Marvel's The Defenders, Season 1, Episode 1: The H-Word
Oh shit, the Defenders is out! For those of you who are blissfully unaware of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's hyper-ambitious multi-part Netflix show series, the Defenders does to the street-level heroes of Marvel Comics what Avengers did to Marvel comics' big A-lister heroes. Bringing together Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist together in a climactic battle against the Hand. I've been following the Netflix series since its inception with the first season of Daredevil, and all five Netflix seasons prior to this are chronicled here. Of course, my opinion about the various Netflix series isn't equal. I've gone on record on saying I absolutely loathed Iron Fist, the latest installment of the Netflix series, and both Luke Cage and the second season of Daredevil, while going relatively strong for a majority of its run, ended in a relatively underwhelming way.
And this very first episode of the long-anticipated Defenders series... doesn't actually instill me with a ton of confidence. It's a bit of a necessity, because both Luke Cage and Iron Fist ended with cliffhangers, Daredevil's second season had a huge sequel hook, and nearly all four ended with their heroes in positions where they're not necessarily ready to be superheroes (the titular H-word). And the result is something that really means that if you aren't up to date with the story of these four characters, you might as well as give up and look up a summary of the five seasons that preceeded the Defenders, since you won't understand a goddamn thing that happens here.
The first scene doesn't instill me with confidence, either, a messy fight scene that's erratic and jarring as it shakes around in a darkened sewer, with the only recognizable feature being Danny Rand's glowing Iron Fist. Which is a cheap way to keep the identity of the mysterious woman he's fighting a secret, when any geek worth their salt knows it's Elektra.
Although, holy hell, that's an amazing opening that cuts back and forth between the primary colours of the four Defenders (Matt's red, Jessica's blue, Luke's gold and Danny's green) and their silhouettes against New York City.
Netflix shows are meant to be a binge-watching experience, and writing this and damning the episode for being a shitty pilot isn't exactly fair. It's more like the first ten minutes of a movie, really, like that sequence in Avengers where you get to meet all the characters for the first time if you missed their individual movies. Except here, there's a crapton of continuity nods -- a double-edged sword that, as someone who's been following the Netflix shows from its inception, I appreciate... but they did probably go slightly overboard -- and it ends up being kind of like a dry recap of where we last leave off the characters.
The big unifying theme between our four heroes are that they're still unwilling to embrace their true selves, their destiny, if you will, as heroes. And with the relative dearth of material they're given with, the main actors get to perform remarkably well, with Krysten Ritter's Jessica Jones and her constant assholism (her deadpan "holy shit." at finding bombs, her drinking whiskey in a Starbucks coffee, her conversations with Trish and Malcolm) is a hilarious standout, but the other three men that make up the Defenders end up feeling rather m'eh, with the simple problem that the first episode falls back to repetitiveness. On one hand, there's the sense that we're just having our main four characters jump from one supporting character to the next that will leave newcomers scratching their heads and going "who's that Foggy Nelson guy supposed to be, he never shows up later on?" whereas a good chunk of the screentime devoted to the main four kind of lapses into ham-fisted reminder of who these characters are, and sometimes -- like the constant, constant emphasis on Jessica Jones's alcoholism, Matt's constant angsting about his now civilian life, or the aura of RnB that only plays in Luke Cage scenes end up feeling more than a bit clunky. But the show has earned its hooks within my attention by the simple promise of, yes, it's a bit rough right now, but we're going to get this team-up underway at one point, and we do kind of have to re-introduce these characters.
Add that to the rather messy juggling of plot points because some of these shows ended in cliffhangers, and you get the big cliffhanger of Luke Cage's first season having him being stuck in prison to be resolved in the span of a single conversation, or the even bigger cliffhanger of Iron Fist finding that K'un Lun has been razed by the Hand when he's being an irresponsible asshat (sorry-not-sorry, I still abhor Iron Fist's self-centered motivations) likewise be resolved with a single messy fight sending him going from Asia back to New York. And apparently Daredevil and Jessica Jones have just... stagnated while all this happened. It's a bit jarring, to be honest, but I'd rather have Luke Cage be broken out of prison in episode one rather than spend, like, half of the season with one of the main four characters stuck in prison.
So let's analyze the four heroes individually, and what they're doing, because this episode feels more like an anthology story... of which it works reasonably well, I guess. All four heroes are completely divorced from each other at this point, located in different places of New York City and, in Iron Fist's case, only arriving in New York at the end of the episode. All four main Defenders get equal screentime, though we also do spend some screentime with the main villain, the nameless woman played by Sigourney Weaver who is the indisputable boss of Madame Gao, the thing that the Netflix-verse has closest to a unifying big bad.
Last we left off Daredevil, the Devil of Hell's Kitchen has hung up his costume, traumatized by Elektra's death, and revealed his secret identity to his love interest Karen Page. The show ends up giving us a classic, if boring, Matt Murdock lawyer scene as he defends a cliched profits-vs-safety case, and gives the crippled young boy some tough-love speech about living with a disability. We get him talking with Karen a little about life in general, about how some people feel that the city would probably be safer with Daredevil back on the streets, but Matt puts on a happy face in front of Karen... and then proceeds to go into a confession booth with Father Lantom, confessing that, yes, he does miss life as Daredevil (we see a scene of him struggling to restrain himself to trust the police to deal with people fighting), and Father Lantom tells him to move on. Matt's story is the most static and probably least interesting of the four at this point, though Charlie Cox does deliver a heartfelt speech in that confession booth.
Jessica Jones, last we left her on her show, is arguably the one that had most things going on for her. Sure, she's slightly traumatized over the whole experience, but Killgrave's dead, most of her friends survived the ordeal... and, like Matt, she ends up closing it down. Where Matt tries to struggle with only living one side of his dual life, Jessica is so much still Jessica Jones. She's drunk, she's a gigantic glorious asshole, she's still loyal to her friends... and she mostly doesn't give a shit about the world, as evidenced by the damages in her office in the battle against Simpson still being around (which is a little attention to detail I absolutely loved). She doesn't give a shit about her new life of fame, and wishes it would all go away, and acts like a gigantic douchebag to a pair of wife-and-daughter who asks her to help find their missing husband. Which, of course, ends up being the plot hook that drags Jessica into the big plot by way of a mysterious phone call telling her not to do so. Jessica ends up being the only hero out of the four to marginally be involved with the Big Threat (tm) when her investigation yields a bunch of explosives in an empty apartment.
Luke Cage, meanwhile, is out of jail, because of the efforts of a friendly neighbourhood lawyer. Not Matt as everyone thought it would be, though, but Foggy! That's the biggest twist the show has so far. Luke gets out on basically good behaviour (the display with the handcuffs is a great, subtle nod to that) and gets applauded by the entire prison as he gets set free. He returns to Harlem, has some table sex... sorry, I mean, "coffee", with Claire, and while the Luke/Claire scenes felt a bit clunky, we do learn that Harlem's changed slightly in Luke's absence. Misty Knight gives Luke a quick recap, and basically Mariah and Shades are still in power, but tells Luke to help out a troubled young man, the brother of Candace, the prostitute killed during the events of Luke's series. (I remembered she existed, but I genuinely forgot she was killed) Luke gets to see some mysterious things, like Misty's anecdote of car bombs with dead youths inside, or whatever mysterious things that Candace's brother is keeping from him, but despite his insistence that he's not a hero, Luke embraces his role as Hero of Harlem far more readily than Jessica or Daredevil. I did really like the neat ways that the show does of showing Luke's local-hero status, from rough punks immediately cooperating when Luke takes off his hoodie, to cuts of people whispering about Luke as he passses down the streets, to the rather on-the-nose display of criminals clapping as Luke is set free. I absolutely loved the "moving forward" like from Luke, by the way, a neat call-back to his old mentor's catchphrase.
And... Iron Fist. Yeah. While nowhere as bad as he was in his own series (probably because there's only one-fifth as much Danny Rand in this episode as your average episode of Iron Fist) Danny's still basically going through the same old routine. He gets shafted back from Cambodia back to New York, traumatized (rightfully so!) by the ghosts of the people killed in K'un Lun while Danny was dicking around in New York. I probably am meant to be sympathetic to Danny's tortured guilt, but I honestly feel like the personal hell is something that he deserves. The story of Danny trying to atone for his sins instead of the gigantic mess he had in his own series is potentially a lot more engaging, though, so for now I'll not talk trash that much about Danny.
The final piece of the puzzle here is Sigourney Weaver, who plays Alexandra. We know not that much about who she is, but Weaver's performance is pretty amazing. We first see her at a moment of vulnerability as doctors tell her that, despite her resources, she's dying in months, maybe weeks... and the very next scene we see her feeding birds in a park, talking to another old woman, Madame Gao, who, despite some odd inconsistencies in her motivations and allegiances, is still a pretty great villain through and through... and Gao's respect and fear of Alexandra quickly shows that, yes, Alexandra is the top dog in this story.
And Alexandra's impending death causes her to accelerate her plans, much to Madame Gao's visible unease (though she doesn't dare question Alexandra's orders), and at the end of the episode we see the city get torn apart by an earthquake, which cuts from each hero's perspective, while Alexandra talks to a hooded figure -- the resurrected Elektra. And considering how I've always thought that the Black Sky subplot in Daredevil's second season is actually the weakest subplot, I'm actually not super looking forward to Elektra's return as a zombie.
Overall, it's definitely rocky. It's still enjoyable, more or less, but I can't lie, I am slightly worried considering how Defenders only has eight episodes of runtime, and this feels like a bit of a clunky start to the gigantic thing that all the Netflix shows have been building up to.
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