Luke Cage, Season 2, Episode 9: For Pete's Sake
This is a bit of an odd episode, huh? After last episode ended with the ominous bit where Luke, Misty, James, Mariah and Tilda are basically under threat of the Jamaican bounty hunters, Luke calls in Danny Rand for a favour... and ends up just borrowing a building they can hunker down in, and end up leading to a stand-off against Bushmaster and his Stylers. The majority of the episode is just our characters interacting and talking until the buildup to the confrontation between Bushmaster and Luke, and it... doesn't really work all that well.
The big revelation here is Mariah talking to Tilda, telling her daughter that she never loved her, and that Tilda was born out of Mariah's rape at the hands of the jackass uncle Pete -- a child of incest and rape, and that Mariah married a gay man. It's cold, harsh, and genuinely shocking... and probably would be, if I did feel that it was not-so-neatly foreshadowed. We know Mariah's a smart manipulator and actress, and it's conceivable that everything that she did was to keep Tilda close as a way to boost the PR ratings. But there were moments when Mariah was genuinely panicking in earlier episodes with Tilda in their house, or when she begged Bushmaster to let her go and stuff. It's a bit inconsistent, I feel. Tilda here is being sort of built up as a woman that can make or break Mariah, and this harsh backstory is definitely leaning a lot more towards "break", but I genuinely don't think Tilda herself is that well-realized of a character.
If nothing else, this episode really tries to build up Mariah as the Greater Evil in the inconsistent fight between Mariah and Bushmaster, where previous episodes have shown Bushmaster to be the vengeance-obsessed savage murderer. I guess that's so that we don't feel quite as bad for Mariah when she gets put away or killed at the end of the season? I dunno. It's pretty consistently portraying Mariah as starting to break down all the PR-friendly fake smiles she's built around him, and revealing the monster and the stone-cold gangster Shades keeps telling her she is, although at least she does have a pretty traumatic backstory to base it off of. Woodard is fantastic as always and her powerful performance is perhaps the only thing making this character work.
Mariah and Misty go through this long, long negotiation on Mariah bringing down Bushmaster the legal way in cutting a deal and really sort of undermines Misty's story by forcing her to agree to the notion of entertaining cutting a deal with Mariah, huh? The problem is that this takes on for the bulk of the episode, and when Mariah just basically runs out of the building in the chaos with the aid of a gun, it makes a good chunk of this episode feel like wasted time. At the end of the episode, Mariah is in full-on gangster mode, meets up with Shades, and is a woman with no real resources other than the handful of men loyal to him... and Bushmaster's uncle Anansi, tied up in Shades's trunk and likely to be killed in an upcoming episode as an act of vengeance.
Meanwhile, Luke gets to talk to both James and Tilda, and it's... it's honestly nothing we haven't heard before. Luke did end up properly reconciling with James, with a lot of "d'awww" moment of forgiveness like when he refuses to throw Mariah out to the wolves for the simple fact that he was "raised better than that". The ultimate fight in this episode between Luke Cage and Bushmaster's forces is... sufficient, I suppose, leading to Luke finally paying Bushmaster back and knocking him out. But with four more episodes down the episode, Bushmaster makes his escape after giving a long speech about the history of the Jamaican rebels, before blowing up the police escort car with a bomb he's hidden in his palm.
It's honestly a very slow-paced episode and one that feels the most grating. The actors try their best to fill up the time with their charisma, but this is a bottle episode that really felt like it's just buying time with easily-shot conversations.
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