Luke Cage Season 2, The best way to stop Evil.(Spoilers!!!)

Now before beginning this Blog post, I will admit something, I kind of do not connect with this show, as much as I do with the other shows.

Firstly because as a whole it seems quite disconnected from the other shows, except when it decides it wants to be connected, not just in terms of location and characters but also in terms of Tone and atmosphere.

The other shows have this somewhat dark and Mysterious tone to them, I mean with Daredevil and Jessica Jones it is obvious, one is a Mystery show and the other is a show about a brooding lawyer who sneaks out at night to beat up criminals while wearing a devil costume.

And even Iron fist, the lightest of the other three shows is pretty dark with the themes it handles while showing Harold Meechum beat two guys to death, Danny Rand being drugged and kept in a mental facility against his will etc etc.

But of all the shows that should have dealt with a lot of Dark Subject matter, given the overarching theme of Racism this show deals with, somehow Luke Cage as a show feels much lighter in tone and music choices and color grading and all of that.

Even when it flashes back to something that should potentially be Dark like for example Carl Lucas's Backstory, the tone still feels pretty light... somehow...

Granted this is a subjective opinion and there are instances that this show does get pretty dark, like when cornel kills his first kill on screen, or his backstory, but even in times like that when the lighting the tone and everything else is perfect the music takes everything to shit.

Not to mention that Cornel isn't even the main villain of season 1, he is murdered by one of the true villains, his cousin, Mariah Stokes.

And while I did praise this in the last Luke Cage Blog post, because Mariah is a better villain than Cornell, not just because she is far more slimy and Diabolical but also because she is far more closer to reality.

But along with that also comes the fact that you hate her. And believe it or not, there is a fine line between making a villain hate-able and making them so hate-able that they become a pain to watch.

This same reason is why I don't want to watch Game of Thrones, king Jeoffrey is such a piece of shit that the only way you want to see him is when he is choking on poison.

Thank God this season finally delivered the same with Mariah, cause GOD THAT WOMAN NEEDS TO DIE!!!

Yes Mommy Choke on that poison!!! CHOKE ON IT!!!

And I know I am quite literally praising the performance of Mariah stokes because if you hate her so much that you celebrate when she chokes on her own blood and dies, and you hate her because she is a slimy slithery con woman who slips out of all the consequences of her actions, then yes, the job is done.

Just like if you want to see King Jeofrey die slowly and painfully then the job is also done, the point stands that this also makes the scenes they are in painful to watch, it just hits too close to home.

Again, subjective I know.

But the biggest problem with this show is the way that Luke is first introduced, Luke is introduced in Jessica Jones as one of her love interests, or rather her primary love interest in season one.

And you would think that that makes my complaint about Luke Cage being disconnected from the rest of the shows null and void, BUT NO!!! You see the fact that Luke Cage starts so far away from whatever happened in Jessica Jones and has no other crossing over characters save Luke himself kinda makes the whole disjointed feeling more in your face than anything.

And I know what you will say, Claire Temple, but Claire Temple is a more of a Daredevil Character, and she literally appeared in Jessica Jones like towards the end for like just to heal Luke Cage, in other words not Long enough.

She felt out of place in Jessica Jones as well as she literally just showed up out of no where, healed Luke and fucked off, she didn't interact with any other characters but Jessica and Luke and that's it.

And the thing is, by the time Clair Shows up, it is already too late to remedy this particular feeling, and not to mention, she leaves pretty early on in this season.

But that said, this season actually does a lot better in terms of its interconnectivity, I mean I get it, it's Luke's show, why would other characters show up, except, Luke showed up elsewhere first and took up quite a bit of the runtime there.

This season has Iron fist show up to help Luke out with a case(but mostly to check on him as asked by Claire) and also Misty Train with Coleen and then get a metal arm from Danny unlike in the comics where she gets it from Tony Stark.

It also has many more Darker elements compared to the last one, but the again, this time around it hits a little too close to home.

Like particularly the story line with Cockroach beating up on his wife and Child and the Wife being too afraid to go to the police because she thinks there isn't shit they can do to stop him.

But I guess there are worse things to say about a show than it did it's job too well.

Speaking of doing your Job too well, that is basically Luke Cage's arc in this entire season.

When Claire met Matt Murdock and feel in love with him, she decided not to go ahead with it because she was afraid he was too close to becoming what he was fighting against.

With Luke Cage, the same problem comes across, as Luke looses control on Cockroach and beats him half to death.

This in fact has the opposite than intended effect because this lets Cockroach file a lawsuit against him and keep himself further out of getting actual justice because he faced "vigilante violence".

Not to mention this makes things complicated with Claire Temple and she leaves after he punches a hole in her wall.

But this is essentially Luke Cage's arc in this season, you would think, stuck in the middle of a multiway gang-war he would be trying to make peace, and he is, by doing the one thing he is good at, punching his way out of shit.

But the thing is, somethings just can't be punched, like for example, Bushmaster, I mean he can be punched, it just won't help, because he will just get back up, and keep fighting, because of something called Nightshade.

It is generally a poison, but it seems, Just like his immunity to bullets and Luke Cage's Punches, Bushmaster has immunity to this one as well.

And so he beats up Luke, wait what?

Yes, so this season after Mariah tries and fails to kill Luke with a Judas bullet because in the previous season when he was operated on and the experiment thar gave him powerswas redone to remove judas shrapnel from his body, his skin reformed harder than before, we learn of Luke Cage's true weakness, a man with a Jamaican accent.

Who is also Jamaican.

But why is this Jamaican man here? (And he is Jamaican because he will never let you forget it.) Well he is here to kill Mariah Dillard and take everything that's her.

Because it turns out Mariah's criminal family, did crimes in the past, shocking I know.

But mama Mabel burnt down Bushmaster's home when he was a little boy in front of him because they wanted all the shares of some Bushmaster wine.

Truly does crime know no bounds.

And if you will remember Mama Mabel was Mariah's mother.

So sins of the mother Sins of the daughter.

And this mother daughter theme is only fitting because this season we also have Mariah's daughter Tilda, and with that also reason to somewhat make Mariah of all people sympathetic.

Nightshade or Tilda Johnson in the comics is a leader of a band of compliant lycanthropes that she made using her knowledge of genetics and mysticism.

This time she is a mystical healer who runs a place called mother's touch and is the daughter of Mriah Stokes or Dillard or something.

Mariah chooses to go by Stokes and not her married name because one her white husband was gay, two she justifies her actions by telling everyone and herself that she is forwarding the dream of her Mama Mabel by building the club known as Harlem's paradise and three because her daughter wasn't a result of her marriage anyway, she was result of rape by her brother.

This is the one thing this season that garners any sympathy for her this season, it is also surprising that this season for the first time Bushmaster posed such a large threat that both Misty and Luke are somehow convinced that the best way to get the best outcome for everyone is to give Mariah Immunity and have her testify against Bushmaster.

Bushy and Luke fight again and Luke wins, but Bushy escapes because he can survive blasts and his guards cannot, and somehow surprisingly a Hammer tech bomb works for some reason, remember Hammer? Just Tin Hammer.

But this sets up ol' Bushy in a place needing medical attention so he goes to Nightshade, who by this point in the story he has tried to burn alongside her mother, and they have been saved by Luke Cage.

She decides to help them first out of fear then out of guilt for what her family did to this guy.

Meanwhile!!!

Since Luke and Mariah and everyone were hiding in a Rand Facility when Bushy attacked, and so technically a Rand Facility has been attacked, we obviously get the immortal Iron Fist, working his way into the episodes to help Luke, but mostly to check up on him because an old friend called Claire asked him to.

I wish he stayed, it would have been interesting to see how Mariah Survives the fist.

Hehe.

Well no need Nightshade killed her so, anyways moving on.

Luke Cage gets an important change in his perspective when he saves a survivor of the infamous "Rum Punch" Massacre where Mariah shoots down and Burns down an entire Jamaican Restaurant full of innocents just to get back at Bushmaster.

He realizes that Him and Bushy are very similar and at the end of the day, someone needs to enforce the unsaid rules while the police enforces the said ones.

But enough on that, having killed Misty's Superior who is also Mariah's ex and was working with the best friend of Shades called Comanche or Darius Jones as a snitch against Mariah, so shades kills him too(that's a sentence.)

Shades has kind of got it done with the killing and has been questioning Mariah this entire season, the flippantly named by the press, "Rum Punch Massacre" is too much for him and so he flips

And once again Mariah turns out be the real villain in a series where someone else was posited as the villain.

It turns out Bushmaster is actually quite sweet and polite when he isn't a screaming mess, and Tilda wants him to kill her mother with an extra strong dose of Nightshade which she warns him not to take all at once.

So he does, and almost kills Mariah but nearly dies himself.

And due to Shades Mariah is taken into custody, and the day is saved!!! Yayyyyy!!!!

And normally this would be a good place for the show to end but this is netflix marvel we are talking about by this time there were already talks to end the deal and kill all the shows so they had to add on another plot line where Mariah leaves Harlem's Paradise to Luke and he becomes the new crime boss running Harlem, but a good one this time, hopefully.

I mean his father agrees and he is a god fearing man who left him the last time he was framed. And it is also due to his quarell with his father that his relationship got to the place that it did.

So Mariah dead, bushmaster gone and accepting Luke as the new ruler of Harlem, Paradise left by Mariah to Luke because he loves Harlem as much as she does(guess at least that wasn't a lie then.) And Luke refusing to meet Claire to protect her from his life of crime.

Now on to Iron Fist season 2