Diamondbacks dialogue and acting is sooo bad.
That rap was by far the best moment of the whole season. Also liked the bullet holes hoodies style.
Great Shades moments make for a better episode.
This is probably the best episode since Diamondback joined the show. I still really don't like him but here he wasn't as bad as he usually tends to be. This episode also has plenty of good scenes in it, my favourite being the Method Man rap part. I'm quite enjoying Shades and Mariah's characters too so it's great to see them get more screen time again.
What I didn't like is that I was actually really interested to see how the scene at the barbershop in the end would play out but then of course Diamondback had to show up in his goofy costume and ruin everything. That was a lazy way to solve the situation I must say.
What's the point in killing Cottonmouth and replacing him with Stryker. They're the same character. One plays piano.
Method Man made this episode.
Stan Lee on a poster, preparing the season finale
7.3/10. After watching this episode, I have one big question -- why didn't they just cast Method Man as Luke Cage? And I'm only half-joking. He has experience as an actor; he has believability in the part, and he does more to sell the concept of Luke Cage's character in five minutes than all the heavy-handed conversations and monologues the show's presented to us over hours and hours this season. There's an authenticity when he talks to Sway about what's striking about Luke Cage beyond his bulletproof skin -- he could have run, but he didn't. Mike Colter always seems like such a stiff as Luke, and in fact, his most human moment here is when he seems mildly starstruck and excited to exchange hoodies with one of his favorite rappers. It's a great scene, followed by a quality rap, and it makes me wish that Method Man had been a much bigger part of this show.
Still, I like the way they set up Luke as something of a folk hero in Harlem. Everybody wearing hoodies with bullet holes in them seems plausible as a trend and a show of solidarity, and it raises some pretty interesting subtext regarding the garment's prominence in recent years that actually fits the mistrust between the community and the police that the show is going for. That's a vast improvement on the "the cops are harassing us, so let's give them bigger guns!" campaign the show tried to pass off as plausible. The scenes of people walking around Harlem sporting those hoodies while Method Man rapped about Luke was about as fun and potent as the series has been.
But oddly enough, the other highlight of this episode has been Shades. I've been kind of lukewarm on the character this season (no pun intended) since he seemed to have a one note smarm/smoothness thing going that I didn't really buy into, but we saw some more interesting layers to him here that helped flesh him out as a character. His interrogation scene with the inspector where he kept repeating the word "lawyer" was a hoot, and the attempted kill by Zip in the elevator that Shades managed to find his way out of was a nicely tense action scene as well. He's slowly coming into his own, and pairing him up with Mariah, the best character on the show, doesn't hurt either.
I like the two of them as a team. They're two of the very few people on the show who seem to apply logic and have a plan. The idea that Shades is turning away from Diamondback, who he's started to see as a man working without a net rather than the master tactician he seems to thought, at the same time Mariah is turning away from the quest for respectability she so craved for long, and turning to the criminal element she worked so hard to distance herself from, puts them both at an interesting place as they come together. The idea that they're going to turn into a criminal power couple makes me more excited for S2 of this show (assuming both survive the finale), and I like the idea of them trying to employ a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" deal with Luke.
But Luke's still a lot of dead weight in the episode. The cop who let's him go gets a nice monologue, and the whole police escape and chase thing has some juice, but I still just have a hard time caring about this charisma-less wonder, despite the herculean efforts of Method Man. Misty is still on the case, and gets the Waitress's statement about what really happened to Cottonmouth recorded on her phone (which, in narrative terms, means the waitress is so so dead). The time in the episode spent leaning on Turk and indulging in more cliche chess metaphors drags this thing down. Even the attempted assault by Domingo's crew feels like wheelspinning!
But the worst has to be Diamondback's costume. I'm sure there'll be more time to talk about it, but my god, it seems like something he put together out of old halloween costumes from a thrift store than a legitimate villain outfit. Maybe that's the point, but when you see the season's big bad and laugh, it's not good.
Overall, the more Method Man and Mariah/Shades we got, the better this episode seemed, but while the focus was on anything else, the episode started to drag and bore. Hoping for good things in the end game!
Shout by spazureBlockedParent2016-10-17T21:36:34Z
Now if Diamondback could just stay in prision so that we can have a decent show around again, that'd be great.