Luke Cage, Season 2, Episode 7: On and On
Wow, this episode cleaned house with the cast, huh? It's slightly past the middle part of this season, and after last episode being a bit slower, this one goes at a breakneck speed as characters straight up just die left and right. So let's go through all the deaths last as we discuss our two main protagonists, Luke and Misty. Sure, the two of them did have a brief action scene and continue to find clues and stuff -- scenes that easily count as the driest in this episode and feel more procedural than interesting.
But the big Luke Cage scene in this episode is him meeting up with his father and finally having that conversation, which is something that I've honestly felt shoehorned into this show pretty hard. Reverend James Lucas is played by one of the strongest actors in the show, and his... interesting characterization as someone who flip-flops between a genuinely morose man who wants to apologize to his son, but also has such a huge ego that he ends up alienating him further and further. The problem really is the buildup honestly -- I don't mind the actual conversation, which is pretty strong (as jarring as it is edited in this episode, cutting back and forth with the Bushmaster/Stokes scene) but the buildup here is honestly a bit weird with everyone and their mother telling Luke to talk to his dad like a game reminding you to do the main quest. It feels jarring, honestly, and it's not like "what is the friction between the two of them" is some sort of huge mystery. There really is genuinely no difference if Luke had this conversation all the way back in season two or now, halfway through, so to build it up constantly without any logical in-universe reason has always felt weird to me.
In any case, Luke and his father reach a bit of an understanding -- Luke understands the whole fact that James is in sorrow because his wife is struck with dementia, and the scene where James basically tears Etta away from the prison, while Etta still believes in her son... Luke's sorrowful recount of how it's the last time he ever saw his mother is genuinely heartbreaking (and also forms a neat parallel to Bushmaster's story). Oh, and then Luke brings up the whole Willis Stryker situation and shit just got even more complicated as to what we're supposed to feel about James Lucas. I suppose, if I may borrow to the as-of-the-time-of-writing recent issues of the manga Boku no Hero Academia with a similar character, Endeavour, it's a similar situation. Reverend James is a genuinely shitty person and all the airs he puts up is bullshit, but the attempt to reconnect with Luke is genuine. That's... that's neat, I suppose.
Misty, I think, is the most detached of this all, trying to find her place as basically a superhero that's not willing to work with the law, and the Misty scenes are honestly just sort of waffling around and genuinely feels like padding, with a brief burst of action before she goes and has a pointless scene where she flirts with some random dude in a bar. At least she does get to say a final "fuck you" to Captain Ridenhour, although the way that doesn't really wrap up Misty's dynamic with Ridenhour is kind of a bizarre writing choice.
Meanwhile, Mariah has been sort of... static and flailing around for the past three or four episodes. Alfre Woodard does her best, but it's clear that Mariah Dillard's just sort of showing up for each episode to remind us she's one of the big villains, but we're just building up to this confrontation with Bushmaster. And honestly, poor Mariah is such a spectator in everything that's going on that I genuinely felt kinda sad as she just tries to alternate between "oh no panic crisis" to "I got to take charge" before, well, the final confrontation with Bushmaster. It's a good thing that she survives since if this was all we got out of the character it'd be genuinely be shit, but her story's been so stale and repetitive as of the past couple of episodes, repeating the same old song and dance with Shades and Tillda, that anything is going to be interesting -- even if, as it seems, her hiring Luke Cage after Harlem's hero saves her from the fire.
Tilda is a character that just plain doesn't work for me, by the way. The actress is fine, but her lines are pretty badly-written and she's such an accessory to Mariah that I genuinely am just waiting until she ends up being the lynchpin to Bushmaster's downfall, or if she's going to become a dramatic death to shock Mariah.
Bushmaster, the other main villain, has been shown to be immensely efficient and ruthless, racking up a body count and decapitating Mariah's allies like it ain't a thing, including the grisly off-screen killing of Piranha Jones in this episode. But when it comes time to killing Mariah? I genuinely feel that that particular scene felt rather bizarre. After this whole long story and a season-long insistence on his hatred of the Stokes, he cuts Tilda loose, burns up Mariah's apartment... and just leaves? And apparently Mariah is tied down to a chair far enough from the fire, but the fire spread fast enough to burn down the building but not reach Mariah, who's like three meters away? And also Luke somehow reaches that scene in time to do a dramatic rescue, but Tilda can't find a knife or something to cut her mom out? That whole sequence was genuinely pretty badly shown, honestly, and in genuine contrast to Bushmaster's economical ruthlessness throughout this season.
Bushmaster's big epic speech about his backstory is... well, it's well-told, at least. The backstory honestly feels like a retread of the Diamondback/Luke "your family screwed over my family", only with gang wars thrown in. But the dramatic reveal is sort of lost its luster with me basically already figuring out Bushmaster's big beef with Mariah (the Stokes' ancestors killed Bushmaster's parents in a intricate gang war). Again, Mustafa Shakir is terrific and really sells his two big scenes in this episode -- the rant to Mariah and another conversation about vengeance with Uncle Anansi, but Bushmaster's fast settling into the same problem of kind of being static and not leading to a big buildup.
But hey, people die his episode! And the most regrettable death is definitely poor, poor Piranha Jones. Piranha's final lines in the show is him telling Bushmaster that Luke Cage's never going to lose to him, so even though he's technically a bad guy, I really do like the sheer amount of charm Piranha has, and just how much he's a Luke fanboy. It's really a shame that the episode moving from episode 6's "okay, Piranha is safe, now time to deal with Bushmaster" to how we open here with Piranha being captured offscreen, having a brief scene and getting killed. I felt the pacing is absolutely off there. Having his head bobbing around in a piranha tank is absolutely grisly, though. (Wonder where all that ruthlessness went when Bushmaster had to deal with Mariah?)
Meanwhile, Shades and Comanche had this storyline going on about how Shades basically figured out Comanche was the traitor from the very beginning of the episode when Ridenhour told Mariah about something that only Shades (and by proxy Comanche) would know about. It makes the whole bit about the conversation between the two of them to be a lot less scary and more just waiting for the shoe to drop, and it dropped in a confrontation where Comanche shoots Ridenhour dead to protect his cover (because he clearly values Shades more than immunity), but then Shades kills Comanche for betraying him... while also saying he loves him? The relationship between the two is nice and sweet, and I guess I can sort of comprehend why Shades kills Comanche on an intellectual level -- he loves Mariah and the thrill of a life of crime more -- but the way the actual scenes are framed and built up to, especially with the lack of follow up on their past apparently-romantic relationship made the whole thing feel pretty sudden and aborted. RIP Comanche, you were fun while you were around. Ridenhour... a bit less so.
Overall, though, definitely a very rocky episode. A lot of individually strong scenes that don't necessary have the oomph it requires thanks to bad pacing, and the Shades/Comanche and Bushmaster/Mariah confrontation genuinely felt like they lost their bite due to some rather odd sequencing of events. Overall it's still fun to watch, but left me scratching my head a couple of times.
No comments:
Post a Comment