Welcome to The A.V. Club’s Luke Cage binge-watch. From Friday, September 30 through Sunday, October 2, A.V. Club contributor Caroline Siede will be watching and reviewing every episode of the Marvel series’ first season.You can follow along and comment on the whole season on the binge-watching hub page or chime in on the individual episode reviews. For those watching at a more moderate pace, reviews by Ali Barthwell will run every other day beginning Monday, October 3.
Well that was a twist! Not so much Luke’s potential death-by-Judas-bullet, which was always bound to happen sooner or later. I’m talking about the shocking reveal that Mariah is our true villain after all. The scene in which she murders Cottonmouth was a fantastic shattering of expectations that recontextualizes Mariah’s character without feeling like a retcon. Unfortunately, the rest of “Manifest” was a little more hit-or-miss.
Creator Cheo Hodari Coker cited The Wire as an influence for this series and I see what he means. Like that highly acclaimed show did with Baltimore, Luke Cage casts a wide net over Harlem life, but it’s also fascinated by minutia of those Harlem institutions. Cottonmouth is released because the police can’t make a case against him; Misty adjusts to life under the critical eye of her new boss Priscilla Ridley; and Mariah deals with the political fallout of her cousin’s arrest. At its best the show mines that minutia for real drama, but at its worst it can also be a little boring.
So something like the Luke/Cottonmouth parlay really worked for me because it puts two compelling actors in a room and lets them bounce off one another. But elsewhere Luke’s continual waffling about whether or not he wants to be a superhero is starting to grate. The reveal that Cottonmouth knows his convict pass should be a game-changer, but it mostly just feels like the umpteenth retread of Luke as a reluctant hero. Pick a lane already, dude.
And then there are the flashbacks to Cottonmouth and Mariah’s childhood under the iron grip of Mama Mabel Stokes, which worked better for me in theory than in execution. I like the idea of examining the forces that shaped Cottonmouth and Mariah into the somewhat erratic people they are today. That Cottonmouth was forced into a life of crime when he was 14 helps explain why adult Cottonmouth occasionally feels stuck in a stage of arrested development, as I pointed out in “Just To Get A Rep.” And learning about his lifelong love of music helps us better understand why he’s so protective of Harlem’s Paradise. Booking musical acts and tinkering on his piano are the only ways he can express the musical voice that was long-ago silenced in him.
But, unfortunately, we just don’t spend enough time with the flashbacks to allow for the kind of specificity I praised in Luke Cage’s early episode. It’s fine to tell a familiar story if you can find something new in it. But here the flashbacks are basically reduced to “innocent kid with talent is tragically forced into a life of crime,” which is a story I’ve seen many times before. I like the idea of Mabel as both community protector and ruthless leader—traits that seemed to have been inherited by Mariah and Cottonmouth to varying degrees—but the flashbacks are too short to dig into the humanity behind her more archetypal persona.
On the other hand, I’m not sure the Mariah/Cottonmouth confrontation would’ve worked nearly as well without the information we learned via those flashback. And holy shit was that a great scene.