends up going to a pretty low point and a dark place, betraying her own code to plant evidence to frame Cockroach and land the fucker back in jail... except she can't actually do that, because Cockroach is dead. God damn, show!
Meanwhile, Luke is being sued by Cockroach, and while he seeks the aid of everyone's favourite lawyer buddy Foggy Nelson (yay Foggy!), the amount of $100,000 is a pretty big sum to pay especially for someone who's crashing in Pops' old barbershop, and we get a pretty hilarious montage of dudes that rejected Luke's offers or are just offering plain insane deals (one dude wants him to FIGHT A SHARK and I must admit I'm disappointed we didn't get to see that). Foggy and Luke ends up taking up Piranha's deal where Luke ends up showing up as a celebrity star in Piranha's party. Also, yay Piranha, who is immensely entertaining in his scenery-chewing moments.
And, of course, poor, poor Luke ends up being treated as a prop. There is that one nice girl who is genuinely a fan, but between Piranha's little Luke Cage trophy wall and the fact that he sort of just wants Luke to be there as some sort of a fun "lookit this fancy new thing I got" and just show off that he can shoot the bulletproof man ends up absolutely demeaning. But then he ends up showing that he can still be a hero, beating up the assassins coming to abduct Piranha in a pretty badass scene (Shades helped in a neat bit of hero-villain team-up) and then while interrogating Piranha about Bushmaster... and then Luke decides to drop the line of "you wanna hire this hero?", kind of setting up the mission statement of his comic-book title.
Overall, though, a pretty dang good episode, with the obvious spotlight of dragging Luke and Misty to some pretty low points before offering them a chance to redeem themselves, while simultaneously toppling Mariah from her tower of power, and making great use of hiding Bushmaster from the spotlight to suddenly show his deeds off in a pretty horrifying way. Good episode.
No comments:
Post a Comment