Luke Cage, Marvel’s latest 13-part binge-watch Netflix series, is a rare show that reminded me hard that much of my favourite entertainment is produced by a foreign country. There’s a nation out there where a large minority has suffered centuries of different treatment because of skin colour. That nation’s experience of racism is quite different from mine.

The series is a great adaptation of the source material. The ‘jive-talkin’ 70s Hero for Hire who was comics’ first major appropriation of blaxspolitation movies makes a graceful transition to modern TV. Marvel’s Luke Cage doesn’t even shy away from the euphemistic language of the original. Cage’s go-to exclamation is again “Sweet Christmas!” and the no-swearing thing is written in as a plot point character trait.

Spoilers below:
.
.
.
.
.

The key tropes of Carl Lucas’ original origin port across too, complete with Dr Noah Burstein, Reva, prison guard Rackham, and Diamondback. These are well-handled in transition, meshed with more modern sensitivities and sensibilities and with Cage and Reva’s previous appearances in Marvel’s Jessica Jones. Willis Stryker is even more tied to Luke here, revealed in late-series as his illegitimate half-brother, but once that shapes Diamondback’s whole motivation – revenge against the favoured son – the character’s menace and competence actually seem degraded.

Plenty of other early Hero for Hire villains show up too, all nicely refurbished, including an excellent Cottonmouth, his now-cousin Black Mariah, Shades, and crooked cop Rafael Scarfe. All of these characters are given considerably better characterisations and backstories than any of Marvel’s movie villains.

Misty Knight is there too, initially as Scarfe’s partner. She and Cage have a one-night hookup in episode 1 before either knows who the other is or what they do. That encounter poisons future interactions very nicely from a plot point of view, especially when Misty is expected to bring the wanted man in and is shown to have been ‘compromised’ by her previous encounter. Knight is used very well in this series, a second lead really, and she brings the best parts of her comic-book counterpart with her (she even gets her comic-book red holes-in-the-shoulders outfit for one brief closing scene). A serious arm injury in episode nine teases the possibility of her gaining a bionic limb, but the story goes another way.

Claire Temple is another major player after she debuts in episode five. This ‘night-nurse’ (she even gets referred to as that on one occasion) has previously appeared in both Daredevil and Jessica Jones. She plays a larger role here than ever before and the gradual romantic relationship between her and Luke by the final episode feels earned the hard way. Claire is the most effective protagonist in the series, established from her first scene where she kerb-stomps a would-be purse snatcher; she’s a Harlem girl.

Those looking for comics Easter eggs or for Marvel Cinematic Universe connections will not be too disappointed. Episode 1 alone references “the Incident” (the Chitauri invasion of New York), Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and the Hulk. Later on there are passing references to Jessica Jones (“your rebound chick”), “that nutjob in Hell’s Kitchen”, and John Blaze . Episode 7 begins to the voice over of an edition of phone-in chat show Trish Talk, featuring Patsy Walker debating and defending Luke Cage’s actions. Daredevil’s snitch Turk gets away unbeaten-up for information in Episode 2, but returns in Episode 12 to get properly shaken-down for what he knows. Hammer-tech plays a significant role in the story and outfits Diamondback for his final toe-to-toe with Luke. There is nothing to suggest that this story occurs after the Sokovia Accords, or even after the Ultron incident.

The most blatant fan-service comes in Episode 4, which flashes back to Carl Lucas’ prison time and the experiment-gone-wrong that made his skin tougher than steel. He wears similar silver bands on his wrists. The electronic headpiece that he wears for that ordeal is a familiar silver tiara. The first outfit he steals on escaping includes a bright baggy yellow silk shirt. Nice callback that made me grin.

Also fun for comics readers are Cage’s employer/mentor/father-in-law Pops referring to him as Power Man (something Claire takes up later), and a couple of times where people mention they would really like to hire a hero. I don’t know if a big fight at a classic old-style cinema was tribute to Cage’s old hangout at Times Square, but given the amount of research and care put into the rest of the script let’s say it was.

Those looking for “Black” Easter Eggs will be happy too. The series references a long list of Black luminaries and less-than-luminaries, some of whom were unfamiliar to me before I researched them. A sign on Pop’s wall lists the only people who don’t pay cash for his barbershop services: Mohammed Ali, Nelson Mandela, Richard Roundtree, Michael Jordan, Al Pacino, and Pat Riley (Al Pacino is included because “The Godfather and Scarface guaranteed that man an eternal ghetto pass”).

Most of the episodes feature live performances of music in Cottonmouth’s club by actual well-known Black musicians playing themselves. All the episodes are named after tracks from Gang Starr. Episode 12 includes an extended cameo by Method Man, who encounters and then vocally supports outlawed Luke Cage in a splendid on-the-streets montage over his on-air “Luke Cage version” of ‘Bulletproof Love’. “Lord, who to call/ When no one obeys the law? And there ain't no Iron Man/ That can come and save us all?/ Power to the people/ And Luke Cage the cause./ And the cops got it wrong/ We don't think Cage involved./ Look, dog, a hero, never had one/ Already took Malcolm and Martin/ This is the last one/ I beg your pardon/ Somebody pullin' a fast one/ Now we got a hero for hire/ And he a Black one./ And bullet-hole hoodies Is the fashion.”

I quote such a long swath of the rap because it underlines so many of the themes of the series while the montage moves on the public perception subplot as the citizens of Harlem reject politician Mariah’s spin about Cage the murderer and show support for their local hero by wearing bullet-holed hoodies to thwart police stop-and-searches for the wanted man.

There is discussion of black literature and pulp fiction, or historically important Black figures like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, of recent contemporary race issues like the shooting of Rodney King, and a particularly strong scene where Cage forcibly educates a gun-toting young black man on the significance of Crispus Attucks, “the first man to die for what became America.”

That scene outside the Crispus Attucks Centre, the opening and closing framing of Episode 2, also features the first but not last use of the words nigger and nigga. Cage doesn’t like the terms, although they are used several times in the series, always by Black characters, sometimes derisorily. “Young man, I have had a long day. I’m tired. But I’m not tired enough to never let nobody call me that word.”

Suspicion of black men being criminals is an important part of Diamondback and Mariah’s overall plot to sell super-weaponry to the police force. “Fear of Blacks is what passed every gun law.” Now a Black man is bulletproof, a point that the series emphasises several times. The answer is clearly better bullets, using “alien metal” from “the Incident”.

The race issue is handled as sensitively as possible. Prison guard Rackham’s overt comics racism is toned down but never quite forgotten. “Deals like that always sound good to a slave owner,” Cage responds to Rackham’s offer to help him in exchange for joining an illegal prison bare-knuckle fighting racket. A scene where a teenage Black boy is beaten in police custody is somewhat defused because the abusing officer is also Black; anything else would have been blatant and tasteless. But some of the sentiments and generalisations spoken by Black characters in the series would have been branded and vilified as outrageously racist if spoken by White people.

That is what led me to my awareness of being from a different country. The UK has race issues too, but nothing as embedded or with such a bitter history as the US struggles with. Nor has the UK the historic pluralist cultures of various ethnic groups in a melting-pot (Well, not for the last thousand years, although that may be changing in the 21st century).

Marvel’s Luke Cage could only be made in a nation with those experiences, one that is still adjusting to cope with them in the modern day. It saddened me that a writer’s room with “mostly Black writers” was notable enough to be newsworthy, and that it was only accomplished for a series about a Black man in Harlem. For the main part I scarcely noticed the majority of the cast were Black except when the story took trouble to remind me of it.

It also slightly bothered me that so much of the portrayed Black culture was shaped and based upon reacting to a perceived ruling White culture. Had the roles been race-flipped and a White music artist been singing “Now we got a hero for hire/ And he a White one,” it would have seemed blatantly supremacist. Had a White character been opining that “Baseball gets passed down from fathers to sons. That’s why there ain’t no black ball players these days. No fathers stuck around to teach ‘em” [my paraphrase] it would have been an outrageously racist blanket statement. From a Black man commenting on Black Harlem it slips by as local colour (really no pun intended).

Another alien feature of the story was the endemic gun culture portrayed throughout. There is no episode in which some character does not point a gun at another. Guns are equated with power and with control, which are both pervasive themes in this work. As well as the obvious guns-and-Black men issues there are questions about police use of firearms (and stop and search), about the endemic peddling of guns based on fear of violence (including gun violence) and about how guns become a first rather than last resort. No major character in Luke Cage does not use or attempt to use a gun at some point except for Luke himself; he crumples firearms with his fists every time he encounters them. All those well-known images of Power Man with bullets bouncing off his chest are written into this series’ DNA and used to start a discussion about arms and their use.

If the US is alien to the UK, Harlem is sometimes alien to the US. The series treats Harlem as another character. Its history, its culture, its old sorrow and its vibrant potential are all represented. Villainous characters can still love it and take pride in it. Various cast members have been shaped by growing up there. A newcomer like Georgia preacher’s son Cage can be adopted. Photography, deft dialogue, well-chosen locations, and some clever thematic connections all help to portray a place and time that have not previously been depicted in fare I have watched. I am educated.

The series is well done. Well told with strong writing and excellent production values, well acted with no sour notes or weak performances even by peripheral characters. There are moments where I thought the narrative flagged from 10/10 to 8/10, such as a lengthy interlude while Cage is injured and the unfortunate timing of a last-episode climax 20 minutes in to an hour-long feature, but I am well satisfied with the time I invested watching it.

If I was to nitpick I would concentrate on Willis Stryker, Diamondback, whose strong debut halfway through the series after repeated mentions to set him up is then vitiated by a series of bad choices that undercut his stature as a villain. That his grand schemes turn out to have all and always been aimed at getting back at his half-brother make him smaller. His fellow villains Cottonmouth, Mariah, and Shades all have more layered and interesting motivations. Flashbacks and exposition that contextualised the conflict came too late and too scanty, much of it in the final episode’s pre-credit opener. Stryker’s final smackdown, a street fight with Harlem watching and cheering for Luke, is really something of a letdown. Despite his ill-designed Hammertech fighting suit (was it meant to look as if it had been designed by a geek who thought he was cool? If so, points. Otherwise, failure), the stakes at that point were never lower. It all came down to a brawl, and we’ve seen that done better between Daredevil and Kingpin.

I would have preferred an upbeat ending to the series, especially since it seems unlikely that Mariah and Shades, who slip away unscathed at the end and effectively win, taking over Harlem’s underworld, seem destined to retain that victory until Luke Cage series 2 sometime in the next three or four years. Misty Knight’s plot thread, which is all about nailing Mariah for her crimes, is therefore unresolved. The message appears to be “the system doesn’t work after all”. Everything she has been championing is wrong. This feels like a thematic misstep.

Meanwhile Carl Lucas is hauled back to Seagate to serve out his time, with nothing but a spontaneous farewell kiss of promise from a night nurse to tide him over. This might be a necessary set-up for the forthcoming Defenders series but it also left the series on a remarkably bleak downbeat note. I can’t call it a mistake because it was a legitimate capstone to Luke’s hero journey. I would have preferred a different resolution.

A final criticism, not of the series but of its marketing. I felt like I had seen all the best actions sequences as online trailers beforehand, including the remarkable Episode 3 setpiece of Cage taking down the gangsters in the Crispus Attucks complex. It was as though the whole series had been cherry-picked for previous release, and it weakened the impact of those pieces when they appeared in context.

The strong far outweighs the weak, though. Mike Coulter shines as Luke Cage, bringing a complex, honourable, yet flawed and scarred hero to the screen with a bravura performance. He handles a range of material adroitly and makes Cage thoroughly likeable and very accessible. And he gets away with saying “Sweet Christmas!” He leads a cast that includes three meaty roles for three very different women (Simone Missick, Rosario Dawson, and Alfre Woodard as Misty, Claire, and Mariah) who all hold their own. And there are plenty of smaller but well-cast parts that carry their own plot-arcs, including Frankie Faison as ‘Pop’ Hunter and Frank Whaley as Rafael Scarfe. Special mention goes to Mahershala Ali as Cornell ‘Cottonmouth’ Stokes, whose carefully-judged performance underpins the events of the first half of the series.

Marvel’s Luke Cage wasn’t my series, in my neighbourhood, in my culture. But it was great to visit and to learn. Bring on Danny Rand!

HH

I've not read much Luke Cage. I remember having a Spider-man issue as a child where he and Spidey tussled for the first time (likely a reprint), and later a Marvel team-up or something where Wanda hired Cage and Iron Fist and they ended up teaming with her and Vishnu to fight some demons.

Fun stuff, but probably not particularly grounded or relevant commentary on today's social issues. Still, it had a scene where Vizh helped them all get to the roof of a skyscraper during a blackout by flying to the top of the elevator shaft, grabbing the counterweight cable and then increasing density to pull the elevator with everyone else up. I don't know why that scene stuck with me, but I still like it.

Sorry... tangent. I quite liked the in-depth review! Thanks for sharing it.