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.
A pattern is emerging with these Marvel Netflix shows: They start out fairly grounded and realistic before eventually pushing things too far in a comic book direction. It happened with Daredevil (in both seasons), it happened with Jessica Jones, and now, unfortunately, it’s happening with Luke Cage too. This episode opens with a truly embarrassing technobabble scene in which Claire and Dr. Burstein frantically use trial and error to save Luke’s life. (Salt! Heat! A toaster in the bathtub!) And that opener is a harbinger of more cartoonishness to come.
“Take It Personal” amps up the elements Luke Cage has struggled with this season—including clunky dialogue and odd tonal shifts—and it downplays the show’s strengths, like its lived-in depiction of Harlem and its low-key character interactions. Those missteps, along with some questionable real-world metaphors, mean this is easily the weakest episode of the season for me.
Here’s a pro-tip: If the solution to your problem involves thinking about it a bit, you can actually do that anywhere. Yet Luke decides he and Claire must visit his (suspiciously snowy) Savannah hometown so he can reflect back on his childhood. “Willis hates me and I just need to figure out why,” Luke explains. Hmmm, maybe you should’ve listened to the longwinded monologue where he laid out all of his resentments about you?
The scene in Luke’s father’s church creates a lovely visual language for its flashbacks as present-day Luke watches figments from his past move around him. But that interesting visual flourish isn’t enough to save what feels like a pointless side plot. After about 30 seconds of reflection, Luke confirms that Willis was telling the truth; they are indeed related. But it’s just hard to care about the *big reveal* that Luke’s childhood best friend is actually his half-brother, when we didn’t even know he had a childhood best friend until two episodes ago. Luke might find it revelatory, but to us it’s just new information
Even weirder, this episode does feature a genuinely shocking twist that works equally well for Luke and for the audience: Reva knew about both Dr. Burstein’s experiments and Rackham’s fight ring, and she was apparently manipulating Luke for large portions of their relationship. Given how much his love for Reva motivated Luke in both Jessica Jones and on this show, that seems like it should be devastating. But instead it’s glossed over fairly quickly (“I love the idea of Reva, but not her specifically. Not anymore.”) in favor of more Willis drama.
Perhaps there’s a way this odd plotting could work if the execution were flawless, but the dialogue in “Take It Personal” is the clunkiest it’s been all season. There’s no subtly or nuance and everyone just says exactly what they feel. “I trusted Reva and I was wrong. How can I trust you?” Luke asks Claire. She might as well respond, “Because my name is in the main credits.”
The other half of this episode digs into some tricky territory that I’m not sure fully works either. Diamondback (who I’m liking less and less as a villain) kills a cop in order to pin the murder on Luke. The police department ramps up their stop-and-frisk tactics to help them track down the bulletproof hero they think is responsible, although Misty remains unconvinced that Luke was actually involved at all. Then after a detective roughs up a teen in the interrogation room (the same teen Luke saved from the shootout at Pop’s), Mariah manages to spin the whole thing into a political boon for herself as she holds a rally that’s half police brutality protest, half anti-superhero campaign.