Luke Cage needs to rely on its more interesting characters instead of the well-trod plot
Even a mediocre episode of Luke Cage feels like a really good episode of any police
procedural. It makes sense that the most satisfying moments to be had here involve
watching Simone Missick as a solving crime and kicking ass. She’s consistently one of the strongest
players on Luke Cage but it still
often feels like the series doesn’t know what exactly it wants to do with its
characters. The series did a lot of work in the early episodes to create interesting
and nuanced characters but over the past few episodes, character development has
stalled while the show focuses on much less engaging plot. It feels like the show
isn’t serving its characters that can save a middling episode and, instead,
focusing more on characters or storylines that are boring or poorly executed.
The character that baffles me most at this juncture is
Tilda. We are supposed to believe that her relationship with her mother is one
of the most important emotional threads of the season, but it feels like we
missed a piece of information or a character beat shared between Tilda and
Mariah to explain how close their relationship is now. When it comes to Tilda
specifically, I can’t tell if the writing or the performance by Gabrielle
Dennis is the problem. Tilda spends much of this episode wildly veering between
shell-shock and wide-eyed confusion. Any trace of the savvy, seductive, and
intelligent woman we met earlier in the season is gone.
The writing infantilizes Tilda. She keeps referring to
Mariah as “Mommy” when there had been so much tension and anger around the
language the two used to refer to each other. The pleading performance from
Dennis feels juvenile. It doesn’t help that Dennis is playing against Alfre
Woodard for most of her scenes. Even when you feel like Woodard is playing it
more casually, her stately charisma & poise are unmatched. She is electric
to watch. Dennis is in her mid-thirties and so is Tilda, but everything about
the character plays like a woman under the age of twenty-one.