Saving The City, After a Lot of Talking

I finished watching The Defenders on Netflix Wednesday night. Brief, non-spoiler review: There are some cool moments, the heroes and their supporting respective casts play off each other well. The constant disbelief and scoffing of certain characters to certain elements undercut the story at times. The villains talk too goddamn much. I like Scott Glenn, but Stick's "Everyone is a fuck-up but me" shitck wore thin real fast. You will be grateful for when punching starts just because it shuts people up. There are some cool lighting and music choices. The pacing, as with most of these Marvel Netflix shows, is uneven, to be charitable.

OK, that's with no spoilers. From this point on, SPOILERS. If you still need to see it unspoiled, best to head somewhere else now. I will say it one more time, go away if you don't want SPOILERS. After this, it's your own damn fault.

The pacing thing is the biggest nuisance. Elektra's back from the dead, and the show devotes the first 10-15 minutes of episode 3 to that. Her resurrection, the efforts of Alexandra (Sigourney Weaver) to rebuild her mind and train her into this fabled weapon, the Black Sky. But I didn't really care*, I know how this stuff works, so it felt like an interminable diversion from the stuff I do care about. Keep in mind at this point, the team had still not come together. Matt Murdock has appeared, presenting himself as Jessica Jones' lawyer, and Luke and Danny fought in an alley, but there has been no teamwork. But let's waste a quarter of this episode on how to brainwash someone or whatever, sure.

The worst is the 7th episode. The Hand need the Iron Fist. Elektra's captured him. The rest of the team know this is bad, and they need to get out of the police station and rescue him. But first, let's have a conversation between Matt and Karen. And one between Luke and Misty. And one between Matt and Foggy, and on, and on. All the while, time is passing. Eventually they make their escape, get to the bad guys' HQ, and there's more debate,can we blow up the building, more talking. Meanwhile the Hand are getting exactly what they want, because the Defenders are showing no goddamn urgency whatsoever, despite the repeated statements about how the fate of the city is at stake.

Maybe this is one of those things where TV suffers compared to comics. With comics, a hero can have a long speech within the confines of one panel, in the time it takes them to throw a single punch. Realistically, this isn't possible, but it works because that's how comics present it. The five-sentence soliloquy takes place in the same panel as the punch, ergo it takes the same amount of time. Somehow. It doesn't work the same with actors speaking dialogue.

Also, a conversation in comics can go as fast or slow as the audience reads it. The writer and artist can try to establish a pace, but the reader can still set their own. With actors, not so much.

The conversations themselves are fun; taken on their own, separate from the larger story, I enjoyed watching all these characters interact. But as part of an actual story, it undercuts the urgency. When there's something that really needs to get done, I don't stop to have conversations with people, even if they might be important. Those get put on the back burner. And I'm not, to my knowledge, holding the fate of millions of people in my hands**.

Of the members of the Hand, I was most intrigued by Sowande, played by Babs Olusanmokun. Admittedly, this was in part because of his stylish outfit as The White Hat***. An eye-catching look will get you part of the way there with me. Unfortunately, he didn't get to hang around as long as the other fingers of the Hand where I could see more of him. They all have that self-assured manner, that this is all going to play out exactly as they want, but there are differences in interests or approaches, and I didn't really get a bead on his. Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho) is always working an angle. Always playing the peacemaker, or the supportive one, but always to keep herself in position to get what she wants. She stays close enough to both sides to tip things whichever way she wants, when she wants. She knows how to play the game.

That said, by the last episode I was as sick of her long-windedness as I was of Alexandra's or Bakuto's.

Watching the four main characters bounce off each other was a consistent highlight. The restaurant fight in episode 5, Jessica, of all characters is the one doing the best at following Stick's advice that they need to fight together. Danny's the target, Matt charges off alone to confront Elektra, Luke gets singled out by Sowande. Jessica, who had already said she wanted no part of this and left, only to return when realizing it was too late to get out without innocents being hurt, is the one stepping at key moments to bail out Danny, or enable them to make their escape. There are times Krysten Ritter's constant eye-rolling and commentary on how ridiculous some of this stuff is gets old, where I suspected the writers were using her to work out their embarrassment at doing a superhero show. Horrors, Daredevil wears an actual superhero costume instead of everyday clothes, the shame. But she responds that way to everything from expressions of concern to people holding her friend at gunpoint, so it's consistent characterization at least. She's also the one who tries to stop the fight between Matt and Danny. I'd never pictured her as a peacemaker, but she's clear-headed enough to recognize this isn't helping anything.

Danny's the impulsive idealist who has a lot to learn. He takes Luke's words about how with his resources he could be doing more than punching poor kids (who are, come on Luke, helping to destroy evidence at the scenes of multiple homicides, they're aren't delivering cookie bouquets). But his idea of using it is to get himself a meeting with the Big Bads, then stride in a lone and threaten to destroy them, rather than trying to use Rand-Meachum to buy them out, or bribe city inspectors to show up and get the place shut down for having a giant mine shaft in the middle of their building. So he still doesn't quite get it. He's young and naive, struggling with guilt and uncertainty of how to proceed, how to fix his mistakes, and he tries to cover it by letting everyone know he's the Iron Fist****.

Stick deciding the best way to keep Danny away from the Hand was to kill him was the least surprising thing that happened on this show. I'm sorely disappointed in Matt for not seeing it coming. But Matt's too caught up in his Elektra b.s., and whether he wants to be Daredevil or not. He does, but it wrecks his life, so he doesn't, but then he's jonesing to punch some bad guys and do more than a lawyer can. Push and pull, back and forth.

The leads keep telling their supporting casts they can't tell them more because it'll put them in danger. Nonsense. The Hand are already going to target them, simply for being friends of these heroes. What are the Hand going to do if Matt tells Foggy more about them, kill him twice? I'm not sure if Luke telling Misty everything earlier would have made things go better, but I doubt it would have made them worse.

The boardroom scene fight was pretty cool, from Iron Fist fighting alone, to his team-up with Luke, to Matt and Jessica appearing on the scene. I like the music shift when Luke gets involved.

I like Mike Colter as Luke Cage. Even though he's fresh out of prison, and trying to figure out how best to help Harlem, he has a clearer vision of how he's going forward than the others. They're all at crossroads, but Luke seemed steadier than the others. Maybe because he was committed to his path, just trying to figure out how to make it work. And I did enjoy his and Danny's back-and-forth. 'So punching's OK now? It's complicated.' Despite Danny having traveled much more, Luke understands people better. But Danny's had a host of weird experiences Luke hasn't. Watching Luke run into the stranger side of things could be fun. Although I can't believe Luke doesn't want to hear a story about someone fighting and killing a dragon with their bare hands. Who doesn't want to hear a story about that?

There's a noticeable lighting effect used, where each of the leads gets their own color, and those factor in prominently throughout. I was curious about the peephole lens view they use in transitions between locations. They'll show a bunch of street corners or subways through that view and then it's the next scene. I get we're traveling in a sense to where the story continues, I'm just curious why that particular approach.

When the Hand said they needed the Iron Fist to get at what they needed under the city, I thought for a minute it was going to be one of those gates Fraction and Brubaker introduced in Immortal Iron Fist. The ones developed by Danny's grandfather so you could secretly enter and exit K'un-Lun. I didn't think they'd be built by Danny's grandpa this time, but given the Hand are supposedly so focused on getting back to K'un-Lun, it seemed like a good end goal. A way to get in, without being noticed, and then they could strike by surprise, take over the place. But no, it was more "cheat death for another week" stuff. Maybe that was impossible after Iron Fist season 1. I haven't watched it, so I can't say. At the end I thought they were teasing Danny dressing up as Daredevil to keep his name alive in Matt's absence.

I'm hoping the conclusion of this story draws a line under the ninja stuff. No more frickin' ninjas.

That was a lot of complaining, but it's easy to criticize. Fun too. To the extent the show works, it does so on the strength of the four main characters (and Rosario Dawson's Claire character, as sort of a sounding board for practically everyone) and how they work or don't work together. Differences in viewpoints, approaches, personalities. I know, shocking revelation. I wouldn't say you need to drop everything to watch it. You have some free time, sure, give it a whirl, there's some enjoyable stuff in. Maybe you'll enjoy the villains more than I did, that would help a lot, I imagine.

* As far as star-crossed romantic partners for Daredevil go, I'm much more interested in Typhoid Mary than Elektra.

** I read a comment online that said after the Dr. Strange movie, they couldn't take this show seriously because the Hand seemed so second-rate compared to Dormammu. The stakes were too low. Which struck me as a stupid statement. Are as many people's lives at risk? No, considering Dormammu is a universal-level threat. But people are still going to die, and to them, it's probably irrelevant how grand the threat is.

*** When we learn the mysterious bad guy getting young men in Harlem killed was a guy in a white suit, did I get excited at the extremely far-fetched possibility it would be The White Man, for Posehn and Duggan's Deadpool? Yes, even though I knew it absolutely was not.

**** The mark of Shou-Lao doesn't look nearly as cool stenciled on someone's chest as it has in all those comics I've read over the years.