‘Luke Cage’ struggles with moving on after killing series’ popular villain
Before Cheo Hodari Coker began plotting Season 2 of Netflix’s “Luke Cage,” he had to address the elephant in the room.
Actually, it was more like a snake in the room. A Cottonmouth to be specific.
Coker, a director, writer and producer who can frequently be found on social media answering both positive and negative questions and comments from viewers of his works, had frequently seen comments online saying that the killing of Season 1 villain Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali) was a huge mistake.
There was a method to Coker’s perceived madness. One reason he gleefully accepted working on “Luke Cage” in the first place was his love of superhero comics. Coker still remembers vividly how he felt the moment he read the 12th issue of “Alpha Flight” (published by Marvel Comics in 1983), when legendary comics scribe and artist John Byrne killed the character Guardian.
“When (Bryne) killed Guardian I was verklempt,” Coker told The Washington Post. “I wanted to bring that kind of thing to Marvel television. I wanted to kind of do what Hitchcock did with ‘Psycho,’ because it was a big deal to kill Janet Leigh. And so, that was the thing. Cottomouth in that structure was always going to die. Even though people liked him a lot.” The move also aided the evolution of Alfre Woodard’s Black Mariah, the character who killed Cottonmouth in Season 1. Her role would be expanded and given more depth in Season 2 and she’d also share an antagonist with titular hero Luke Cage (Mike Colter) in Bushmaster (Mustafa Shakir). Three villains would have made a crowd and Coker always knew he wanted to give Woodard an even meatier part as Black Mariah, going back to the first time the two had dinner to discuss the role. “(Alfre’s) brilliance as an actor is that she can harness any emotion from within so that it always feels real. She really dug the first script for Luke Cage and agreed to do the part, and we met with her and we were talking about family and she says, yeah, I’m very protective of my family,” Corker said. Then she told him, “If someone comes after my family I’ll cut a” and then added an unprintable expletive. “The way that she casually flipped from being Alfre, humanitarian, (multiple award) winner ... it was like, whoa, there’s a lot of duality here. I knew immediately that this was something that we could enhance and play with [in Season 2].”
“Luke Cage’s” second season also had to deal with the culture-changing influence of the success of Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther.” “Luke Cage” may have been the first “black” thing Marvel had done in live-action back in 2016, but “Black Panther’s” success meant the stakes had been raised. Coker never worried.
By the time “Black Panther” arrived in theaters in February, he was done filming and deep into post-production, but confident in what he knew he had.
“When I went to the Black Panther premiere, my mind was blown,” Coker said. “