I finally got around to finishing the series. I needed to finish Iron Fist first, because I feel I ought to get the whole background. I liked it but, yeah, none of the above complaints are off base.
Watching, I didn’t feel like the whole ‘big ass hole in the ground’ thing teased way back with Daredevil payed off in the end. Yet, thinking about it now, the fact that there’s a dragon skeleton and whatever else was there embedded in the ground in deep antiquity is a pretty good epicness for the culmination of six series’ worth of build up, except… it was if anything underplayed. I mean, just asserting that it contained immortality juice somehow and that extracting that juice would cause New York to crater didn’t do it, because there was no explanation as to why it was holding up the ground for a long-ass way up. Isn’t most of New York on bedrock? But they needed the premise to be more than just the Hand would keep being immortal, so they just kept saying that it would collapse part of New York with no explanation as to why the hell that would be because writing is hard.
In the Jessica Jones series, Jones cooked up an elaborate scheme whereby she would lock Purple Man in an isolation cage and force a confession out of him. This was desperate and hare-brained, but it felt like we were watching Jessica’s struggle against her own crippling fear play out in this scenario. In The Defenders, the circumstances that resulted in Danny being strapped down so he could be easily captured later seemed to serve the plot rather than a manifestation of a group psychology.
Elektra’s shifting motivations worked for her, more-or-less, except at the end where she suddenly seemed to go from being the cat toying with her prey to actually wanting to immortalize Daredevil as well to then also not caring about that and wanting to just be with him as they both died in a rather short time with no reasons given or suggested for the rapid turns-around. I mean, it’s not as out-of-nowhere as Joy Meacham’s sudden decision to go evil at the end of Iron Fist, but it was similar in the lack of attempt to explain to the viewers what was bringing about these transformations. Also, am I to understand that she all by herself whipped all the asses in K’un-Lun? Because it was pretty much wall-to-wall warrior monks, right? Okay, if she waded in with a bunch of immortal ninjas, I’d buy it.
I liked the fact that Jessica Jones felt out of her depth surrounded by trained martial artists. But I feel that anybody who blocks a punch from Jessica Jones should how have pulp for an arm. I don’t think that would blow the FX budget. After a few times with enemies running up, getting thrown back instantly crippled by inexpert punches, the experienced martial artists would adapt by concentrating on dodging between strikes. Then having her pick up a ridiculously huge thing would mean more than +1 CS to damage, it would make it easier for her to sweep a large area.
They emphasize that Luke Cage’s skin is impenetrable, but that just sets off alarm bells for me if there’s no further explanation because it seems like that leaves him extremely vulnerable to attacks that will do immense internal damage even if they don’t break the skin.
You could argue that the fact that Danny is critically stupid enough to be tricked into using his iron fist to bust open the Dragon Vault has kind of been set up. I can’t recall any point at which he was ever shown not to be a dumbass. His dipshittiness was long established. I don’t remember if the Iron Fist had that shockwave effect in his own show, but I liked it. But it made me want to see him use it in the old-fashioned Marvel ground-punch attack.
About The Vault: So, was the dragon cocooned all over in stone, or was there just this one big stone on one end of a massive rib cage (if that’s what I was meant to understand I was seeing)?
Also, could a room full of writers not come up with a term other than The Substance? Did the Japanese guy ever say whatever the equivalent is of ‘The Substance’ in Japanese? I’d have found it less jarring if they’d kept calling it “The Good Shit” instead. I assumed that after Elektra’s re-awakening we were dealing with something like a The Substance addiction, and that’s why she herself wanted to open the vault. At the end she apparently wanted to make Matt immortal too, though that came out like the writers just thought of that right before filming. I never worked out what made her The Black Sky, but it seemed to me that Alexandra’s decision to spend The Last of our Resources on Elektra was played as more of a function of maternal longing than of power. They never seemed to play up the classical angle hinted at with Elektra’s betrayal, with the original Electra being involved in a plot to kill her mother in vengence for her father’s murder.