Noodle around for 7 episodes doing nothing of consequence, then decide to Fight Club a building into a hole, because there are dinosaur bones down there, and if you grind them up and put them in your tea like tiger penis it will make you immortal. Also earthquakes, because reasons?
(If that's a spoiler, then I'm happy I spoiled it for you. I have done you a service by saving you time.)
I mean, aside from being the most reactionary, conservative example of the superhero protagonist problem ever, does no one even consider that immortal dinosaur viagra might be something that one of the various superscience hospitals owned by Stark or by The Privileged Iron-Bro might want to get on a god damned slide?
This show was so lousy, even Jessica Jones didn't redeem it. I may have to go re-watch Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 to get the Bad Brofist taste out of my mouth.
I think I counted at least half a dozen times when the "heroes" could have ended The Hand's plans. Instead they stood around talking, or arguing with each other, or forming into a circle waiting for the people they'd just beaten to the ground to get up and regroup. Like that time Sigourney Weaver was alone with the five of them having a nice conversation while I'm shouting at the screen, "Someone just kill her! Stick! You have a fucking sword! Why don't you cut her head off?"
I didn't hate the show as much as you but I long for the days when stories like this would be told in a single 45 minute episode.
Right? This could have been one episode. SHIELD might have dragged it out to two or three.
Punching bad guys is not only a silly activity for superheroes in theory (something that halfway decent comic books have been acknowledging since the 1980s) it's also tedious after about five minutes. If your hero is a lesser power then sure Miracleman-style utopian changes are out of scope. You're not going to be dismantling capitalism, or solving Palestine, but even starting an after school club to get more kids reading would be more effective than punching yet more generic thugs through a wall or whatever. Let's have a montage about using local democracy to bring about meaningful change that makes everybody's lives better. Or an episode where the enemy is childhood poverty. It's still escapism if you solve corrupt law enforcement using flight and telekinesis rather than punching bad guys & I am less likely to fall asleep watching it.
I actually kind of enjoyed the part where they sorta-almost addressed this in Defenders! "Hey, Eternal Peril of Yellow Knuckles or whatever, aren;'t you a billionaire?" "Oh yeah! Let's billionaire this shit!" "Aw man, that didn't work, and I even put on a tie. Ok let's go back to punching things!"
No, in hindsight I didn't enjoy that, because it was terrible.
I have seen that episode. The lame attempt to billionaire a solution was more momentum-killing than anything in Luke Cage or Jessica Jones. I did not watch Iron Fist, but I now assume it is full of this stuff.
"I did not watch Iron Fist, but I now assume it is full of this stuff."
Suprisingly - no.
It is full of other thoroughly shitty things though.
Couple things: The Hand's behavior. "We're uber secret - so we trigger earthquakes that will destroy New York City." How does that help you be secret? Everyone's going to be looking for you. You want to be secret? Get some trucks full of concrete to shore up the massive dome you're emptying. Don't destroy New York City. Just get in, get your stuff, and get out with nobody the wiser.
And that massive dome? How big is it? Does it fill up the entire space under NYC? I mean that's a big F---ing dome. Surely someone would've noticed it before the Hand started their plan.
Speaking of the dome, why didn't the Hand just drill into it from a different angle? Then they don't need Iron Fist to unlock the door, since they could ignore the damn door! Just like a thief can go in through a window instead of dealing with a locked door.
Finally, what grown man goes by the name "Danny"? You want me to take you seriously? Sorry, I can't until you realize that "Dan" and "Daniel" are adults and "Danny" is the paperboy. (Well, actually I won't take you seriously ever because you're a whiny little turd, but that's beside the point.)
Counterpoint: The Last Ship is back for another season. Somehow.
Thought for a moment they were going to pivot to Chandler roving the post-apocalyptic hellscape as a bare-knuckle fighter. With an orangutan sidekick.
The quality control problems with the netflix+marvel series are just depressing. They had enormous budgets, generally excellent casts, a viewing format that should reward experimentation and long-form storytelling, and (by the standards of shows featuring characters owned by multinational entertainment-industrial complex behemoths) relative creative freedom.
And now three years into the experiment, the best you can say is that the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones were basically watchable as long as you fast-forward through at least 3 filler episodes each, and Luke Cage lucked into and then promptly wasted a better actor (Ali) than the show deserved.
This all really should have worked out better than it did.
I pretty much agree.
I thought the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones were excellent, especially the latter, though they could have used a slightly tighter edit.
Structurally, Luke Cage was actually two seasons of 6 or 7 episodes each, and it makes a lot more sense if you look at it that way. Its first season is better.
I suspect that the first half of Luke Cage would be made even better by never, ever watching the back half. Pretend they made a compelling Othello-with-superpunching melodrama about Shades convincing Mariah to discover her inner gang boss, and not... whatever the fuck that was that they actually did. Or pretend they got cancelled on a cliffhanger: it's an honorable ending that's happened to better shows.
So would a TV show of "Defender" make any sense? I mean considering they made movies out of Mario Brothers, and Mortal Combat, and fricking Battleship.