Luke Cage, Season 2, Episode 8: If It Ain't Rough, It Ain't Right
Yeah, updates are a bit slower -- sorry about that. Just been real busy currently.
We're in the second half of Luke Cage's second season now, but there's definitely a significant chunk of this episode that just feels like the same old plotlines being retreaded. And honestly, so much of this episode is just untangling the heavy deaths and revelations from the previous episode. While it does deliver some interesting character beats to some of our characters, for the others it really feels like we're just spinning the same old wheels until the plot catches up to them.
After a brief action scene saving Mariah from Bushmaster's bounty hunters, Luke basically tries to reconcile with Reverend James and just kind of hangs out with daddy Lucas and protects him from a bunch of Bushmaster's minions at the episode's climax... a scene, that, pretty hilariously and awesomely, involves Reverend James punching one of the Stylers in the face. It's a neat sequence of scenes, but, again really feel oddly disjointed compared to the rest of the episode.
Bushmaster, on the other hand, is just sort of stuck in a side-quest of sorts. His minions are hunting down Mariah, Tilda, Luke and their loved ones, but because his power comes from the nightshade herb (apparently different from regular nightshade?) he's taking time off to get his goons to try and grow some.
Meanwhile, Shades is... kind of all over the place. After killing his ex-lover and best friend Comanche, he's conflicted and has a scene with Comanche's mother... but honestly, so much of Shades's actual scenes with other people is pretty much repeating the same song and dance of him loving Comanche but loving Mariah and the gangster life more, while at the same time he's feeling insecure about his place in Mariah's organization. Particularly when Mariah, thinking that Shades is a possible snitch, leaves him to hang dry in the police precinct. Misty and Shades get a bunch of enat scenes in the interrogation room, but, again, so much of Shades's characterization has him trying to fool someone that it's really hard to pinpoint what the dude's real motivation is beyond "help Mariah".
We did, at least, get a scene between Shades and Mariah in the burned-out remnants of her brownstone, but even then that's just a huge screamy fight that ends up with them pledging their loyalty to each other, because I guess they're all they have left? It really, really helps a lot that Theo Rossi and Afre Woodard are spectacular actors, because neither of their characters feel written particularly well.
We did get a fun bit from "Big Ben" Donovan, Mariah's lawyer, as he switches sides to Bushmaster because he pays more. That's kind of fun.
Misty... Misty's kind of all over the place, I think. Simone Missick is a good actress, but I'm genuinely not sure just what the show's trying to do with Misty, genuinely going back and forth about whether she wants to be a cop or not. The show tries to sell the fact that she's flawed and borderline hypocritical at times, but every single time she's portrayed after that moment of temptation to frame Cockroach, she still has that moral high ground over every other corrupt cop... which the show doesn't really even address. It's odd. And after all the conflict with her own inner demons regarding Scarfe and her missing arm, she spends this episode -- and the rest of the season -- just sort of back to being "Good Cop Ally", and I really felt that a lot of her more redundant scenes could've been cut out to give her a proper character resolution.
Speaking of a character that didn't really work out for me... Tilda Dillard is also kind of weird, huh? She feels more of an accessory than anything, but her relationship with Mariah feels genuinely inconsistent, her friendship with Luke feels jarring, and the fact that she keeps talking up the herbs just feels absolutely silly and genuinely overplayed.
Throw in the genuinely bizarre flip-flop end-goal for Luke, who can't decide if Bushmaster or Mariah is the bigger threat that needs to be taken down, and I really feel that the show could've really used a bit of run through the editing process to trim off some of the more repetitive scenes.
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