What I’m Watching: Luke Cage

Luke Cage: Season 2, Episode 11 “The Creator” (B+)

One of this show’s best skills is humanizing its villains, which it does masterfully and on many occasions. Mariah has crossed a line, and it seemed like Shades was going to kill her after she baited him with references to his relationship with Comanche. Instead, he left and went straight to Misty, turning himself in so that he could help take her down. Shades has always been somewhat sympathetic even if he does end up killing a lot of people, and I’ll be very interested to see what his fate is. The biggest shift in this episode was the way in which Bushmaster was portrayed, with flashbacks to the mid-80s in Jamaica helping to explain how his family was cruelly suppressed by Mariah’s, and the young Mariah spoke down to him in a way that makes it much clearer just why he hates her so much. Framing this episode in the context of mourning Anansi’s death showed a time in which even Bushmaster respected some sort of boundary, going so far as to thank both Tilda and, more surprisingly, Luke for their kindness and sensitivity. Misty doing PR felt almost as strange, and now Luke is going to work with another former lieutenant of Mariah’s, Luke, to help rid the streets of her after now feeling that he should have let her die. He offered Bushmaster a way out too, but there’s no way that he’s going to take him up on that, instead preparing for a final battle that I can’t imagine is going to go in his favor but isn’t likely to leave Luke without any lasting scars either.