The Defenders

I enjoyed Karen and Trish's talk, and obviously Claire, Misty, and Colleen have their moment.

I didn't. Trish and Karen's interaction made zero sense for me, and while it was great to get to see Misty, Colleen and Claire fighting together, the moment didn't feel earned. Without all the work Iron Fist did for Colleen and Claire, it wouldn't have worked at all.

For the climactic fight, I'm just gonna say it, I feel like Trish should've been Misty and Colleen's backup in fighting Bakuto. She is an actual fighter. That would've maybe even been of benefit towards her addiction arc in Jessica Jones season 2.

Or at least she should have gotten the opportunity to attempt to fight when they go attacked.

Right, when Murakami tried to go after her at that restaurant. Does make you wonder how she'd have fared. Would Trish have gotten the upper hand if she'd engaged Murakami, or would it have been like the first time she fought Simpson?

Honestly, Trish, Malcolm, Karen, Foggy and Claire were the really underused side characters here in The Defenders. Obviously, since the show is so packed with side-characters, most of them were going to have a reduced presence. Unfortunately, for a few of the side characters, this actively weakened their characterization. Karen's existence on the sidelines of the action rather than right in the thick of it (despite having more personal motivation for going after the Hand than Jessica or Luke have) is kinda odd. The same goes for Claire, who hangs out in the background for most of the show, handing out clumsy advice, and doesn’t even get to perform her standard plot function of providing spectacularly daring medical help (unless you count her treating Matt offscreen after he was deposited in Thomas Ridenhour's office^note Yeah, going back after watching Luke Cage season 2, that is in fact Ridenhour's office that Matt was placed in). She's kinda been reduced to being just Luke's love interest and Colleen's friend, with no real significance to the overall plot. They didn't even acknowledge her past connection with Matt until the very end.

Honestly, I feel like Claire really wasn't done right by in any of the shows after Daredevil season 2. Claire was a legitimately fascinating addition to the first two seasons of Daredevil plus the season 1 finale of Jessica Jones. But then they really ran the character into the ground during Luke Cage, Iron Fist and The Defenders, almost as if nobody really put any thought into giving her an arc beyond serving as a common thread to bring the gang together (which I also feel they ultimately kind of botched) and so had no idea what to do with her. In Iron Fist, it was like “idk let’s just turn her into Danny’s sidekick for awhile so she can help him fight ninjas, see how that works”, while for Luke Cage it was like, “Well you know, Luke is a good looking heterosexual guy—what if we forget about character development entirely and just write her into a relationship with him for awhile?”

Trying to force introductions to all of the Hand all at once and then have them basically wrapped up as a concept all in the course of a shorter than average season was a mistake.

New York can be a big Hand project but it shouldn't have been the biggest. Some fingers should have been held back for later even if they never intended to use them. Gao, Bakuto, and Sigourney Weaver could have been enough interplay and enough big Hand bigwigs to sell the seriousness of whats going on.

And more should have been done with Sigourney. Seriously.

Maybe it was a mistake to have the plot of The Defenders be a continuation of plots from some of the ongoing series. Instead, it could have had its own completely different plot, but one that puts Claire in danger in some way, and she calls up every superhero she has in her phone to come help her out. With each Defender not realizing Claire called the others in, too, so at first they think the others are who they've been called in to fight, and we get the traditional Marvel heroes-fight-because-of-a-misunderstanding-before-teaming-up sequence.

That, too.

If we get a season 2, unlikely though it is, I hope they explore more interaction between Matt and Luke, and Jessica and Danny. Ideally we get more of all four of them together, but whenever they do the "split into two teams of two" thing it would be nice to mix up the pairs next time.

My guess is that they might eventually do another season of The Defenders as a grand finale of the Netflix-verse whenever that happens, but that's just speculation. I think the big issue is that it holds up too much production time of the solo series to make it with any sort of regularity. I remember Melissa Rosenberg saying something about how this ended up delaying the production of Jessica Jones season 2 (of the Phase II shows to date, one will notice that neither The Punisher season 1 nor Jessica Jones season 2 make any overt references in dialogue to The Defenders, even though Karen's grief over losing Matt was on full display in the former while there's some subtle suggestions that the loss of Matt is underscoring Jessica's reaction to Whizzer's death; it's not until Luke Cage season 2 that shows started referencing the events of The Defenders.)

It's amazing to see Charlie Cox subtly shading the writing of The Defenders and kinda wishing he could just get into the writing room himself.

From this IGN interview, he wasn't all that pleased with Matt not getting ample time to properly mourn Stick's death:

"One of the challenging things about that moment is that, we’re so deep into the plot at that point, we’re so deep into the story, that there isn’t time to sit and have the feelings around the loss of someone. Stick, who Matt obviously was at odds with the majority of his life, but at the same time, loved him deeply. And I do remember, there was a scene at the police station when [Matt] wakes up and kind of remembers that Stick is dead, and it’s like he has a moment, a brief moment where that pain is very real and present, and he feels it. But then he’s got to get on with it, they’ve got to find out where [Elektra] is and what she’s doing, and stop whatever’s happening. So, it was a funny one, really, because I always imagined that if something happened to Stick, it would be a huge moment in Matt’s life. And perhaps it will be, going forward, once we get to Season 3 [of Daredevil], maybe he’ll have to go through that loss and experience that grief. But in our show, in the Defenders, it was all happening too quick."

Here he is, talking about his opinion of how the big end note to season 2 of Matt revealing his secret to Karen of his own accord got glossed over:

"In the 6 months since DD ended and this show begins, there is so much stuff that I would like to have explored. Like I’d love see the conversation between him and Karen. At the end of Season 2 he hands her the mask, and says I’m Daredevil. I’d love to have seen that conversation. And maybe we will. Maybe we’ll see that in a flashback or something, I don’t know."

His opinion on Matt's headspace regarding Elektra:

"When Matt figures out that whoever this was is in the vessel of Elektra, he's so drawn to the prospect of it being her, not just because he loved her, but also because it would have relieved a tremendous amount of guilt and shame over what happened to her. He allows himself to believe. He deludes himself into believing she can somehow be refound, or he can get through to her, and the Elektra he knew and loved would be there again. For me, that becomes more and more ridiculous as the episodes carry on, but it's insight into the head space he's in. It's weird, because she does begin to remember things. She does begin to remember him. That, of course, adds to the confusion."

Regarding the Hand as villains:

"I think the biggest challenge for me is when you introduce a organization like the Hand where there's any sort of ambiguity around how these people live and die, whether they can be exterminated, and all that kind of stuff, in order to keep that grounded and real, from an acting perspective, I find that really challenging. Because you also need to pay attention to the tone of the piece. The tone of the piece does not mean—in The Defenders, at least—it does not mean sitting around for hours talking about how to possibly explain the craziness of what happened. It's a story that's fueled by plot, and so we need to get on with it. And every now and again, as an actor, I feel frustrated that we haven't as characters been given an appropriate moment on screen to go, “Hold on, this doesn't make any fucking sense.” That's the stuff I find the hardest, just kind of balancing having the story that has the mythical elements or supernatural element and try to keep it grounded and real and relatable."

From this Collider interview during filming of Daredevil season 3:

Interviewer: With everything Matt’s gone through over the course of the three seasons of the show and Defenders, zombie ninjas to the like, dragon bones beneath the city…

COX: Thank you for reminding me.

I really want a Defenders Season 2, but with an actually interesting bad guy. Maybe the Hood or Tombstone?

One of the central flaws of the Defenders for me was actually that everyone out of the main cast except Danny (whose shtick is punching things) thinks they're dealing with complex sociopolitical issues they can't solve by punching when they are, in fact, dealing with eldritch ninjas who must be punched or they'll blow up the city. A future Defenders story should, for me, have a multi-layered group of antagonists to match the layer of the Defenders themselves. So, for example, a villainous group consisting of something like a misogynistic serial killer (for JJ), a corrupt crime boss (Murdock), a racist Rabid Cop (for Luke) and a mystical martial arts master (for Danny), so that everyone gets to tackle the issues their own way instead of getting dragged down by a Outside-Context Problem like the Hand.

Or they could fight the Headmen.

I honestly think the Kingpin should have been the Defenders' adversary. It'd be so much easier to tie Luke and Jessica's stories into combatting the Kingpin of Crime than it was to try and connect them to The Hand. It would also be easier to buy Rand Corporation being under the Kingpin's control than magic opium ninjas. Plus it would allow the character to have the scale and scope that such a villain deserves, rather than restricting him to just being Matt's personal nemesis.

Fisk should be the Kingpin of Crime, not the Kingpin of A Handful of City Blocks, No Big Deal. Reducing him to just some minor asshole that Matt can totally handle by his lonesome does the character a massive disservice.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 2nd 2018 at 5:55:21 AM

That's certainly true but

I could only see Luke having any connection to Kingpin through Diamondback being a crime boss maniac who murdered a score of other crime bosses. Jessica I can't see having any.

Well, we know Fisk will be gaining a lot of new turf in Daredevil season 3.

It's true, I don't see it as a disservice to the Kingpin because I never thought his rise to power was by any means done at the point where we see him in Season 1. He only truly becomes the Kingpin after going to prison, and I do hope to see the show do him justice (so to speak — really, the opposite of that) as it goes on. On the other hand, I'm sad we'll never get to see him truly (figuratively) go toe to toe with Mariah Stokes, and I'm really, really hoping they're not planning a similar exit for the big man anytime soon.

The problem with watching him rise is that, due to the nature of storytelling, we're also here to watch his fall. By show's end, Fisk will be destroyed. His reign will be broken, his power ended, his threat forever silenced.

When dealing with Evil Overlord type characters, a villain who has held onto power for ten, twenty, thirty years before the hero came along will always be more impressive than one who just barely got his hands on the reins and then was immediately conquered.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 2nd 2018 at 10:13:27 AM

I kind of don't see it that way, because a character who comes to power at the same time as the hero has had that hero to deal with during the entire period of their rise and fall. Whatever obstacles that elder villain had to overcome, we don't see them, and the fact that this new hero did topple them at the height of their power undermines whatever their past accomplishments might have been. Here we see them, hero and villain alike, warts and all, and can judge them accordingly. And if the writers can pull that off, with D'Onofrio on hand as their Wilson Fisk— his successes, whatever they might be, feel magnified to me. And Daredevil's victories as well.

That works for a specific type of villain: a personal nemesis. An archrival. A peer to the hero whose journey parallels his own.

Which is its own type of villain and so much smaller in scope than the Kingpin of Crime should be. He is made so much lesser by being Murdock's personal rival; a tiny threat to Matt's little corner of the universe, insignificant to the rest of New York City.

That's kind of fair, though I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, or that the situation that prevents the shows from acknowledging or being acknowledged in the larger MCU is really something that should detract from the show itself. The Kingpin has always been a greater scope villain (and I would like to see the movies at least mention him as his profile rises), but his battles with the Man Without Fear have always been much more personal and spiteful.

I mostly know kingpin to be a villian generally handled by one hero for the most part.

Fisk started as a Spider-Man villain, then it was Frank Miller who made him a Daredevil foe. I'm surprised there are people clamoring for a Spider-Man / Daredevil team-up film in the MCU even though it's not gonna happen.

Sure, I know. Why would that surprise you, though? It's not going to happen for any number of logistical reasons, but why does it surprise you that people would still want it?