1x09 DWYCK

7.1/10. I gotta be honest guys, I’m a little tired of this show. I don’t really binge watch things the way most people do (or the way I used to do). Instead, I’m more likely to watch 1-2 episodes of hour-long shows a night. But I can see how the binge-watch model would work better for a show like Luke Cage where some of the dead spots, or stories in the same episode that don’t really go together, would make more sense, or at least the rougher edges would be sanded down, from taking it all in a couple of big chunks.

Which is to say that we have a three different stories here: 1. Misty being interrogated (sorry, receiving therapy) 2. Mariah stepping into Cottonmouth’s crime world to clean up his mess and getting mixed up with Diamondback, and 3. Luke and Clare hunting down the doctor who performed the experiment that made Luke who he is. There’s a lot of dullness and what feels like wheel-spinning in all three, and while you can make some loose thematic connections between them about each plotline being about control somehow, they mostly feel like three very distinct, unrelated stories that don’t fit tonally with one another.

Let’s go with Luke’s story first. For one thing, you can only fake kill Luke or pretend that he’s on death’s door so many times before it ceases to have any effect. It’s silly and cliché to begin with, and going back to that well repeatedly does nothing to help matters. But the idea that the Judas bullets are inside Luke, and they need to find a way to weaken his skin in order to get the shrapnel out is a solid, if not super compelling obstacle. They’re still selling a Clare-Luke romance that I’m just not buying, but the idea that you have this untrustworthy Frankenstein of a doctor fixing up Luke in his barn is comic book-y, and that both helps and hurts the episode.

It might work better if it wasn’t interspersed with the realism of Misty Knight talking to a police psychologist about her past and what happened with Diamondback. It’s not a high standard, but it’s probably the best part of the episode. It’s certainly the best performance the actress has given as a character, and while there’s a lot of “let me sit here and deliver my backstory” kind of cheese, the “two people in a room” format gives her a nice canvas on which to show her acting talent.

The whole “I became a cop so I could do good here where neither the cops or the community were preventing bad things like what happened to my friend” is pretty hackneyed stuff, and a lot of the conversations about control and vision turns what could be good subtext into text. Still, we get to dig into the Misty Knight character in a meaningful way, and despite the focus she’s received, it feels like she’s been clumsily developed or underdeveloped compared to some of the other regular characters, so I appreciate the attempt if nothing else.

And then you have the Mariah-Diamonback story, which is a pretty mixed bag. Mariah is great as always, and while I’ve been skeptical of Shades in the show for a while, I like the dynamic that he’s not actually Diamondback’s trusted lieutenant, but is rather projecting bravado and power like everyone is, and has enough attachment to Mariah to want to protect her, maybe even court her, instead of just honing in on her territory. And I also like that Mariah is reluctantly getting herself involved in the crime side of things, if only for the prospect that she can sell off her brother’s interests, and use Luke Cage’s crime footage to build a donor base and make another run at respectability and political power with a new donor base.

Diamondback, however, is still a weak point. Right now he just comes off as a generic quirky mob boss type, with the trademark random killing of a henchmen, taking out of other bosses, and bible verse-spouting tic. The fact that he is both Luke’s best friend and, apparently, Cottonmouth’s friend, runs into some serious small universe territory, and overall the character and the performance just come off a little too cornball-feigning-gravitas for my tastes. The idea that they’re positioning him (and Mariah) as the answer to the superpower person “menace” has a little juice, but it’s mild.

Overall, this is one of those episode that felt much longer than it was, if only because it felt like three things which could each have been the backbone of their own episode being stitched together without much coherence or complementary qualities to them. Despite the highs of the Cottonmouth/Mariah flashback episode, this season has been more of a slog than a joy. Hopefully it picks up as we inch toward the endgame.