Luke Cage season 2 episode 6 review: The Basement
This article comes from Den of Geek UK.
This review contains spoilers.
2.6 The Basement
If I could give Luke Cage one piece of advice this season, I think it would be “stop being an idiot”. When he challenges Bushmaster to “a fair fight”, part of me can only wonder why he expects to actually have one. But hey, that’s how you end up sinking into the river with a faceful of paralysing herbs. (Although that was a good fight.)
In fact, a lot of this episode was good – Luke’s fight with the Stylers and his ongoing double-act with Piranha was as entertaining as Luke has been all season, Shades and Comanche heading out together to intervene was great, and Dillard playing every member of the police force for idiots was brilliantly hubristic.
Oh, and speaking of which, Misty’s plot is actually hotting up. I’m glad she resigned because if planting evidence wasn’t a good reason to fire her, the fact that she broken about fifty other rules was. Some people are just not cut out to be cops, and it’s usually the people with zero regard for the law. Also we saw her extremely damage a metal shelf with her arm so I’m hoping she’ll really go for the vigilante/freelance detective life soon. Watch out, shelves of New York.
I also liked how Piranha’s plot dovetailed with Luke’s father issues and Dillard’s money issues. Plots failing to link up satisfactorily has been a problem for some of Marvel’s Netflix output in the past, but these kind of shows work best when everything is playing off everything else. I’m still not completely sold on Luke’s father as a character, not least because I don’t remotely believe he’s going to not be evil, and also because it seems incredibly unlikely Luke would hand over an incredibly valuable asset to anyone he didn’t 100% trust. But time will tell on that.
Speaking of family relationships, I really enjoyed Bushmaster getting a dressing down from his Uncle. The villains on any TV show are best when you get to learn a bit about their lives when they’re NOT being villains, and I’m extremely here for that.
Speaking of which: I didn’t remotely see the relationship between Comanche and Shades moving that swiftly from homoerotic subtext to homoerotic text. Is Shades right that life inside is different, or was he just covering because of his own latent homophobia? Regardless, I was practically screaming at the TV for the whole episode when Shades was asking all the slightly wrong questions about who was a snitch and why. It also seems that his respect and love for Mariah is genuine, and I loved him nudging her towards being the ice-cold murderer he saw before even if their relationship is on rockier territory than ever (You know how it is – he keeps talking about how great Pokemon Gold was and she hasn’t played a computer game since Magicland Dizzy.)
And finally, this episode was light on references, but there were a couple:
When Luke Cage says “Where’s my money, honey?” we all know EXACTLY where that moment is from. Luke Cage: Hero for Hire #9 (1972). See image.
And in the theatre he hid out in while protecting Piranha, one of the old movie posters was “The Crimson Skull.” That movie DOES exist in real life, but you can only imagine that someone, somewhere imagined it would be a sly not to The Red Skull. Right? You can’t switch a nerd brain off, after all…
Read James’ review of the previous episode, All Souled Out, here.
