CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF HARLEM
The second season of ‘Luke Cage’ is a more dramatically satisfying and engaging experience.
When Marvel premiered the first season of Luke Cage in 2016 it represented an opportunity for the comics giant to give space to a strong black hero for an extended outing in the immediate aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. The first season of the show offered plenty in the way of highkicking action and a noir-ish styled take on Harlem in its story of a man who, after an experiment goes wrong, is gifted with powers that make him impossible to kill. Problem was, it seemed as if the show’s creators had thrown everything they had into the first half of the season before visibly losing steam and trying to make up for a lack of ideas by simply giving their hero more and more baddies to kick.
Since then, we’ve had Black Panther and the CW’s Black Lightning — strong black comic book-derived stories that attempt with varied levels of success to deal with broader issues affecting black life in the post-Obama age, something which Luke Cage noticeably failed to deal with in its first 13 episodes.
Cage spent this time making an appearance in the crossover series Defenders, which saw him and fellow Marvel stars Daredevil and Jessica Jones form an alliance in a haphazard unfocused fight against way too many enemies of New York to keep up with.
In its second season, the show’s writers, while not taking the social-consciousness route, have made a decision to slow things down and give most of the characters large back stories and personal demons to deal with, and on the whole this has made for a more dramatically satisfying and engaging experience.
Now a celebrity crime fighter, Cage (Mike Colter) is under fire from all sides — his own celebrity is making it hard to do the job of keeping his beloved Harlem safe, a task only exacerbated by the determination of archvillain Black Mariah (Alfre Woodard) and her enforcer toy-boy Shades (Theo Rossi) to ruthlessly cement their hold over Harlem’s underworld.
Cage also has to deal with the worries of his girlfriend, Claire Temple (an inexplicably underutilised Rosario Dawson) and the return of his estranged preacher father, James Lucas (the late Reg E Cathy).
When a mysterious Jamaican gangster named Bushmaster (Mustafa Shakir) — equipped with ancient knowledge that enables him to possess similarly superhuman powers to Cage — arrives in New York bent on revenge for his family against Mariah, the stage is set for a fiery, violent confrontation that might see unlikely alliances formed in the face of a common enemy. All of which creates a headache for Harlem cop Misty Knight (Simone Missick), who has lost an arm and her self-confidence but not her commitment to protecting her beloved birthplace.
By expanding the show to allow for the exploration of various aspects of multiple stories, the second season creates a richer universe than its predecessor and generally manages to successfully navigate the bumpy road of television’s dreaded second-season blues. It’s still sharply styled and grittily executed and for music fans there are a host of performances at Mariah’s Harlem Paradise nightclub that provide plenty of talent to look out for — in a conceit that’s borrowed successfully from the Road House cameos in David Lynch’s recent Twin Peaks series. Look out for everyone from Esperanza Spalding to Gary Clark Jr, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and pioneering rap legends Ghostface Killah, KRS One and Rakim.
While it doesn’t necessarily provide much in the way of social relevance or inspection, it’s certainly fair to say that Cage’s second outing provides more than enough in the way of entertainment and family tensions to keep interest sustained beyond the familiar trope of super-strength good guy who kicks many bad men’s asses. You may not be able to shoot, burn or kill him but you certainly won’t have a hard time watching him.
Luke Cage Season 2 is available on Netflix