I’m not clear what you mean, but Bushmaster is a genus of venomous snakes. They are found in South and Central America, including parts of the Caribbean, though I’m not sure if any are found in Jamaica. The Luke Cage villains have a theme - Cottonmouth and Diamondbacks are also venomous snakes.
Voodoo is also normally a Haitian thing. I think it was explicitly named Orishaat one point? Better than making him a Rastafarian - it’s an extreme minority religion over there (something like 0.1% of Jamaicans).
Does this season take a while to get moving? I am partially through episode 3 and it’s just not grabbing me. Seems like most people rate this near the top of Marvel shows but I don’t know, it’s kind of a slog for me
I also didn’t read Bushmaster as having magic powers, so much as pharmaceutical powers. Granted, that nightshade stuff is to real-world pharma what Iron Man’s suit is to real-world rocket physics, but I don’t think it was intended to be supernatural. Tilda’s approach to the stuff was explicitly science-based, not spiritual. I was really pleased with how they handled it – pop culture portrayals of voodoo as a religious faith are usually really problematic. I thought they did a good job avoided that with the Jamaican gang.
That said… I kinda want to see Brother Voodoo show up in Luke Cage. I’d love to see this creative team’s take on the character, given how well they’ve done grounded versions of characters like this and this.
Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of this season - much more than the first season, which derailed itself half way through when it killed Cottonmouth.
I was never a reader of Luke Cage/Iron Fist related comics so wasn’t familiar with the bad guys before the show, but googling shows that (one of) the comics Bushmaster was transformed to “unliving metal.”
As I watch the next season of the show, I won’t be able to keep from drawing parallels to the fifth season of Angel, which also dealt with the hero being put in charge of the bad guys’ business and being corrupted, or at least distracted from tending to his primary mission. Would it be too much to ask for Marvel to somehow include an episode featuring puppets? Luke Cage as a “wee little puppet man”? I’m down with that.
Dude I hated when they cancelled that show.I hated that puppet episode at first,but when I finally watched it I loved it. It really has a good story line with evil puppets.
As long as it has MAAAATTT DAAAMOOON! He’s technically already in the MCU, but wouldn’t be the first recasting (Alfre Woodard was in Civil War, which I don’t remember).
I’m not sure there’s too much to read. It’s a famous Biggie portrait, taken soon before his death. It represents the various characters wanting to be the king, soon followed by their downfall.
The Basquiat is Mariah’s reluctance to retire; she doesn’t just enjoy the money but the power and danger that goes with it.
I liked Season 2, but I also liked Season 1. My main gripe is that these Marvel TV series tend to repeat themselves a bit: they play up how the villain can’t be defeated by just punching them (e.g. Kingpin, Killgrave, Madame Gao, Bushmaster, etc.; even in Jessica Jones season 2, she kept agonizing over what to do with her mother), then the season climaxes in a episode where the villain is defeated by punching them (or shooting them, in one case). It doesn’t help that all of the Defenders have essentially the same power: super-punching. At least with Bushmaster his defeat didn’t come in the last episode. That’s why I thought Season 1 of Luke Cage and The Punisher were refreshing changes – they didn’t spend all of this time and energy showing that the bad guys were untouchable (but not really).
I agree that there was some pretty hammy acting and dodgy Jamaican accents (not that I’m an expert on Jamaican accents), but I thought Shades, Misty Knight and Danny Rand were much improved. And, as much as I like Rosario Dawson, I think a little bit of Claire Temple goes a long way. The low point of Claire Temple was when Danny Rand took her to China with him for no conceivable reason; hopefully they don’t go back in that direction where she’s like Wendy and Marvin of the Super Friends.
Because the show explicitly sets it up as non-magical. That’s Tilda’s whole deal, remember? She quit her medical career to use her scientific background to study folk remedies. She’s able to use that knowledge to figure out Bushmaster’s deal, and later adapts it to kill Mariah. But she’s never shown as religious or mystical. The power comes from a particular strain of nightshade that only grows in a specific place in Jamaica, and the knowledge of how to use it was discovered by voodoo practitioners, but the process of refining the root into its usable form is presented as purely a scientific process, once you strip away the religious trappings. If it was “voodoo magic,” then it wouldn’t work without the religious trappings, no more than a guy working in a chemical lab could trans-substantiate a cracker into the blood and body of Christ.
I’m not “misinterpreting” your posts. I’m telling you that it’s indistinguishable from magic, regardless of the mumbo-jumbo they recite in dialogue. It’s clearly magic by any reasonable interpretation of the word. Religion isn’t a necessary component of magic.
I thought the show was deliberately cagey (haha, Cage-y) about where bushmaster’s powers fell on the science-to-magic scale. I think it’s best to think of him like Captain America. It was a super serum. It can’t be reproduced. Unless the plot demands it, in which case it can be reproduced.
But presumably if one particular strain of herbs could give anyone super powers, there would be lots of super-powerful good- and bad- guys running around Jamaica kicking ass.
Luke Cage and Jessica Jones obtained their powers as a result of scientific experiments. But we know that there ARE magic/mystical powers in the Marvel/Netflix world. The Iron Fist, Madame Gao, and Elektra have displayed such.
