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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
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I agree that's probably the coolest part of the new suit for me. Looks like it came straight from the Coates/Stelfreeze series.
After a really long break because life happened real fast and in a hurry, I'm back to finish Defenders!
The Defenders, Episode Six
And we are back with the severed head of Sowande who was awesome and I'm kinda sad that he died so fast, even though I'm also really happy with how awesome Stick's no-bullshit takedown of him was. …y'know, after an episode of weirdly not killing him because reasons. It was still a cool f*cking scene!
That said, so far as the five fingers of The Hand go, black dude totally died first. Just sayin'.
"You didn't have to kill him." Matt, kindly shut the f*ck up. Stick totally had to kill him. He also killed Nobu for you. Get some actual goddamn results from your no-killing bullshit, then start mouthing off about it.
Also, I love how nobody's actually bothered by the spontaneous decapitation of Sowande. Like, at worst they are mildly perturbed that a man's brain matter just splattered all over their shoes. This crew's seen some shit.
"He's what they've been after all along." "Yeah, well, we knew that!" Today's review is brought to you by co-reviewer Luke Cage.
"Must be why they haven't killed you." "They haven't killed me because they want me on their side!" Yeah. So you can open the lock. Get your thumb out your ass and pay attention; your rebuttal didn't actually refute anything Stick's saying.
"So The Hand is in New York because he gives them access or opens something up?" No, The Hand was here long before they were and couldn't have predicted the shittiest f*cking Iron Fist in history spontaneously abandoning his post to delve headfirst into their operations. He's a lucky accident, not their reason for being here. Presumably, they're here because the lock is. That's probably what they're digging for.
"He was a member of The Hand. An organization formed by lying psychopaths. You can't trust a word he said." Danny is weirdly resistant to the idea that The Hand have a reason for repeatedly trying not to kill him. Like, this is "Colleen suddenly hates the Defenders" weird. I have no idea what his motive is for suddenly digging in his heels and going, "NO, I refuse to accept that my Iron Fist could have any actual purpose! None of this can possibly be true! It's just for bludgeoning things, nothing more! Stop trying to make this about me, even though I've spent my entire career trying to make everything about me!"
As loathe as I am to defend Danny for anything, this is a very strange writing choice. This is a pointlessly obstinate to argue about. He's just being weirdly contrarian in this scene, in a way that doesn't feel right even for his character.
"The way I see it, we only have one move." I love how we get tension-ratcheting music as Matt says this and Danny looks legitimately scared by it. Like Matt's about to say they need to kill Danny so The Hand can't use him or something. Like that would ever be a thing that comes out of Matt's mouth. Like, a minute ago he was ranting about how Stick's a bad person for saving Danny from Sowande, and now they think we're going to be worried about Danny's wellbeing from a dramatic line Matt delivers?
Pull the other one, episode.
"They make you question the people you trust." And then we go straight on into that scene, except instead of killing Danny, they just don't want to let him punch dudes while they're sorting this out. It's legitimately hilarious how dramatic they're trying to make the ordeal of whether Danny will be allowed to punch bad guys.
Like, Danny is all in, arguing vehemently that they need him to punch the bad guys. They can't do it without him, only Danny and his Iron Fist can punch bad guys. And on the other side, they're all talking him down and trying to explain the brutal necessity of the decision for him to not punch bad guys, like this is a great and terrible sacrifice they're asking him to make. Oh, no! Without Danny, who could possibly punch the bad guys?! Except, y'know, Luke's invulnerable so there's that.
"If Alexandria gets a hold of you, the war's lost. I can't allow that." Is Stick talking about actually killing Danny? Because if he is, then he's having a completely different conversation than the others are.
"Maybe we should just hide him." "We're running out of time!" No, you're not. They're running out of time. Time is actually on your side. This no-revivals thing means you can totally wait them out. There is a time to chase and a time to make your adversary chase you, and now is the time to make them do the chasing. As long as they need Danny, the Defenders have all the cards; they can force The Hand to come to them, desperate and ill-prepared, on their own terms.
"They want me on the sidelines because I'm the only one who can destroy them." I love how, in the course of railing against how this is All About Danny, he managed to contort his defense in order to make that All About Danny too. That was some fantastic weasel logic.
"We can keep you safe. You just need to calm down." Pfft. Danny is the MCU's Kratos. Mindless pursuit of a violent goal is his thing. He doesn't know the meaning of calm.
"That's the problem, Matt. I'm all out of calm." Yeah! What he said!
I love how Danny punches Matt in the face one time and then just stands there all proud of himself, like Matt's going to fall to his knees and be like, "My god, I never realized your violence was so amazing! I forfeit to your amazing punch. We'll do it your way. I'm so sorry I questioned your punch."
Matt, on the other hand, actually knows his shit and follows through on his retaliatory strike. Danny's that guy in a bar who gets right up in your face like, "What, you want a piece?" but does not, in fact, want a piece. He just thinks you're going to be cowed by his display of intimidation, and when you actually hit him, he has no idea how to handle it.
Danny threw a punch to scare Matt into backing down, never realizing that the only person who's actually wowed by Danny Rand is Danny Rand. Matt, on the other hand, threw a punch because he intended to fight, and went straight into the assault from there.
Man, Matt is kicking his ass, too. I love how Danny breaks a chair over Luke's back, and Luke's just like, "Huh. That happened," and resumes watching the fight. Jessica tries to cut in because Matt is just utterly trashing Danny, and Danny - being the violent Kratoslike moron that he is - is unable to take this opportunity for what it is and instead pushes her aside so he can sucker-punch Matt, turning what could have been an end to the fight into resuming the 3-on-1.
And then Danny totally wastes his Iron Fist on Luke, because strategy is beyond him. Man, that was satisfying. If nothing else, Danny has successfully defeated his own argument about how only he alone can stop The Hand via instigating his own shitstomp from the rest of the group.
I mean, most of the group. Stick f*cked off in the middle of that fight. Presumably he was off on the sidelines weighing the tide of battle to determine whether he'd need to use his Offscreen Teleport Decapitation on Danny.
"Somebody's got to stay and watch him. Preferably somebody who can take a punch." Not only is Luke entirely right about this, but this is once again a clever way to divide the characters in order to keep Luke's Story-Breaker Power from killing all tension. As before, Luke's fatal weak point is simply the fact that he cannot be everywhere at once. His invulnerable hide can either be keeping Danny contained or investigating Midland, and there's only a guarantee of violence in one of those places.
If shit with the chair goes south, Luke could literally bear hug Danny until the others got back.
"Well, Danny's still knocked out." …yeah, but that could change at any moment. Why aren't you up there doing your job?
"What do you mean, 'take care of it'? Look, Hand-related or not, that was a homicide, man!" I love this conversation between Luke and Stick. Luke's clearly freaked out by Stick's total comfort with ending a life, but not to the point that he's all, "Killing is always wrong forever, why do you have to be a bad person?" like Matt is. He's uncomfortable rather than self-righteous.
"So you want to tell me how a pro-bono lawyer can afford a loft like this in New York City?" Jessica Jones is still my spirit animal.
"We were unified until you brought the Black Sky into the fold." Y'know, the other Fingers are doing an awful lot of running their mouths about how Alexandria is an idiot who's going to get them all killed, but nobody's actually doing anything.
"We will seek out and capture the Iron Fist ourselves, without the Black Sky." Y'know, it's fun seeing Gao interacting with peers in Defenders. Engaging people who are on the same level as her is a new dynamic, and it's letting us see a different side of her than the inscrutable ancient abomination we know her as from the previous shows.
"I'm not talking about her abilities. She has a strength that you and I can only imagine." …so you are talking about her abilities, then.
"And you don't believe the Black Sky is enough to save us?" Y'know, Alexandra's appeal to blind faith might hold meaning if Elektra hadn't already gone rogue. She is objectively wrong every time she's like, "Trust in the Black Sky, the Black Sky will deliver, we must stand with the Black Sky," etc. etc. At this point, Alexandra feels very strongly like the weak link in the Five Fingers; her poor choices got everyone killed.
"You've got me tied up like a prisoner."
"Like". Hey, Danny, let me share with you some wisdom I picked up in my youth: if it smells like ass, it's probably ass.
"Not 'like'. You're definitely a prisoner." Yeah! What he said!
"Big mistake. HRGH URGH GRUGH!!!" I love how Danny tried to drop a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner only to be thwarted by the fact that despite his repeated insistence to the contrary, the universe does not actually revolve around Danny Rand and will not bend over backwards to provide him with dramatic follow-throughs to his narcissistic boasts. He remains tied to the chair.
"Locking me up is not smart." "Neither is fighting three people that happen to be on your side." God, I wish Luke had been here for Iron Fist. Pretty much every time he and Danny talk, awesomeness spills out of his mouth and slaps Danny in the face.
"Whatever, I'm just trying to say that my friend's dad was a good guy and maybe yours was too." Two-for-one psychoanalysis. Nicely done, Jessica. Hat's off to you.
"Do you play?" "Huh?" "The piano." I am interested to see where Matt's going with this. I love Jessica's WTF reaction. He's clearly got something up his sleeve.
"Looks like the plans to the building your dad was working on." Oh, he had a hunch about where the blueprints were. That's not as impressive as I'd hoped this was going to be.
"You're sure the structure in the hole is man-made? Could it be some sort of bedrock?" "Thirty stories deep in a perfect dome." "Alright, fair enough." Spirit. Animal.
"He assumed we only had two choices. Run or fight. Well, I found a third option." I knew it. Stick is every bit the ruthless bastard who would come up with the idea that since Danny's so important, killing him will fix everything. I do love that he had to wrestle with the choice, though. His meditation and asking for forgiveness is all clearly foreshadowing this moment. He couldn't do it in front of Matt and Luke, but he also needed time to work himself up emotionally to being able to do it, since it goes against everything the Chaste taught him.
I'm confused about his takedown of Luke, however. The smoke from his concoction knocks Luke on his ass, bypassing his invulnerability, but Stick's clearly sitting in the middle of the stuff giving zero f*cks.
And then Stick does the slasher killer slow-walk to his target rather than taking advantage of Luke's incapacitation to strike swiftly and decisively. His awesomeness has abruptly abandoned him, which is how we know that we're now supposed to stop liking him.
But again, both that and the fact that he wastes time justifying himself to Danny makes sense because this is a complete violation of his principles. He's still trying to talk himself up to it even after gassing Luke. Logically knowing what must be done and emotionally being capable of doing it are two very different animals, and while Stick is a remorseless killer, he respects and reveres the Iron Fist like any servant of K'un Lun. This is some solid internal drama.
Ooo, and then in the fight with Elektra, we see that despite his bluster, Stick is just as emotionally compromised as Matt. He actually gets what could have been a killing blow on her, but hesitates. I'm actually expecting Elektra to kill Stick here, and if this is to be the end of his character, this is a great humanizing scene for him to go out on. For once in his goddamn life, the shell around his character has cracked, revealing bits and pieces of the man within.
Yep, there it is. The killing stroke on Stick. Because karma has a great sense of irony, Stick dies an entirely avoidable death; had he not incapacitated Luke, Elektra would barely have gotten two swings in before Captain Invulnerability smashed her swords with his face and bear hugged her into submission. Still, this was a really good sendoff for his character, and I feel satisfied.
…
Wait, what? Okay, Elektra grappling Luke around the wall, I can buy, but knocking him out with a kick to the face? Is she supposed to have super-strength? When Alexandra was talking about how strong she is, did she mean that Elektra's literally super strong? Is that what the Black Sky means? A person who comes back from the grave with the ability to bench-press a skyscraper? I am so confused right now.
Never mind that bit about karma, I guess. Elektra has super—okay, she just jumped out the window onto a taxi with no f*cks given. She definitely has super-strength. Good to know.
So that's what the Black Sky is. Elektra has the ability to come back from the grave as a Brick. Because reasons?
As an aside, I like how they don't even bother explaining how Elektra found them. Like I complained about in an earlier episode, they're hiding in a Rand building. It's an obvious choice. The Hand just had to flip through obvious choices until they found them.
"We cannot underestimate them." "Do not underestimate me!" Yeah, uh, this proclamation would have more teeth to it if she didn't conveniently f*ck off every time a fight broke out in her vicinity. Alexandra's a paper tiger. She likes to talk shit, but she has absolutely zero bite to back it up.
"I have proven myself to be the one and only true lea—" Wow. Y'know, I'll be honest, I totally did not expect that. Alexandra was built up to be the Big Bad so convincingly that this is a legitimately shocking death. Especially since it's Elektra that abruptly kills her, and then immediately steps over to take the narrative reins.
This was a fantastic episode. There were a few minor quibbles to be had, mostly in the beginning, but all in all it was an intensely satisfying episode that diligently built towards the climax, gave us some new information, provided a good finale for Stick's character, and ended on a truly great swerve at the end. I'm legitimately excited to see how the next two episodes will pull this all together for the big finish.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.No, I didn't. What was it?
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.You'll hear it at the start of the next episode.
And the start of every episode.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!The MCU does seem to be doing a little better with understanding that the movie being the next big step in the character's journey and the antagonist being "the greatest threat to the world and/or their personal lives that the hero has ever seen ever bar none" don't necessarily have to go hand in hand (that mentality, imo, is something that made both Iron Man sequels suffer - especially Iron Man 2 - and outside of Marvel tends to be a big problem with superhero movies in general). Or at least, they're more free with introducing less titanic threats, and when said villain is the greatest threat the hero has ever seen, it's in a way that makes sense rather than feeling that way because it's obligatory: Hela and Ego are huge threats to the universe, but the way they're set up still makes them feel like stepping stones to concepts we're only just starting to be introduced to.
Of course, they still need to fine tune balancing that with "the villains are an engaging threat" in the first place, but they've had a few successes with that recently too.
So I'm still not sure if Elektra has superstrength or what. There are a lot of situations where if she had true superstrength, it seems like she could have won a lot more easily than she did.
I'm actually wondering if whatever regenerative qualities the Black Sky has thanks to being so heavily infused with evil black goo simply allow them to push themselves past normal human limits, because they'll heal very rapidly from that wear and tear— no pulled muscles, no strained tendons, no need to worry about hairline fractures building up to a full-on broken bone. Thus superstrength of a kind, but with more definite upper limits. Combine that with a knowledge of martial arts and, say, those pressure points Sowande kept talking about, and maybe her fight with Luke was meant to be a lot more precise than it looked? His skin's unbreakable (mostly...), but still flexible. Some kind of nerve strike, maybe?
To me this episode is all kind of idiotic. Especially Matt seems to have a really short memory if he truly thinks that it is a good idea to tie Danny up and leave him with Stick. Hasn't he learned anything from the last season?
Regarding the villains: I have the feeling that Killian is the result of too many rewrites and studio demands leading to the people behind the scenes loosing sight of the story. Either that or there were two different ideas which ended up smashed together (Ant-man had kind of the same problem). But nevertheless, Ironman 3 ended up being the template for third instalments in the MCU. So far every single one of them ended with the heroes loosing or giving up on their favourite toys.
Black Panther Lego sets
. If there aren't mecha rhinos in this movie what even is the point of it all???
She jumps out of a second-story or third-story window and lands on her legs on a taxi, smashing the car as she impacts. She does this while carrying the added weight of Danny. Then just keeps right on walking. If she didn't have super-strength, her legs definitely would have been broken from that jump.
I'd be willing to write it off as fantasy kung fu nonsense if not for that taxicab feat, but she pit her physical endurance against both a car and gravity simultaneously and won. She's superhuman.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I'm sure she's superhuman, I'm just not sure in what way, if she's flat out superstrong or just very strong with some other secondary powers. Like, it doesn't seem like she's as strong as Jessica, but she can knock Luke flat on his ass, something that Jessica required a shotgun to pull off. As with all things Black Sky, I just want some specifics, here. They don't have to give us everything, just something.
Confirmed: trailer will come out tomorrow, according to Marvel’s twitter.
edited 28th Nov '17 9:18:13 AM by wisewillow
@ Tobias: One of the things I like about Defenders is how it handles Danny. He mostly acts the same as he did in Iron Fist, but instead of treating him as a broody badass, it treats him as a whiny child. It acknowledges that his flaws are actual flaws that he'll need to overcome if he wants to be treated as an adult.
As for Stick and the gas, he downed a potion of some sort right before everything happened. Presumably that immunized him to the gas.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.Oh, good point! I mentally wrote that off as liquor and forgot about it instantly.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.So...anyone remember that silly story about Disney kinda sorta maybe acquiring Fox?
It MIGHT be gathering steam...
(One thing the article points out is that there's radio silence from both sides...and Disney made the Marvel and Lucasfilm deals under the cone of silence, not dissimilar to this. Ergo, if this goes through, we'll only know about it when they announce it.)
edited 28th Nov '17 5:20:18 PM by TargetmasterJoe
