Luke Cage took me longer to watch because it turns out that sitting comfortably was a bit of an issue this weekend.
Stupid nitpick, right off the bat: The President of the USA in the MCU in 2015 is named Matthew Ellis, so named in Iron Man 3 and Agents of SHIELD. Barack Obama's name kept coming up in Luke Cage. Was he President during the first Iron Man? Is he a Senator from Illinois? This bothers me more than it probably should.
Nitpick part deux: The climax of The Incredible Hulk took place in Harlem. It's mentioned one time and only in the most oblique way, but a lot of characters say things about how the super guys never come up town. That just ain't so, unless Hulk and Abomination tearing down buildings and using cars for boxing gloves doesn't count for some reason.
I like what I saw more than Daredevil Season 2 or Jessica Jones. First, Luke Cage isn't an unceasing trigger warning of sex trafficking, child abuse and sexual assaults. It's about an invulnerable guy in a hoodie taking out the trash. The production team is almost entirely African American. Writers, directors, most of the cast and I can see the legitimacy of the culture they've baked in. The show gets a BIT preachy about Harlem-the-place at least once in almost every episode but it's nice to see that the MCU isn't 100% whitewashed, even if I'm absolutely the audience that is prepared to accept whitewashed super heroes as normal.
Other strong points: Cottonmouth, Shades and Black Mariah. These are complicated villains. They're normal humans who each have their own sort of power. Black Mariah in particular seems very real as someone somewhat familiar with Chicago politics. She's evil in a personal way but she's still trying to improve her community. I like it. Netflix-Marvel seems better equipped to create memorable villains, moreso than even the movies (Loki being the single exception) have been.
Mike Colter is a very charismatic dude. He is not of Harlem. He's not a thug (comic book Luke Cage has been a jive-talking thug at times). He pulls off his place as an outsider really well, but he's clearly grounded in that place now. I appreciate this. Daredevil should be rooted in Hell's Kitchen in that way, but to this day I have no idea what that means in terms of real life NYC. Harlem, with its hopeful street art and history as the center of black culture, is given depth and its due.
Luke Cage is not filmed entirely in NYC street lights or the sort of flat, cool colors that most daytime scenes in most Marvel productions use. They make use of shifting focus even within a scene to center our attention, something I don't remember seeing in other Marvel productions. Luke Cage seems a lot more colorful somehow. These are technical choices that I noticed, something I'm not usually all that attuned to, but I noticed it here.
Music. Hip-Hop is not my thing, but the soundtrack is integrated in the production much more deeply than I remember from any other Marvel effort. We get bits of jazz and blues and enough homage to Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield in the incidental music for me to see that this is an extension of something that has grown from the 70s origins of the character. I have a feeling that the hip-hop/rap stuff that does show up is deliberate and iconic in ways I'm too white to know about, but I can tell efforts were made. In any case, after mostly-forgettable Marvel scores, I'm glad somebody got music production right this time.
I love the way police are used. They're not incompetent. They're not hostile. They're not all corrupt. Some of them are actually pretty good at their jobs and some are not. Their relationship with the community is complex and mildly adversarial. A police therapist come in at one point and is actually helpful. This seems particularly unusual for super-hero fiction. Luke Cage has a surprisingly large police procedural component to it that I would not expect to see, but at times it was definitely the A story and something we haven't seen before from Marvel. Simone Missick should be a big character in Iron Fist, which is good because I really like her.
Marvel stuff is much more thoroughly part of the plot. The Avengers come up a lot. Hammer Industries and Chitauri technology are important. Luke escaped from the same prison where Justin Hammer and Trevor Slatterly are incarcerated.
I liked the complexity presented in the ending of this series in the most vague and spoiler free manner possible.
I felt like there's a bit of an in-joke in the number of cast members from The Wire made appearances. If someone had said "Omar comin'", I think I would've lost it. Also, Mama Mabel is Samuel L. Jackson's real-life wife.
Bad stuff: Diamondback. He does stuff that doesn't make a whole lot of sense given his apparent resources.
Fight sequences. We are spoiled here because Captain America movies and Daredevil have done fight choreography so well. Luke Cage is super strong and invulnerable. He DOES know how to fight, but he doesn't have to. Most fights are played for laughs, with Luke casually flicking a thug through a wall. In this way, we have a more comic book style of violence, but that's a big shift from everything else in the MCU.
Sermons about Harlem. I think there's one in every episode. I appreciate them but message received after the ninth one.
Luke is openly super-powered. He's tossing people around in public and even on camera. New York Police are ultimately armed specifically to deal with him. One way or the other, this should at least rate a mention of SHIELD. I understand why Agents of SHIELD stuff doesn't come up in the movies but can someone at least bring up Netflix NYC events on AoS soon?