Luke Cage: Season 2

Harlem is in the grip of a crime wave, with councilwoman-turnged-gangster Mariah Stokes Dillard orchestrating things from behind the scenes. The police can't touch her and all Luke Cage can do is put out fires and try to fight crime on his own (whilst dealing with his own social media fame). Events take a turn for the worse when a Jamaican criminal named "Bushmaster" arrives, hellbent on vengeance against the Stokes family.

The first season of Luke Cage may rank as the weakest of the Marvel/Netflix collaborations so far (despite strong competition from the first season of Iron Fist): an excellent first half, with a strong villain (Mahershala Ali's Cottonmouth) giving way to an absolutely awful second half with a weak antagonist (Erik LaRay Harvey channelling William Shatner levels of ham in his one-note performance as Diamondback), with maybe seven or eight episodes' worth of plot stretched over thirteen hours.

Season 2 of Luke Cage, annoyingly, manages to take these problems and magnify them. The season is far from a complete write-off, with the actors all being great and some of the storylines and character arcs having promise, but none of it cohering very well. The villain problem is at least alleviated, with the always-splendid Alfre Woodard stepping up as Mariah and Mustafa Shakir (The Night of, The Deuce) giving a charismatic performance as the ridiculously-named Bushmaster. The show also adds some good new acting talent in the form of Reg E. Cathey (The Wire) as Luke's father. Sadly, Cathey passed away shortly after filming of the season was completed.

But the negatives are huge. This time around there are maybe four episodes' worth of plot stretched across thirteen hours. Not just entire episodes, but entire blocks of episodes simply exist to spin their wheels and take neither the plot nor the characters anywhere. It doesn't help that the writers seem to not be on the same page as one another: in early episodes Luke apparently has an anger problem, but this immediately vanishes and is never mentioned again. In another episode recurring secondary villain Shades (Theo Rossi) appears to have genuine remorse (to the point of crying about them) for the deaths of innocent civilians he's caused, and in the next is gloating maniacally about them. Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) is just dropped from the season when the writers run out of things for her to do. The first episode has a great joke about villains always trying to shoot Luke when they know he can't be hurt, which is undercut by the same thing happening again and again throughout the season. There's also a team-up with Danny Rand/Iron Fist (Finn Jones) which is surprisingly great, but then Rand just disappears from the story with no explanation.

There's a lot of frustration here, mainly because the actors are great when they're given good material to work with, but all too often they're left going round in circles and talking about things we already know about ad infinitum. As a 4-6 episode mini-series, the second season of Luke Cage (**) could have been excellent. As a 13-hour season, it's an all-too-often soulless grind, with bright moments separated by hours of tedium. Easily the weakest season of the Marvel/Netflix collaborations to date. The season is available now on Netflix.

Luke Cage: Season 1

Harlem, New York. Following events in Hell's Kitchen, Luke Cage is laying low. He has two jobs, working in a barbershop by day and in a kitchen by night. A series of chance events lead to the murder of a friend and mentor, so Luke Cage reluctantly breaks out his crime-fighting skills to avenge his friend and find his own identity.

Luke Cage is the third of a planned six-series collaboration between Marvel and Netflix, following on from Daredevil and Jessica Jones and running ahead of Iron Fist, The Punisher and The Defenders, which will see the heroes from the first four series (it doesn't seem that The Punisher, which was a late addition to the project, will cross over in the same way) join forces against a mutual threat. It's definitely one of the most ambitious TV projects that has been mounted in many years.

As a project it's been mostly successful: the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones were excellent, with brilliant acting and strongly-defined villains and thematic elements. The second season of Daredevil, whilst still very watchable, was a little bit more incoherent and lacked a decent enemy. In particular, its pacing was a big problem and the series was drawn out to a slow and meandering ending.

Luke Cage, unfortunately, is weaker still and for many of the same reasons: the story is far too thin to support 13 episodes (it should have been 6 episodes, or maybe 8 tops), the "big bad" of the season is monumentally disappointing and the show's thematic ambitions become muddled to the point where it's impossible to work out what the show is trying to say.

Backing up, the show has plenty of good points. The first half or so of the season is pretty tight, with Luke Cage (Mike Colter reprising the role from Jessica Jones) going up against local gangster Cottonmouth (House of Cards's Mahershala Ali) after his mentor Pop (The Wire's Frankie Fason) is accidentally killed in a shoot-out. At the same time, local cop Misty Knight (Simone Missick) is investigating Cottonmouth's criminal activities and his relationship with his cousin Mariah (Alfre Woodard). There's a nice, tangled-up moral mess to the situation, with Cottonmouth genuinely respecting Pop and losing it after a subordinate kills him unintentionally.

Mid-season things switch up, with Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson reprising the same role from both Daredevil and Luke Cage) joining Team Cage. Cottonmouth's drug supplier Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey) then takes over as the main villain after he gets annoyed with Cottonmouth failing to deal with Cage and takes matters into his own hands. It's at this point that the show goes off the rails.

Cottonmouth is an interesting villain, well-played by Ali and featuring a genuine degree of nuance. Diamondback is not. He's a dull thug, played with a near William Shatner level of hamminess by Harvey. The character is deeply boring and when he shows up in a special suit in the final episode to fight Luke Cage, it's unintentionally hilarious. By this point the show has also run out of ideas so it spends three episodes dwelling on the possibility that Luke Cage might die (hint: he doesn't) and two on a deeply tedious hostage situation that feels designed to spin wheels rather than tell a story or develop character.

The show also has a pretty incoherent attitude to format and structure. Most episodes don't have a cold open, but then several do for no real reason. Several episodes feature flashbacks immediately before the information in them become relevant in the present day, which feels lazy and obvious. However, the prison flashback episode is a big winner since it has structure and pacing and tells a complete story in 50 minutes, which none of the other episodes manage.

There are some other bright spots: Misty Knight's police bosses are obstructionist but never stupid, and expertly avoid being cliches. Alfre Woodard is excellent throughout the season, even when her plot turns are less than convincing. The music is brilliant (although Method Man's cameo as himself is completely bizarre).

But these good points only make the show watchable, never exceptional. The tone of the series is all over the place. One moment it feels like the show is making a serious point riffing off the Black Lives Matter movement and the problem of race relations in modern America, but then it runs scared from the idea (in one incongruous moment a white police officer explains his decades-long history of policing in Harlem in detail to make it clear he's not racist). It spends a lot of the time trying to stay "grounded" but then breaks out bazookas and super-powered suits that would have looked cheap on Agents of SHIELD. The police's attitude to Luke Cage also changes at random between episodes, veering from them trying to hunt him down like a dog after being framed as a cop-killer and being okay with them. It's also great to see Claire being given a lot more to do, but it's then a bit odd to see her being reduced to a damsel in distress in several scenes and her potential romance with Luke Cage feels shoehorned into the story for no real reason.

There is a fair bit to enjoy about Luke Cage (***) such as the performances, music and atmosphere, but the pacing is poor, the ultimate villain is deeply boring and the show can never quite make its mind up about what it's trying to say or do. The show is available to watch now on Netflix.