Luke Cage, Season 2, Episode 11: The Creator
Okay, but did we really need that many flashbacks? I get that showing Bushmaster's backstory is neat and all, but we already had that long monologue from Bushmaster when he tried to burn Mariah alive. Showing an elaborate sequence with Young!Bushmaster witnessing the McIvers and Stokes-es arguing about the division of the shares for Harlem's Paradise just feels indulgent, and really doesn't fill that many holes that needed to be filled. We also get some nods to how Bushmaster is always "special", never succumbing to a sinister vaccine, and Anansi at one point took him to a healer that healed him with nightshade when he was shot by one of the Stokes' assassins. But really, why did we need these to be full-fledged flashbacks? Having Bushmaster or Sheldon tell this on his own really wouldn't be that much more different. The only real part of the flashback that I genuinely found effective was the horror show that little Johnny felt when his house was burned down, and for Mama Mabel to stroll up and make jokes while throwing the actually-legit paperwork into the fire.
It doesn't quite have the same impact as the Bushmaster monologue tells us, because it doesn't really fill anything that really needed to be filled, and seems to just buy time while Tilda work her vague super-awesome-herbal-remedy skills to heal Bushmaster. It doesn't even realwer anything about the origin of Bushmaster's power -- it could simply have been "the nightshade gave him insane recovery abilities" but the flashbacks insist that something inside John McIver is always super-strong that made him compatible with the nightshade, and it doesn't really answer anything. We're just waiting for Bushmaster to wake up, find out about the massacre and swear bloody murder against Mariah (even more bloody murder, anyway), making the flashbacks particularly expensive filler.
Meanwhile, Luke is rightfully furious at the massacre at Gwen's, swearing to kill Mariah, and trying to keep that anger down -- I really think that having Luke be actually angry at Mariah, and then having Danny tell him to control his anger would've worked far, far better because other than the incident with Cockroach, prior to episode 10 Luke has been pretty much calm. Really did feel that the main Luke stories in 10 and 11 could've been swapped.
The rest of the episode is the revelation that Ingrid wasn't actually dead last episode, and managed to crawl out... did Mariah and company just didn't make sure everyone died? I mean, Bushmaster did the same thing when trying to burn her -- it's honestly a pretty silly storytelling. Luke ends up going to find Ingrid, who isn't willing to sell out Bushmaster, and we get some escort mission style scenes and some "we can't have more war answer war" dialogue. Oh, and Shades can't bring himself to kill a civilian after spending a good chunk of the episode conflicted (catching Mariah getting frisky with Alex didn't help him either).
Meanwhile, we get some scenes here and there, like Misty getting more and more comfortable with her position as future police chief of Babylon, Mariah striking a deal with Yang (of the Yangsi Gonshi, minor antagonists during Iron Fist) to finally break her one rule as a crime lord and get heroin flowing through Harlem, Luke and Bushmaster having a brief civil conversation in the morgue, and Shades arguing with Mariah about how she crossed a line by killing civilians -- Shades doesn't care about killing actual snitches and traitors and former lovers, but apparently his line is civilians, which I really wished we had learned a bit sooner.
Overall, though, it's clearly just a buildup to the climax of this season, and buildup episodes tend to be relatively unsatisfying. We'll see just how many of these characters will end up with a proper character arc at the end of the season, yeah?
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