The Spin Off Post

So for the uninitiated I'm going to let you in on a secret. We write for a class, and for weekly assignments we have to direct our posts to a certain demographic. This week we had to focus on writing to our parents. Which is incredibly funny, because I didn't realize this and chose to do Luke Cage in accordance with my last weeks blog. This is one of those shows that you may be able to turn into a drinking game, (if you're old enough, please drink responsibly). Take a shot every time some one gets noticeably uncomfortable.

The show is a spin off to the Netflix Original series, Jessica Jones. Following Luke Cage, the man with unbreakable skin through Harlem and some government conspiracy's. It feels like it takes a less comedic approach to the One Punch Man style of show. Where the main character is invulnerable so nothing should be a problem. In replace of that we get to see the other side of the daily struggles of their personal life like; paying bills, and holding relationships. I'm not all that familiar with the Defender's comic book line and I never finished Jessica Jones so I can't tell you where this fits in the time line. If I had to guess I'm going to say this happens before the original show.

How do I feel about this show? I think I can safely say that I like this show. Definitely more than Jessica Jones, and I think I can attribute that to a few things.

First of which is Luke Cage, I really didn't talk about him during my Jessica Jones post. He is definitely my favorite character in Jessica Jones. He's far more charming and fun to watch on screen then the rest of the cast. He does seem to suffer a little from being the main character. While he still has his charm it seems a little dulled down for the side characters. Which I will give a special mention to Pops, he's the sort of wise mentor character in this show, and he serves Luke by trying to get him to be a hero and move on from his dead wife. He also tries to keep all of the kids off of the streets and out of gang violence and harms way. All I know for real is that he will die and I will probably cry a little.

The next one is pacing and the ability to hold my interest. I do like slower and more thoughtfully put together plots. Jessica Jones was slow, but it wasn't thoughtful. It tried to be a noir, and a super hero story following some one with PTSD. This made the show have a sort of off putting pace, every time it would start doing something interesting with one of those ideas it would drop it and move on to one of the other ideas it had going. Luke Cage follows closer to the Daredevil style of pacing where a lot of plot is laid out in a well paced and interesting way. Balancing between the villains and the heroes personal and vigilante ventures.

The third and final thing is tone. You know I started out wanting to talk about Luke Cage and somehow I started talking about all of the Marvel shows. Don't worry Iron fist, we'll talk about you soon. This does make sense seeing as they are all in an interconnected universe and have a whole show where they work together to fight crime. Luke Cage is a serious show like all of them, dealing with heavy and constricting themes. Luke Cage, like Daredevil, has it's moments of levity where you can just see the characters act like people. This allows the show to be serious while also being engaging and not exhausting to watch. Now I'm not saying Jessica Jones is bad, but I do think it is the most divisive of the Defenders shows, and I think there may be a correlation here.

I do very much like the show and to my Mom and Dad I don't recommend you watch it. It doesn't strike me as the type of show that either of you would enjoy. To everyone who is not my parents I would recommend this. It's quite engaging and still very fun to watch despite the show being incredibly graphic and heavy with violence. Luke Cage may not be as interesting of a character as the other Defender's characters, but he more than makes up for it with his screen presence. I currently am watching this as I put these words to page if that serves as an endorsement.  

Daredevil

This week, I decided to take on the pilot episode of the series Daredevil as it had been recommended to me by one of my friends. I am a fan of the movies based around Marvel characters, so I had rather high hopes going into this. Granted, I did not watch past the first episode, which I may decide to do in the future, but I found the start to be just okay. Had I not known this show was from Marvel, I wouldn't realize we were about to follow a superhero.

Yes, the show was not my favorite, however the directors did make some interesting choices. One of the better aspects was the usage of lighting. In most of the scenes, the lighting is dim. Pretty straight forward. However, I felt it was used to reflect the main character, Matt Murdock. He is shown as being more mysterious and closed off, to the point. He doesn't need lavish things and prefers the lights to be darker. It's also fair to mention he is blind. The director most likely added in this detail in order for us to relate to our main character more, and see and appreciate things from his perspective (no pun intended). We better understand what it's like to live in a darker world.

One thing I felt as though the pilot struggled with was figuring out what genre it was. At many different points, I felt like it was a completely different premise, and almost made the viewer get lost. There were fight scenes, displaying the show as an action, which I had assumed the whole show would be for the most part. Yet even then, while the show is about a supposed "superhero", it still showed him as a guy fighting local thugs. Later, Matt and his friend Foggy Nelson started up a law firm together, and during scenes of their practice, it seemed like they wanted it to be more political and law-oriented. The show almost tries to take up a good cop/bad cop dynamic between the two, but doesn't quiet get there. Every now and then, the show would throw in comedic elements, almost as though just to say there were comedic moments. And after all that, there is already romantic tension between Matt, and, ironically enough, Murdock and Nelson's first client, Karen Page. While most shows don't focus on one specific genre the entire time, this one seemed to get lost in itself and didn't truly establish what it wanted to be. Going away from the first episode, I wasn't really sure what section I would put a show like this in.

The show itself was not terrible, don't get me wrong. However, had I not heard great things from my friends, I'm not too sure if I would consider watching on. While the pilot typically tends to be the worst and most chaotic episode, this one doesn't seem to show much potential for a pick up. Any positivity about the show would be appreciated, as I would like to be able to watch a stellar series from the Marvel universe!