Luke Cage was one of the many great things about Marvel's Jessica Jones series on Netflix. Marvel's Netflix shows - which sort of exist as a MCU annex - have a very different feel from their movies. For one thing, they are absolutely aimed at adult audiences as opposed to the movies' "depending on how ok you are with your kids seeing fantasy-violence" age range.
These shows deal with local problems - all in New York because Marvel doesn't really think of there as being any cities in the US other than New York and maybe D.C. (sorry, Bostonian with a chip on his shoulder here.) The villains are not world-ending cosmic monstrosities - instead they're typically just well-organized criminals or in the case of Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, a sociopath with the worst possible superpower for a sociopath to have.
Anyway, Luke Cage was a welcome presence in Jessica Jones, and given that he's a well-established superhero in his own right (predating Jessica Jones by three decades or so, I believe,) it makes perfect sense that we're getting a series built around him.
I don't think you can possibly ignore the power and relevance of the imagery in this series. While racial violence has been a constant throughout American history, the nation's attention has finally turned (even as a depressingly large number of people try to deny or rationalize it) to the danger of being a black man in America. We get what seems like weekly stories of unarmed black men getting shot by cops. As a white man, I had lived most of my life unaware of just how pervasive this condition of oppression remains. I'm still haunted by the story of Trayvon Martin, whose death seemed like something out of a horror movie, and a teenager walking around late at night with snacks from a convenience store very closely describes how I spent a lot of time with my friends around that age.
Seeing Luke Cage as a black man (certainly not as young as Martin, but not all the victims of these racially-motivated killings have been) wearing a hoodie who is immune to bullets is the sort of empowering fantasy that I think was achieved when Jewish comic creators invented Captain America and Superman (the latter having an origin story based on that of Moses) as invincible heroes to fight the Nazis. It doesn't solve the problem, of course, but it provides a degree of catharsis.
I'm currently at a shift slightly past halfway through this season, but I'll tread carefully around spoilers.
The story picks up a few months after season one of Jessica Jones. Luke has attempted to move on with his life, moving up to Harlem and working a couple simple, cash-only jobs - sweeping up hair at Pop's Barbershop and washing dishes at the Harlem's Paradise nightclub.
Pop is a reformed gangster who has tried to make his shop a beacon of hope for kids in the community, where they can see men at work being role models, and Pop also coaches kids in basketball. Harlem's Paradise is run by Cornell Stokes, known often as Cottonmouth, but he hates that name. Stokes is a would-be Kingpin, running various criminal enterprises that he inherited from his legendary aunt Mama Maybel. His cousin, Mariah, is on the legitimate side of things, and is a councilwoman for the neighborhood. Mariah has a grand project to revitalize Harlem and ensure that the black residents are not run out of the neighborhood by encroaching gentrification, but her methods rely heavily on her cousin's criminal activities.
At first, Luke is nearly lost in the mix, as the pilot puts a lot of work into setting up the board, introducing these figures as well as Misty Knight, whom Luke sleeps with and later discovers is actually a detective who has been looking into Cottonmouth.
Luke gets pulled into the mix when some of the kids who hang around the barbershop have the stupid idea to stick up a weapons deal between Cottonmouth's people and the Puerto Rican Colon syndicate. Pop asks Luke to save one of the kids - the son of an old friend who died decades back - and the repercussions of Luke's interference leads to a war between Power Man and Cottonmouth.
The plot is a little similar to that of Daredevil's first season, but with a backdrop of rich themes of black identity and the complicated effects of racism and the American Dream on the world of organized crimes. Still, there are deeper forces at work that where I am at in the series, we're only beginning to get deeper into. One of the really enigmatic figures, for example, is a man named Shades, who comes to work for Cottonmouth as a kind of ambassador from a different, far more powerful criminal overlord called Diamondback (Cottonmouth is also a type of snake, right? Lots of snake metaphors.)
My immediate gut reaction to talk about Diamondback is that it's Wilson Fisk, but given that we've heard references to him as well without such a code name, and also the fact that Fisk is in prison (not that that means he's not still powerful - see Daredevil Season Two) I feel like there's got to be some trick up their sleeves.
We do find out more about Luke Cage's origin in episode four, though we sort of get the back half of his origin story, kind of handwaving the acquisition of his powers. We know why he changed his name (from Carl Lucas) and why he's always on the move, but the steps necessary to put him where he was when he got his powers are still a little hazy.
Anyway, Netflix is bugging at the moment, which is why I've taken this break in my binge-watch, but I'll probably post more when I've finished the season.
