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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Sounds like there'll be another Marvel hero showing up in Punisher
. Some people are speculating it'll be Moon Knight.
edited 27th Aug '17 3:21:02 PM by comicwriter
Luke Cage, Episode 5!
So Luke's digging through the rubble of Genghis Connie's with his bare hands. Has he given up on protecting that secret identity he doesn't actually have? Not the Carl Lucas thing. The "I don't have super strength and unbreakable skin, what are you talking about?" thing.
"Maybe if we just leave that Luke Cage cat alone…he takes his side of the street, we take ours." I know Cornell's supposed to look like an asshole for rejecting this plan. I mean, he shot a guy, so yeah. He's an asshole. But at the same time, it's a bit late for that. Luke's been on a warpath since Pops. Tone is basically single-handedly responsible for the downfall of this entire operation.
"You think you're going to recoup $7 million just like that?" Shades isn't wrong. Knocking over corner stores isn't going to pull in seven figures. I don't care how many you hit. Most of these places don't have more than $50 in the register at a given time.
So, let's talk about Cornell's plan. He's sending people out to knock over stores and try and form a mob to go after Luke. He is deliberately, decisively antagonizing Luke. He has, as of yet, no plans for how to actually kill Luke. He shot the man with an RPG and already seems to know that didn't work out. So he's picking a fight he knows, for a fact, he cannot win at this time.
This guy he's calling better be something really special, or he's about to look like a dumbass.
"Where you going?" "To make sure Cottonmouth spells my name right." Seriously. Luke gets all the best lines. ^.^ And just like that, Luke is successfully antagonized. Cottonmouth better have a Part II to this gambit involving luring Luke into a trap once he inevitably takes action.
With the fight in the club, I think Shades might be recognizing Luke here. Just like he wanted him not to.
"…Carl Lucas?" Or I could have waited five seconds for him to explicitly say that.
Also, seriously, Cornell better have something up his sleeve because this ambush is pathetic.
"It's called deductive reasoning. If a rocket launcher couldn't stop me, what's a little peashooter going to do?" "You want to go to war? Hmm?" That's not answering the question, Cornell.
"Keep my name out your mouth." What. WHAT. Luke, no. Don't just walk away and leave Cornell totally capable of retaliating. What the f*ck, man?
"I think that's what I want to do. Help people with abilities." Origins of the Night Nurse.
So this conversation about the Judas Bullet probably should have happened before Luke showed up at the club. In fact, I don't even know what the point of that scene was. It just made everyone involved look like morons. Cornell didn't really need the visual demonstration; like Luke himself pointed out, he knows damned well the guy's invulnerable. And Luke just looked incredibly dumb for f*cking off and leaving Cornell and Shades to devise this Judas Bullet plan.
"Per bullet? For real?" Value is based on scarcity and this shit's made out of Chitauri metal. How common do you think that shit is?
At the funeral, there's a woman next to Shades who's fanning herself. From the angle, it looked like it was Shades lightly fanning himself, and the visual was hilarious until I realized what it actually was.
Cornell's eulogy speech was actually really good. I mean, the obvious veiled threats at Luke were there, but he even made those sound great. I'm legitimately surprised by how good this speech was.
Luke's speech was also pretty good, but I can't help feeling like Cornell's was a little better.
So, this was a fun episode with a minor divergence into batshit stupid halfway through before getting right back to good. I'm still deciding how I feel about Cornell. On the one hand, I feel like he does a better job of capturing the crimelord archetype than Fisk did. He doesn't come off as the weak link in his own operation the way Fisk did. But he also suffers from the fact that he's just not a good villain for Luke, specifically.
At this point, Cornell continues to exist solely at Luke's discretion. He's proven over and over that he can't touch Luke. The main point of conflict isn't that Luke can't stop Cornell, it's that he just won't because f*ck you, that's why. Luke keeps telling the police to piss off when Misty asks for his help but he won't vigilante-solve Cornell either so he's basically just popping by to stir the hornet's nest with his invulnerable stick from time to time.
Cornell is imposing, but pathetic. The Judas Bullet isn't going to fix that, either, because a) he only knows about it due to Shades and b) he's already passed the point where any action he takes is not reflective of his own threat capability, but is instead reflective of Luke's ineffectualness. As I said: he continues to exist now solely because Luke refuses to do anything but troll him and then f*ck off.
I’m kinda done with Cornell at this point. He's outlived his incredibly limited narrative usefulness as Luke's nigh-harmless starter villain. Now he's just dragging down the series by the increasingly desperate lengths taken to keep him involved with it. It's about time for him to go so we can move on to bigger fish Diamondback.
As a rule, your villain's not supposed to feel like the hopeless underdog, and that's where Cornell is right now. It's time for him to go.
edited 27th Aug '17 9:35:41 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.As I recall, the main reason Luke couldn't go after Cottonmouth directly was because he didn't have anything that could be pinned to the man himself. This is made more explicit when Cottonmouth walks in the next couple of episodes. Stokes is too connected in the neighbourhood, with roots so deep and enough of a positive image that his eulogy is actually believable. He's too many steps removed from his soldiers for anything to stick to him, so if Luke were to bash in the doors of Harlem's Paradise and drag Stokes out into the street, it'd make Luke guilty of assault while Cottonmouth and his inner circle could just claim self-defense. But even if Luke can't connect the money at Crispus Attucks back to him directly, it still hurts Stokes's operation, and takes his goons off the street one way or another.
And of course Luke is still lying as low as he can, at first, trying to avoid showing Carl Lucas's face to people he knows are going to recognize him.
edited 27th Aug '17 9:55:44 PM by Unsung
The issue with that is that politely jousting with him like Luke's doing just puts a lot of people in the crossfire. Murdock had a lot of this same problem in the second season of DareDevil, where he would stand there moralizing about the importance of his No-Kill Code while all the conflicts were resolved by the murderers in the cast.
Luke's declared war on Cornell. He needs to figure out what the f*ck that means. He won't go to the cops, he won't go after Cornell directly, so he's just sorta striking this ineffectual middle ground where neither a legal nor a vigilante resolution is acceptable to him. He literally went to Cornell's club just to stand there uselessly posturing and then go home, like that's not going to result in more bodies.
Luke needs to figure out his Win Condition, because right now, that is literally the only thing holding him back from winning tonight. Frankly, the point at which Cornell fired an RPG at the building he was in was the point where the gloves should have come off. People are dying not because Luke can't beat Cornell, but because he won't.
As it is, it's not clear what Luke thinks he's accomplishing by repeatedly pissing off a dangerous crimelord and then going home and waiting for the retaliation strike so that he can go piss him off some more.
edited 27th Aug '17 10:02:23 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.You're right that more half-measures will just continue to get other people hurt, but I think that's part of the learning curve which makes sense for Luke in this season in a way it doesn't for Matt in his. And the idea that sometimes, even after cutting off the head of the snake, there's just another head that's worse, which is never really more explicit than when your two starting villains are called Cottonmouth and Diamondback.
The mistake Luke makes more than once is thinking that this is just a personal beef he can take on all by himself. He's quite naive in that way, as his being a Georgia boy rather than a lifelong New Yorker is probably meant to show. It's extremely personal for Stokes at this point, sure, but crime's a messy business. Part of what I like about how the criminals in Luke Cage are presented versus Fisk's crime ring or the Hand is that they're not this clockwork mechanism led by an inner circle of masterminds— it's a snake pit. Tone, Scarfe, Stokes himself, they're all just trying to climb on top of each other to get to the top. Because everybody wants to be the king.
edited 27th Aug '17 10:53:10 PM by Unsung
Luke can't just pick Cottonmouth up by the collar and plop him down at the precinct. There's no legal evidence against Cottonmouth, so all Luke can really do is reduce his resources by roughing up his goons, getting his safehouses closed, and getting his money seized. Him going and posturing to Cottonmouth is basically him saying "Give up. I know I can't touch you, but you can't stop me either, and you have a lot more to lose in this stalemate than I do." Like he said with the chess analogy, he can't touch the king, but a king without his pawns, rooks, knights, ect. is pretty damn unthreatening.
Problem is, Cottonmouth is way too prideful to concede. He declared war on Luke, and he'd sooner flail his limbs uselessly against Luke's steel abs than admit he can't win. And with the revelation that Judas bullets exist, he'd rather double down and pursue that tiebreaker.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!I do agree about how the criminals are presented. Cornell's operation just feels more representative of crime than Fisk's carousel of f*ck-ups. Similarly, I like the way his influence in the police is represented by Scarfe. It's a nice way of showing the limited but not insubstantial power he has within the ranks of the people tasked to neutralize him.
Scarfe also resonates much more strongly than Fisk being able to just make really good Bribe skill checks every five seconds.
In a vacuum, Cornell and his operation are fantastic villains. The issue, primarily, is this weird catch-22 where they're not very good Luke Cage villains and yet I can't imagine them resonating as strongly with, say, Murdock or Jones as their nemesis. Black culture is so heavily saturated into the themes of this show that if you take Luke away, you lose something very important to the story.
But at the same time, Cornell and his operation fall flat as Luke Cage villains due to the aforementioned harmlessness. They have no ability to directly threaten Luke, which causes their ability to directly threaten the people around Luke to be inversely proportional to Luke's effectiveness as a hero. People are dying not because the Villain is so dangerous, but because the Hero sucks at his job.
It doesn't feel like they were conceived with an invulnerable hero in mind. It feels like the writers want really badly to have this be a delicate chess match between two cunning masterminds, but have failed to answer the basic question of why Luke should even sit down at the table at all when, seriously, he can just punch the other player and be done with it.
And his reluctance to punch Cornell has crossed into weird with that nightclub showdown. Like, he'll break limbs and beat down Cornell's guards, no sweat. But Cornell comes down, stands face to face with him, has a tense standoff, and...what? He's fine breaking noses and chokeslamming Cornell's thugs to intimidate them into doing what he wants, but when he meets the man himself? Will not lay a finger on him.
So the end result is a sort of narrative dissonance where Cornell is a great villain, but doesn't work well for the hero he's opposing, and yet would also lose a lot of thematic value if put against any of the other heroes he could have opposed instead. I'm just left sorta feeling like this plot is a waste of a perfectly good character.
To be clear, I am advocating for Luke to kill him. Not to knock him out and tie him up outside the precinct with a note that says, "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Cage."
edited 27th Aug '17 10:24:35 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
Right, right. And the thing about people getting hurt in the crossfire is that people were already getting hurt before Luke stepped in. As I think the next few episodes show, Luke's plan is actually working, and does seriously blunt Cottonmouth's fangs, so to speak. His crusade against Luke Cage is bankrupting him, his men are getting put in the hospital or in jail, and this rampage is losing him the trust of his suppliers. By the time he wants a Judas Bullet for himself, he can't even afford just *one*— and by the time his actual death occurs, Shades was already under orders to kill him. People do catch some stray bullets while Cottonmouth's still around, but it's important not to lose sight of the fact that removing him isn't necessarily going to prevent that. Luke can't be everywhere at once, and it seems all too possible that in the chaos even more people might get killed, or that other gangs might just swoop in and hijack his operations for themselves.
See, I think this otherwise threatening figure being completely ineffectual against a bulletproof man is part of what makes Cottonmouth a *great* villain for Luke Cage. Because the game has changed, and here's the proof.
edited 27th Aug '17 11:43:12 PM by Unsung
That would probably be the most utilitarian option, yes, but Luke's the son of a preacher. Like Daredevil, he'd never actually kill someone. So he obviously needs a Stick/Elektra/Punisher of his own to actually get shit done.
edited 27th Aug '17 10:43:07 PM by Anomalocaris20
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!

Um...spoilers, guys? Tobias hasn't finished Luke Cage yet.
Oh God! Natural light!