[TV] Marvel's Luke Cage

[apepi]

Thoughts, I liked Luke, he was very likable. Though the villains just felt really weak. Cottonmouth was average, but I honestly felt like the show took a nose dive after he died. Diamondback just felt so weak. I just did not give a shit for him. Boohoo, your dad did not love you but he did Luke, so what? That is no real reason to become a villain, he just felt so bad. He stupid power suite was bad, he made weak moves and did the same thing Cottonmouth did, focusing way too much on Cage. I can't believe none of the gangsters did not just shoot their leader and just take control. Domingo should have killed Dimondback, but of course he had plot armor. Bullets magically found a way to bend around his body, that is his super power! I think I might actually cared about Cottonmouth, but the rest of them just seemed bad.

Though I did like Shades, he just did not feel active enough.

Though the show really makes me want a black woman now...

[Jotaux]

I think Shades was the real villain of season 1. He got everything he wanted in the end! Cottonmouth dead, Diamondback gone, got the girl, etc.

[catablitz]

The moment you realize that everything would be fine if the bulletproof guy would just snap a couple of necks and get over with it. But no. Lets follow the pattern of indoctrination and propaganda. Don't be a killer. Trust the system. Νο vigilantism. But hey its a show.

[Shadowferal]

The moment you realize that everything would be fine if the bulletproof guy would just snap a couple of necks and get over with it. But no. Lets follow the pattern of indoctrination and propaganda. Don't be a killer. Trust the system. Νο vigilantism. But hey its a show.

The Avengers would like to have a word with you...

[Deleted]

The Avengers would like to have a word with you...

Jessica Jones featured the titular heroine snapping the neck of the main villian.

Daredevil season 2 featured the Punisher killing criminals people left right and centre, and he's getting his own show.

There is no indoctrination or propagranda.

[catablitz]

Jessica Jones featured the titular heroine snapping the neck of the main villian.

Daredevil season 2 featured the Punisher killing criminals people left right and centre, and he's getting his own show.

There is no indoctrination or propagranda.

Not always true. I was talking about Luke Cage show. Punisher is another story and he is tagged as anti-hero in the comics universe. Indoctrination and propaganda (along with ridiculous narratives) was the reason I was driven away from super hero stuff while I was growing up. Super heroes are nothing like the ancient old archetype of hero. There is no tragedy involved. They are depicted as ethically superior. Almost every common hero is a testament to respecting the system of the society and promoting their ideas. I am not an anarchist, just critical.

[Decisive The Hallowed]

So up to the 4th epsiode at the moment. The show is alright, nothing amazing, but alright. Much prefer Daredevil, but maybe thats cause I feel like I can get more into the characters of Daredevil than all the street gang characters of Luke Cage's world.
The only big gripe I do have with the show is the real nail being hammered down on the "white being asshole to blacks" theme going on.
Yeah, fine, I get it, in the past and even in the now; Black people have it hard, and there are still white people (i.e corrupt cops) that are making it worse. But so far, only two white male characters have been introduced in Luke Cage, and of course, both of them are corrupt assholes. I get it, its trying to send that message. fine. But does it have to really nail that hammer down our throats? It just feels like its going down that typical road.

[Shadowferal]

I'm guessing most complaining about how racism is being thrust upon the show is likely white...?
Hmm...
Not sure if this is appropriate. If not, I sure I'll hear about it.
A bit tl:dr thing, but someone might want to read it so...

Spoiler: 

Info might be a bit dated...but the idea is sound.

From Dragon Magazine #176

Surely you must have thought about it at some point. Perhaps you were playing FASA’s SHADOWRUN* game or TSR’s AD&D® system, or using Games Workshop ’s WARHAMMER 40,000* or GDW’s MEGATRAVELLER* rules. Perhaps you were reading Larry Niven’s Ringworld or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Surely you must have wondered what it would be like to live in a world where humans were not alone, where other races and minds and cultures walked among us and shared with us their own visions of life, the universe, and destiny.

Humanity does seem kind of boring after you’ve played a number of role-playing games or read fantasy and SF novels set in worlds harboring every imaginable sort of intelligent species. You might yearn to meet someone different from everyone else you know, secretly wishing that a family of centaurs had a hidden sanctuary near your farm, or that your best friend was a gruff, hard-bitten dwarf who told you tales of his underground home. Maybe you dream about meeting and befriending Vulcans, kender, wookies, ents, Aslan, or even orcs or Klingons. What would you learn about life if your best friend was an orc, eh?

Of course, in the same way that the Society for Creative Anachronism deliberately discards all the negative aspects of the Middle Ages (such as the plague, religious warfare, serfdom, and crushing poverty) in its events, you probably discard some of the negative aspects of having a multiracial universe when you are daydreaming. All role-playing gamers are familiar with tales of interracial and interspecies wars. You know how a dwarf sneers when he sees a half-orc, or how everyone tenses when a kzin walks into the room. Maybe you imagine that we could do a little better than that in real life. Would we really have rampant interracial warfare just because humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves look and think differently from each other?

You know the answer to that.

If you yearn to meet intelligent life with a strikingly different outlook from yours, you have your wish. You live on a planet of five billion strikingly different individuals, no two of whom look or think alike. We are part of a single species divided into possibly five distinct geographic races, with many hundreds of cultures and systems of beliefs spread among us. We have conquered space and the depths of the sea, harnessed nature to serve our ends, fought disease, built cities, and enriched our lives with art and literature. And we have exhibited the worst traits that any fantasy/SF game designer or novelist has ever imagined in a multispecies setting.

Of the five geographic races of humanity, two— australoids (Australian aborigines) and Khoisanics (African Bushmen)—have been nearly annihilated in conflicts with Europeans and Bantus, respectively. The native Ainus of Japan, whose origins are still uncertain, have suffered terribly from local persecution. A possible sixth race of humanity, the Tasmanians, was completely destroyed over a 72-year period by disease, warfare, and atrocities inflicted by European settlers in the 1800s. Another race of humanity—the muscular, thickbrowed Neanderthals of “cave man” fame— vanished from the Earth only 32,000 years ago, an eye blink in the sum of human existence. Anthropologists have long suspected that Cro-Magnon humans gave their Neanderthal kin a not-so-gentle push into extinction; the swiftness with which the Neanderthals died out once the Cro-Magnons moved in (one estimate says the complete process took only 3,000 years) certainly makes you wonder. Yet another branch of the human tree, a little known Asian/Indonesian people, vanished at the same time, as Cro-Magnon folk with modern features swept out of Africa and across the world.

But why bother picking on separate races? Whole cultures of humanity have been nearly or completely wiped out in quite recent times. Where are the Native American peoples today, who once ranged freely from the white wastes of the Arctic to the green jungles of South America?
There are no living survivors of the Natchez, Yahi, Haush, Chono, Yaghan, and Gabrielino peoples, destroyed by warfare and disease just in the last few hundred years during the European settlement of the Americas. The entire Arawak tribe of Hispaniola, one million strong, was exterminated less than 100 years after Christopher Columbus found them. I lack the references to name African, European, Asian, and Pacific peoples whose names and cultures now exist only on the pages of old, unread history texts.

The story goes on, of course. It was in your grandparents’ time when merely being Jewish was sufficient to have you jammed into a boxcar with your entire family to be taken to a concentration camp. It was in your parents’ time when being a Biafran in Nigeria was a sentence to death by starvation. It is in your own time now when atrocities are being committed against peoples around the world, detailed every day in your newspaper and on television and radio. It will be in your children's time when poisonous fruit will ripen, grown from seeds being sown today by earnest people, young and old, who urge intolerance against anyone who does not look or think or pray as they do. Who will be the next to go?

Curious, isn't it, how well fantasy stories and games reflect the real world.

What can you do about it?

The next time you daydream about centaurs near your farm or a Klingon student in your school, think about your real neighbors, the real people you see
every day who would like to see a new and friendly face. Open your mind and your imagination and your life to those who are different. See things from their
perspectives. Grant others the respect and aid and friendship that you would want them to grant you.

Maybe someday your descendants will live in a world where being different is not a crime. If you like fantasy, a world of peace certainly fits that definition.
Maybe it's time we brought that fantasy to life.

~Roger E. Moore

Bibliography
Diamond, Jared. “The Great Leap Forward. Discover magazine (May 1989): pages 50-60.

Nowak, Ronald M., and John L. Paradiso. Walker’s Mammals of the World (4th edition), vol. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983; pages 448-450.

Wallechinsky, David, and Irving Wallace. The People’s Almanac #3. New York: Bantam Books, 1982; pages 301-308.

[Jotaux]

I'm guessing most complaining about how racism is being thrust upon the show is likely white...?
Hmm...

Wow thats an incredibly racist assertion.

[Shadowferal]

Wow thats an incredibly racist assertion.

Never heard a black man complain about the show's "racism."
Including myself.

[Shiny212]

Really well acted show throughout, solid performances. Too bad the writing was garbage at times. Overexplaining the plot at least once an episode, I'm especially looking at you Claire.... It's also hard to feel any fear on behalf of the protagonist when the villain cant hurt him. Jessica Jones was excellent in this regard since the recurring theme is her terror at even facing Kilgrave, and her ultimate catharsis in the end.

[Fencers]

The only big gripe I do have with the show is the real nail being hammered down on the "white being asshole to blacks" theme going on.

This is not a theme at all. The show is about cycles of violence among family. It's pretty overt.

No cause of the crimes or wrongdoing in the show comes from ethnic 'Whites'. The major 'white' bad guy is given some of the deepest character motivation among the villains of the show- he's a tragic villain and asks for redemption at the end.

Who are the other 'bad guys' besides Schafe? What have they done in the plot regarding the ills of 'blacks'?

This is some interesting projection and desires being expressed in this thread.

[Tradewind]

Strikingly mediocre show all around. First few episodes were decent, Luke Cage trashing the cash dump with Wu Tang playing over it, probably my favourite part. Though, everything else after Frankie Faison dies, or more appropriately Cottonmouth really brings it downhill fast. Once Diamondback shows up, I thought to myself "ok here's the big baddie," but it gets even worse.

It lacked a strong villain to ground the conflict in the series, as much as I like Theo Rossi and Alfre Woodard they were more like caricatures of villains rather than actually being them. It's a sad state of affairs when Theo Rossi's woefully cliche'd and almost comical performance is the bright light in all of this. Daredevil and Jessica Jones succeeded in large part to their strong villains. Any comic book story (story in general even) really is only as good as its villain. Alien metal bullets were stupid other than providing a tie in to the MCU. Diamondback came off as being a huge joke more than anything and Cottonmouth was truly unremarkable. Their motivations, Diamondback especially, made little to no sense and the "final showdown" was pure fuckin' ham in his new super suit.

Ultimately, it was like it was trying to be too many things. An homage to Power Man's blaxploitation roots, while also trying to be some hamfisted political commentary. While not fully succeeding on either front. The "flashback" when Luke is burned in the regeneration tank, then escaping while still having the iconic headpiece and then picking up the yellow shirt etc. I was all for it, loved it. But then the tone changed, without really adjusting the core components. I'm all for corny dialog and exposition, when teamed with the initial mood and theme of the show being a modern take on a blaxploitation show. Because it works. When everything's matched up against "The Man" and it's getting really funky. That's good stuff. I love Shaft, Sweetback and Black Dynamite is by far one of my favourite movies. So when it starts off that way, you expect it throughout and I was stoked. But then it shifted gears so often, breaching into contemporary political issues, without adjusting the tone. It just ends up feeling like some Lifetime special, trying to tackle real world problems but with garbage plots and neophyte writing. Stick to a theme plz.

[catablitz]

Actually I just realized that the moment the show aired, the "black lives matter' situation had already developed in the country! What did the script writers know? Conspiracy theories!

[Svifnymr]

My only issue with this series was the Villains. Diamondback was propped up to be this big bad, this overlord, this "don't speak his name!!", Juice always seemed to shake a little when Cottonmouth even mentioned going to him. His presentation and delivery were fairly week. He bought nothing to the table, was not impressive at all. Mariah wasn't menacing enough, neither was Cottonmouth.

I feel Cottonmouth should have been written more of a combination of Ali's Remy character from House of Cards and Wilson Fisk from Daredevil. Instead, he came across as some weak Kingpin/Joker knockoff that never commanded the respect and lacked screen presence. The only scene that had me nodding to affirm at "now THAT is a Villain" was when Turk came to collect and Cornell threw Tone off the roof.

Al the villains were bland, I didn't care for Mariah's actress at all. Cottonmouth had some personality and Shades too, but Shades seemed to be lacking in motivation enough. Diamondback was just bad. Cottonmouth murdering an underling when they did something really wrong was okay, but Diamondback's random killing was one of those Joker-esque cliche villains that still have people willing to work for them...

Overall it was a bit boring, but I think that's my general problem with all the Netflix shows. They seem like 8 episodes stretched over 13. Luke Cage was worse for it because there was really no threat to him. Sure, there was Super Kill Luke Guns, but introducing them in middle episode leaves little doubt he'll survive anyway.

Really though, they still keep the Marvel connections a bit too vague for my liking. "I know a good lawyer..." yeah, we get it, Matt Murdock probably but since JJ also worked for a lawyer. In either case, you again run into the shows being isolated in their use of tertiary characters. We get mentions of "The Incident" rather than the Alien Invasion, even the bullets, no one ever says Chitauri? These folks have the internet, right? Hammer doesn't know the terms? Is there some limit on references they can make?

Also, sniper using laser, ugh.

The music was fine, but not sure why the volumes had to be noticeably louder.

[Forgottenone]

Honestly the series was pretty good to me, not my favorite on Netflix but so far it is in my top 5. My favorite things were the music though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niqZnjPvwv0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRweZ-e0scc

These two stuck out the most to me, absolutely loved them both. I wish Cottonmouth had survived longer, he was a villain but he had a code and some rules. He was perfect for Luke Cage for a while, you had a Superman vs Lex Luthor kind of thing between the two to an extent.

[Darth Belichick]

You just pointed out my two favorite musical moments. THe Wu Tang over the cash attack was great, too.

[Berndorf]

Al the villains were bland, I didn't care for Mariah's actress at all. Cottonmouth had some personality and Shades too, but Shades seemed to be lacking in motivation enough. Diamondback was just bad. Cottonmouth murdering an underling when they did something really wrong was okay, but Diamondback's random killing was one of those Joker-esque cliche villains that still have people willing to work for them...

Overall it was a bit boring, but I think that's my general problem with all the Netflix shows. They seem like 8 episodes stretched over 13. Luke Cage was worse for it because there was really no threat to him. Sure, there was Super Kill Luke Guns, but introducing them in middle episode leaves little doubt he'll survive anyway.

Really though, they still keep the Marvel connections a bit too vague for my liking. "I know a good lawyer..." yeah, we get it, Matt Murdock probably but since JJ also worked for a lawyer. In either case, you again run into the shows being isolated in their use of tertiary characters. We get mentions of "The Incident" rather than the Alien Invasion, even the bullets, no one ever says Chitauri? These folks have the internet, right? Hammer doesn't know the terms? Is there some limit on references they can make?

Also, sniper using laser, ugh.

The music was fine, but not sure why the volumes had to be noticeably louder.

Diamondback was meant to be an over the top villain who didn't care for the status quo crime politics of Harlem. He was an outsider whose main purpose was simply to kill, make money and torment LC. He's a true psychopath, not just a typical Harlem/nyc crime boss. I didn't feel like Matt needed to be mentioned by name either or that DD's world needed to be more incorporated into LC's show. There were enough mentions of him to acknowledge his existence imo. I also don't think the average person living in nyc would know the invaders are actually called the Chitauri either. That is something I would think very few humans would know. They were simply alien invaders to 99.9% of people who saw what happened. Also, as far as Shades' motivation, its simply to climb the ladder of inner city organized crime. He is basically just a hardened thug who is willing to do whatever it takes to survive and move up the ladder. I don't think he needs any more motivation written into his character.

[Deleted]

Method Man was so random yet so awesome. Great soundtrack as well.

[Icaras]

For the most part I enjoyed the show, but there were a few times I felt like the show was trolling fans.

At one point a character suggests he hire himself out and I was thinking "Oh nice! Hero for Hire!"...nope Luke shoots that down. I am disapoint.

A few episodes later shows Luke in a version of his classic costume...for 2 seconds until he insults it and throws the headband away. I am...feel vaguely insulted? I always liked his classic costume, so...I dunno.

Overall tho, it kind of annoyed me how much Luke resists being a super hero in this show (In hindsight...he doesn't really do much heroing at all).
He was still likeable, unlike Jessica Jones, whose show seemed to really want to make it hard to empathize with her. (And it wasn't at the level of heroes the show, where the characters start as assholes with powers and end as assholes with powers. Luke at least IS a superhero by the end)
I won't say anything for the ending, but I think has a good setup for bringing Luke into the Defenders. I'm also looking forward to seeing Luke interact with Matt Murdoch and with Daredevil.

It's kind of a shame we (probably) won't get any hero for hire stuff out of this version of Luke, but they seem to be trying to steer clear of Blaxspolitation (A shame as I always liked that version of Luke Cage a bit ore than the generic bald strong man he seems to be sometimes in the comics)