Luke Cage Fails To Land Most Punches in Season 2

The second season of Luke Cage dropped on Netflix June 20, and it took me some time to formulate why I think it was mostly a big decline in quality from Season 1. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth watching, but more for the value of being a Marvel Netflix completionist than any real enjoyment.

The first couple of episodes are shockingly off. The writing is weak, the pacing is glacial, and the performances are all over the place. Mike Colter is still enjoyable as Luke, Simone Messick is solid as Misty Knight, and Rosario Dawson is always wonderful as Claire. But the secondary characters are bafflingly bad. Justin Swain as Det. Bailey acts with the quality of a SyFy channel shark movie. Antoniqe Smith as Det. Nandi Tyler is written as and acts like a bad stereotypical anime mean girl.

The biggest shock comes from Alfre Woodard. The amazing actress who was riveting as Mariah Dillard in Season 1 flounders to find her character in the first few episodes of Season 2. When she does, she tears into it with her typical brilliance, but those first few episodes are really tough to get through.

Theo Rossi is outstanding again as Shades, with a bigger and more complex role. And Mustafa Shakir is very compelling as the new powered villain, Bushmaster. He portrays Bushmaster as a charismatic and understandable villain, even without the pathos of someone like Doc Ock from the second Spider-Man movie. But Bushmaster and the other characters from Jamaica have to be called out on their variable island accents. Sometimes they sound like Jamaicans, sometimes like Bermudans and sometime like Bahamians.

The snarky headline also applies to Luke Cage’s actual punches during the show — or I should say slaps. Minor SPOILER: Luke is stronger than he was in most of Season 1, and tougher. So to keep from killing everyone he punches, he mostly just slaps any non-powered person in the head and knocks them out. That makes the fight scenes with almost anyone except Bushmaster amazingly boring.

Let’s talk about the music. The music choices in this season are at least as amazing as in the previous season, and more varied in genre. Initially in the first handful of episodes, using actual performers doing their thing in the club Harlem’s Paradise is wonderful. And to keep it from becoming a pace-killing music video in the middle of the action, the show uses those performances to establish the current emotional tone of the story at that point. The point of view cuts between scenes of the performer and scenes showing the various characters doing something to prepare for or react to upcoming or recent events, while the music plays over them. And I will watch or listen to Esperanza Spalding always and forever.

But after a handful of these scenes, it becomes what it tried to not be — a pace-killing break in the story to simply allow it to showcase performers. Because in the end it is simply a montage scene, and having a montage scene in every single episode of your show is a really bad idea. This reaches its peak in a later episode when Gabrielle Dennis, doing an otherwise good job portraying Mariah’s daughter Tilda, sits down at an electric piano and sings, while the tone-setting montage plays. There seems to be no story-based reason for this (she’s doing it alone, not as a Harlem’s Paradise performer) and it comes across as a contractual obligation that was required to get the actress, comedian and singer on the show.

Not everything is a miss in Luke Cage Season 2. I already mentioned Theo Rossi as Shades, and his side story is one of the most brutal and heart wrenching. And ultimately Luke’s story arc is very interesting, making me want Season 3 to come out soon.

But that leads to another problem — Season 2 ends with a couple of episodes that whimper the show to a close. It is clear by the end of the season that it was entirely a setup to get to introduce the supposed main villain of Season 3, and the new stage in Luke’s life. I mean, I’m a fan of innovative story telling, but I still want some level of dramatic resolution. There was almost none of that this season.

The short version is that Season 2 of Luke Cage is not as bad as Season 1 of Iron Fist, but not by much, making it the second worst season in the Marvel Netflix universe. I give it a 2.5 out of 5.