People needed someone that didn’t require a warrant or a shield to get things done. Call it a vigilante or a superhero, call it what you will, but like it or not I finally accepted that that someone had to be me…
– Luke Cage, in Luke Cage, ‘You Know My Steez’ (1.13)
Both Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter were produced and exhibited by terrestrial television companies and aside from their unique intertextual links between the ongoing films of the MCU, they are, in some ways, not too different from how episodic television had been produced and broadcast since the second half of the twentieth century. The four television shows discussed in this chapter – Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist – depart from this formula in a variety of significant ways due to being financed, exhibited and distributed by the media-streaming-service-turned-television-and-film production-company, Netflix. In the case of Daredevil, the first full season of thirteen episodes was placed online for those with a Netflix account to access all at the same time on 10 April 2015, as was Jessica Jones on 20 November 2015, Luke Cage on 30 September 2016 and Iron Fist on 17 March 2017. The impact of Netflix on contemporary television audiences and production practices is hard to overestimate. Veronique Dupont has suggested that the company ‘has revolutionized the US television industry several times over [and] totally revamped the relationship Americans have with both TV shows and films’ (2014). Dupont and many others have argued that this process has fundamentally changed not only the way television programmes are watched, but even how they are made. This places the four Netflix/Marvel collaborations alongside other high profile and award-winning productions like House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–), Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–) and Transparent (Amazon Studios, 2014–) and in the middle of what has been described both as a ‘binge watch’ (Graves 2015: 227) or ‘on-demand’ culture by Chuck Tyron in On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (2013). Joe Quesada, then Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Entertainment, suggested that ‘the Netflix model offers us the advantage of being able to construct the show in a manner that is very different than a weekly network TV show’. The advantages he saw were that ‘we can sit there and look at 13 episodes and plan it out as a very large movie. It makes seeing the bigger picture a little bit easier’ (qtd. in Dyce 2014).
Quesada’s assertion is that the ‘Netflix process’, as opposed to more traditional television production, impacts on both what is able to be shown and how it is shown. As a result of this, the four television texts discussed in this chapter use the changing format allowed by Netflix to expand the parameters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in particular using the comparative freedoms afforded to explore more mature and complicated story arcs than would be possible in the films and also in the Marvel network television shows. Thus, Daredevil is by far the most explicitly violent entrant in the entirety of the MCU, featuring story-lines which focus on drug-trafficking and prostitution and includes scenes of graphic beatings, beheadings and immolations; and the first season of Jessica Jones centres around a superhero-inflected domestic abuse drama with explicit mentions of rape and a sex scene between two superheroes, yet they are set in the same world of the family-friendly adventures embarked on by Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and even Rocket Raccoon and Groot. This sense of freedom was commented on by the showrunner of the first season of Daredevil, Drew Goddard:
It felt that we’d have more freedom to make it on the small screen and make it more adult. Look, if we took the Netflix [show] and put it in theaters, it’s rated R. And they’re not doing R-rated movies. And we also really got to explore the character. I feel like Netflix was the best possible home for that, otherwise you’d end up with a watered-down version. (Qtd. in Singer 2015)
Like many of the Marvel films in Phase Two and beyond, the four Netflix television shows offer variations on the superhero genre by adopting distinctly hybridised narratives. So Daredevil is about a costumed hero cleaning up the streets of Hell’s Kitchen at night, but at the same time it is also about his alter ego, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), a blind lawyer who tries to do the same thing by legal means during the day; Danny Rand (Finn Jones) aka the Iron Fist, is the billionaire heir to the Rand fortune, but also one of the world’s most gifted martial artists; Luke Cage (Mike Colter) has superhuman strength and virtually impenetrable skin, the result of unethical prison experiments conducted on him after being convicted of a crime he did not commit, but he is also at the centre of a gritty crime drama with storylines seemingly ripped from very contemporary headlines which feature references to the likes of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davies, Eric Garner and the Black Lives Matter movement. Luke, a hoodie-wearing African-American, who is framed and persecuted after footage of him seemingly attacking a police officer goes viral, resonated both inside and outside of the MCU on its release in 2016. As one character remarks in the episode entitled ‘You Know My Steez’ (1.13): ‘Most of these guys [superheroes] wear spandex, who would have thought a black man in a hoodie would be a hero?’ Luke Cage’s roots in Blaxploitation films of the 1970s make for a very distinctive new millennial superhero, especially given the MCU’s reluctance to centralise the experiences of African-American heroes. As Roz Kaveney has articulated, ‘Luke is not just any African-American character; he was one of the more durable products of Marvel’s attempt in the 1970s to open out the traditionally whitebread superhero. He was, specifically, Marvel’s take on the trash-talking, no compromises hero of the Blaxploitation films’ (2007: 82).
This is not to suggest that the Netflix shows do not perpetuate the dominant ideological values we have already observed, but rather they are able to offer some challenges to these paradigms much more frequently than the cinematic branch of the MCU. This complexity primarily (although not always) emerges in the characterisations of their protagonists. Jessica Jones follows the adventures of its eponymous super-powered heroine, who is also a private detective, in a New York-set narrative heavily influenced by the moral ambiguity and visual aesthetic of film noir, a duality which was acknowledged in the series winning a Peabody Award which described the show as, ‘one part superhero saga, one part neo-noir program [which] asks unpopular questions about power and consent, while constructing vivid and compelling characters’ (qtd. in Anon. 2015). As Paul Schrader famously asserted, film noir is not ‘defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the subtler qualities of tone and mood’ (1972: 8). One might argue that ‘tone and mood’ are as important to Jessica Jones as narrative and plot, and that it is because of this that Jessica Jones emerges, alongside Peggy Carter, as one of the most human of the superheroes in all of the MCU. She is truculent, manipulative, traumatised and memorably described by Luke Cage, who makes his first appearance in Jessica Jones before having his own show later, as a ‘hard drinking, short-fused mess of a woman’ in ‘AKA You’re a Winner’ (1.06). Issues of accountability and culpability which the films had been reluctant to engage with in Phases One and Two are placed at the foreground of Jessica Jones as she is often unable to help many of those around her and her actions sometimes result in the deaths of innocents. In the pilot episode, ‘AKA Ladies Night’ (1.01), she proves powerless to save the parents of Hope Schlottman (Erin Moriarty) from being murdered and later watches as Hope commits suicide in front of her in ‘AKA 1,000 Cuts’ (1.10), providing rare examples of Stephen Faller’s ‘false dichotomy choice’ in which the superhero is not able to save all parties and redeem theirself in the process. In the Iron Man trilogy and his two appearances in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Stark is shown onscreen saving every single person he is asked to (perhaps with the exception of Pepper Potts who refuses to take his hand in Iron Man 3, but who does not die) and the only person Steve Rogers is unable to save in The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier, Civil War and his two appearances in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, is Bucky Barnes (who later returns), and even this is not entirely his fault. The comic book version of Jessica Jones was originally created for the more adult-oriented Max Marvel comic line, which meant she was ‘at liberty to be foul-mouthed and drunken, and to sleep around’ (Kaveney 2007: 68). Indeed, as something of a statement of intent, the first line in the first edition of her comic is ‘Fuck!’ in Alias #1 November 2001. In this respect, Jessica is certainly a noteworthy addition to the female characters in the MCU, which we have seen as being very limited in terms of the complexity of their characterisation: her abilities are not at all connected to her gender (see Black Widow, Scarlett Witch, Lorelei), she does not wear sexually provocative clothing (Black Widow, Lady Sif), she is not infantilised (Scarlett Witch, Jane Foster), she is not pushed to the margins of the narrative (Gamora, Hope Van Dyne), nor is her fighting style sexualised (Black Widow), and furthermore she does not need a man to save her (Pepper Potts, Betty Ross, Gamora, Scarlet Witch), nor one to define her (Jane Foster). She is flawed and vulnerable, but these traits make her more human and a richer character as a result. Whether it is entirely true that Jessica Jones ‘is a rare show that can truly be said to have a female gaze’ (Seitz 2015) is a matter for audiences to decide, but her rejection of both a traditional superhero costume and, for much of Season One, even the mantle of being a superhero, marks her as not just a progressive female superhero, but one of Marvel’s most complex characters regardless of her gender.
Figs. 30–33: The evocative opening credits of the four Netflix Marvel series make their genre influences very clear: the legal/crime drama of Daredevil, the film noir stylings of Jessica Jones, the Blaxploitation roots of Luke Cage, and the martial arts of Iron Fist
This complexity also frequently appears in the characterisations of the antagonists of the Netflix shows who often emerge as just as interesting as the superheroes who give their name to the programmes themselves. Unlike the one-dimensional histrionics of the likes of the Red Skull, Darren Cross or Malekith, Jessica Jones is pitted against the charismatic Kilgrave (David Tennant) who possesses the power to physically compel people to do exactly what he wants merely by telling them to do it. This might take the form of something simple like insisting everyone in a crowded restaurant be silent, but more often in sadistic ways when he forces one victim to give up two kidneys for him after he is injured, or tells the innocent Ruben to cut his own throat. Much of Jessica’s psychological trauma and her pronounced feelings of guilt derives from the fact that, before the start of Season One, she was once Kilgrave’s victim and he had ordered her to be his sexual partner and then criminal accomplice. While Kilgrave is gleefully malevolent, he is decidedly human and the show encourages audiences to both despise and at times understand him in ways that the film series has found difficult outside of the characterisations of the beguiling Loki and the empathetic Winter Soldier. Daredevil has an even more interesting antagonist in the entrepreneur and gang boss Wilson Fiske (Vincent D’Onfrio), who is not a megalomaniacal pantomime villain, but rather a businessman with extensive resources and sociopathic tendencies. Much of Fiske’s behaviour is monstrous, but he is also somehow sympathetic, and flashbacks to his childhood depict abuse by his father, who, the series later reveals, he murdered in order to save his mother. The antagonists in Season One of Luke Cage are also striking: the criminal cousins, gangster Cornell ‘Cottonmouth’ Stokes (Mahershala Ali) and the more superficially legitimate, but equally corrupt, politician Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodward), who are bound together by their shared criminal upbringing. Both are shown in flashback to have wanted to leave the life of crime they were born into, as Cornell dreamed of being a musician and Mariah of pursuing an education, but found it impossible to break away from their grandmother’s influence, even after her death. When Mariah kills Cornell in the episode called ‘Manifest’ (1.07) after he teases her about her childhood abuse at the hands of their uncle, it is one of the most shocking moments across the MCU, primarily because of the time and care invested into their characterisations.1
As with Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter, the Netflix shows also exist very tangibly within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but events within them also do not impact on the film series. Therefore, in Season One of Luke Cage there is a teenager selling bootleg DVDs of the New York ‘incident’ on the street corner in ‘Moment of Truth’ (1.01) while telling everyone that they feature ‘Tony Stark, the big blonde dude with the hammer, the old dude with the shield, the green monster!’ Later in the season the weapons sold by Cornell and Willis Stryker are shown to be made from Chitauri metal and manufactured by Hammer Industries. Flashbacks return to Luke Cage’s time in Seagate prison, which we have been told earlier is also where Justin Hammer and Trevor ‘the Mandarin’ Slattery are serving their sentences. In Iron Fist, Danny’s apology to a mother whose son may have contracted a terminal illness from the pollutants discharged from a Rand-owned factory is recorded on camera and uploaded to the internet where it is said to have ‘more YouTube views than that incredible green guy’ in ‘Immortal Emerges from the Cave’ (1.06). It is perhaps Daredevil that is the most immersed in tapestry of the MCU: in small details like the front pages of newspapers which line the walls of journalist Ben Urich’s office which read ‘Harlem terror: Hulk emerges victorious in destructive uptown battle’ referring to The Incredible Hulk and ‘Buildings levelled hundreds killed in midtown battles’ referring to the events of The Avengers in ‘In the Blood’ (1.04) or when characters ask how Daredevil is able to overcome so many henchmen: ‘If he had an iron suit or a magic hammer maybe that would explain why you keep getting your asses handed to you!’ In one of its most subtle allusions Daredevil informs audiences that Matt Murdock once lived in St. Agnes Orphanage as a child after the murder of his father, the same place Skye was said to be raised in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.2
Aside from their connections to the broader MCU, the four Netflix shows are even more closely bonded to each other: from things like the radio show ‘Trish Talk’ starring Jessica Jones’ friend Trish Walker (Rachel Taylor) being featured in both Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, and the lawyer Jeri Hogarth featuring in Jessica Jones, Daredevil and Iron Fist. The nurse Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) is the only character to appear in all four separate series: in Daredevil she finds Matt Murdock seriously injured in a dumpster and rescues him; later she saves a dying Luke Cage in Jessica Jones; and in Luke Cage she leaves her job and begins to help the eponymous superhero in his mission to clean up the streets of Harlem, before embarking on a tentative relationship with him which is interrupted by his arrest and incarceration at the end of the season. In Iron Fist she befriends Danny Rand and Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) in their battle to reclaim the Rand name from first the deceitful Wendell family and then the villainous crime cartel, the Hand. She does enter into a relationship with both Murdock and Cage, but she is much more than one of the stereotypical girlfriend roles that the MCU has routinely offered women and is an intelligent, resourceful and multi-layered character.
While it might be something of a cliché to suggest that the city in which these four narratives are set becomes a character in and of itself, New York is even more vital to each of the four Netflix shows than it is to the cinematic branch of the MCU. It is where Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk are shown to be have been raised in flashbacks in Daredevil, and later where they fight for control of the streets of Hell’s Kitchen; in Iron Fist it is where Danny Rand lives as a child and then returns after fifteen years, first forced to sleep homeless in the park, before then once again living and working in opulent skyscrapers like the Stark Tower-esque Rand Building. New York is where Jessica Jones prowls the streets at night as a detective and then on her hunt for Kilgrave. Similarly, in Luke Cage it is Harlem which becomes a battleground for Luke, Cornell ‘Cottonmouth’ Stokes and Mariah Dillard. It is more than just a place for them and its primarily African-American residents, as Mariah insists that ‘Harlem is my birth right. It’s mine’ in ‘Take it Personal’ (1.10), but for Luke Cage Harlem ‘is supposed to represent our hopes and dreams. It’s the pinnacle of black art, politics, innovation. It’s supposed to be a shining light to the world. It’s our responsibility to push forward, so that the next generation will be further along than us’, in ‘You Know My Steez’ (1.13). It is important to note that the New York portrayed in the Netflix television shows is not the sanitised version of the city which we have seen in the film series, but a much more visceral one where crime is rampant and injustice is endemic, reminiscent, in some ways of the 1970s New York brought to life in American films of the era like Taxi Driver and Death Wish (1974). It is this lawlessness which necessitates and legitimises the emergence of the Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and the Iron Fist in the way that Gotham City seemed to need Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
Of all the four Netflix shows Luke Cage is the most ardently connected to real-world fears and anxieties. Given the paucity of African-American superheroes in the history of the genre, with only Blade (1998), Catwoman and Hancock (2008) offering leading roles for black performers in the decade prior to the MCU, the significance of having the title character of a superhero-themed television show as a hoodie-wearing African-American male is quite profound and led to Joshua Ostroff describing Luke Cage as ‘the most timely TV series since the Battlestar Galactica reboot took on the war on terror in the wake of 9/11’ (2016). The star of Luke Cage, Mike Colter suggested, ‘I can’t imagine anything a black man would want to be more right now than bulletproof’ (ibid.). Outside of Cage himself, the show offers a wide range of African-American characters, male and female, in its narrative and also in its evocation of figures from the past and present as a tapestry on which the drama takes place: from American Revolutionary icon Crispus Attucks to Walter Mosely and Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X and James Baldwin, to the prominent use of a portrait of Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man as himself, to the fact that all episode titles for the first season are taken from the titles of songs by the Brooklyn-based hip hop duo Gang Starr. In the process the show updates Cage from his 1970s Blaxploitation roots to the very contemporary concerns of the African-American community, or as Adilifu Nama, author of Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011), suggests, ‘Thus there is a direct racial relationship between the meaning of Luke Cage and the history of black racial formation in America, no matter how many versions are created of the muscle-bound, skin-as-tough-as-steel ‘Hero for Hire’’ (2011: 66). The programme’s showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker, stated: ‘When the bullets bounce off Superman there is no social context because the Kryptonian alien is bulletproof. But when you have a black person with impenetrable skin and have a bullet bounce off, whether that’s a criminal bullet or a police bullet, it adds a whole other swath of political overtures to that interaction’ (qtd. in Ostroff 2016).
Iron Fist faced something of a critical backlash on its release in March 2017 with critics seemingly falling over themselves to give it the most scathing review. Liz Shannon Miller at Indiewire said, ‘Ultimately, Marvel’s Iron Fist feels incredibly inessential, even boring at times. It’s a show that doesn’t push for bigger themes, doesn’t seek to have its own voice beyond the Buddhist philosophy spouted by a white guy’ (2017), and Danette Chavez at the A.V. Club said, ‘The first half of the season is just a checked box. Filler episodes are one thing, but right now Iron Fist looks like a filler season’ (2017). Iron Fist is not as bad as this veritable avalanche of negative reviews suggest, but it does suffer from numerous problems of narrative, tone and characterisation, plus the misfortune of coming after the popular and critically acclaimed Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Danny Rand’s quest to prove himself as the Iron Fist emerges as more insubstantial than it should be and his antagonists are the theatrical Meachums, father Harold (David Wenham), and son Ward (Tom Pelphrey). Criticisms were directed at the centralisation of an affluent white male in a show about martial arts and even though the character was originally conceived this way when created in 1974, it is the quality of the show’s writing which makes these sustained examples of cultural appropriation even more problematic: scenes in which Danny lectures the Asian-American Colleen, who was raised in Japan and owns her own dojo, about martial arts, Chi and Asian philosophy, prove both ill-advised and misjudged in the episode ‘Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch’ (1.03). Similar concerns were raised about Doctor Strange and its narrative featuring a white Westerner venturing east for enlightenment: in both texts Asian cultures are seen exclusively through the eyes of a privileged Western male, who proves himself superior physically, intellectually and morally to his Asian counterparts without exception.
Like all the Netflix shows, and indeed the majority of the MCU narratives in general, Iron Fist is immersed in trauma. Danny’s derives from the plane crash fifteen years before in which he saw his parents die, which he experiences throughout the series in clumsily-framed flashbacks. Finn Jones suggested: ‘He has this eternal hope and drive that he’s doing the right thing, but at the same time he’s essentially suffering from PTSD’ (Anon. 2017a: 116). It might be suggested that PTSD and trauma became one of the defining characteristics of the new millennial superhero. Of course, trauma has always been a part of superhero narratives but never to such an extent as it has been in the last two decades. In the case of Rand its presentation is not entirely convincing: on his return to New York his bed is too soft for him (as Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson also discuss in The Winter Soldier) and he obsessively plays the same hip hop music on the same iPod he had when he crashed (like Peter Quill and his mother’s mix-tape in Guardians of the Galaxy). More credible is the portrayal of trauma in Jessica Jones and Daredevil: Jessica’s is also the result of the childhood accident which led to the death of her mother, father and brother (which she is shown to be actually partially responsible for) and her persecution by Kilgrave, and Matt Murdock’s from the loss of his father at the hands of mobsters when he was a child.
Given their street-level existence, as opposed to the more national and global impact of the characters from the Avengers, and the close relationships the Netflix superheroes have with their respective communities, vigilantism and its ramifications becomes a more central aspect of their narratives than it does in the film versions. Foggy Nelson criticises his friend Matt Murdock when he finally discovers that he is the Daredevil in ‘Nelson v Murdock’ (1.10) and he asks him, ‘What are you doing Matt? You are a lawyer. You are supposed to be helping people!’ Foggy’s most persistent strain of criticism thereafter is to compare Matt to the criminal Fisk in a trope we have seen returned to frequently in the MCU, the dark mirror or shadow version of the hero. However, unlike the films this is given some substance as it is articulated not by a villain, but by one of the show’s more sympathetic and likable characters. Both Fisk and Daredevil express the same desire to clean up Hell’s Kitchen and both are willing to transgress the law to do so. Foggy asks of Matt’s violent methods, ‘How is that any different to the way he solves problems?’, and when he hears that Matt wants to make New York a better place says, ‘A better place? That kind of sounds like what Fisk keeps saying’. The connections between Murdock and Fisk, while ultimately disavowed, are presented in a more sustained fashion than any protagonist/antagonist relationship throughout the MCU. With their shared vigilante brands of justice and their dark pasts, each are undoubtedly formed by and revel in violence. Matt’s masochistic tendencies also seem to strikingly complement Fisk’s brutal sadism. However, these criticisms are negated, perhaps due to the demands of the genre, and towards the end of Season One Foggy comes to realise that what Matt does is necessary after all: that Daredevil is the only one able to stand up for the people of Hell’s Kitchen when the law fails them, which the series presents ample examples of, from Matt beating up a father who sexually abuses his daughter, preventing a big business like Roxxon from mistreating its workers, or in the case of Fisk’s ability to avoid punishment for his long list of crimes. By the beginning of Season Two all ethical doubts concerning what Daredevil does seem to have been erased: the police are grateful for his help, Foggy assists him with his ‘work’, and even the Catholic priest, Lantom, tells him ‘I don’t know what you didn’t do or what you should have done, but the guilt means your work is not yet finished’ in ‘Penny and Dime’ (2.04).
Having seemingly resolved for itself the issue of the morality of Daredevil’s vigilantism in Season One, Season Two turned its attention to an even more complicated character, Frank Castle aka the Punisher, who originally had been a Vietnam veteran in his first Marvel comic appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #129 (February 1974), and had already featured in three poorly received films outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe played by three different actors. The Netflix MCU incarnation of the character, this time played by the broodingly intense Jon Bernthal, would have such an impact on audiences that he was later given his own Netflix series, The Punisher, broadcast in 2017. Just as the first season of Daredevil ran parallel to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and might well have been called Daredevil Begins, the second season explores similar territory to that of Nolan’s The Dark Knight, revolving around the central theme of escalation. It becomes apparent that in the absence of the powerful Fisk (who was imprisoned at the end of the first season) a variety of criminal figures have emerged, each vying for power, and the actions of Daredevil have inspired a range of copycats which leads to escalating levels of violence and vigilantism throughout the city. As if in response to this, a mysterious costumed vigilante known as the Punisher appears, who, rather than handing criminals over to the police after apprehending them as Daredevil does, executes them. Murdock and Foggy’s secretary and legal advocate, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), wonder if Daredevil’s actions might have been responsible for the emergence of the Punisher and asks ‘Maybe we created him?’ in ‘Dogs to a Catfight’ (2.02), but Matt Murdock refuses to believe there is a connection and expresses profound disapproval of the Punisher’s extreme methods. Initially the Punisher is represented almost entirely negatively and he is criticised by not just Murdock, but also the public, the press and the law, but he becomes progressively more and more humanised as we learn of his background as the season progresses. It is revealed that he is a decorated veteran of the war in Afghanistan who might be suffering from PTSD, and that his family were killed by a drug boss who was never prosecuted for his crimes. When he comes face to face with Daredevil in ‘New York’s Finest’ (2.03), Punisher insists ‘I’m not a bad guy, Red’ and that ‘the people I kill need killing!’ He even criticises Daredevil’s code of ethics which prevents him from what needs to be done, calling him an ‘altar boy’ and telling him that New York ‘stinks and it smells like shit and I can’t get the stink out of my nose. I think that this world, it needs men who are willing to make the hard call’ (in ‘New York’s Finest’ [2.03]).3 After he is finally captured by the police and placed on trial comments from jurors show the variety of responses to him: some call him ‘an animal’ or ‘a fascist’, but others refer to him as a ‘hero, doing things the cops won’t do’ in ‘Semper Fidelis’ (2.04). The trial acts as a turning point in how the diegetic world sees Castle and how audiences are asked to view him too. Karen Page is the first to make this transition and she ponders, ‘I keep asking myself if there’s really a difference between someone who saves lives and someone who prevents lives from needing to be saved at all?’ and even Matt changes his mind due to the extent of the evil that is shown to sweep across the city. He even remarks, ‘New York needs these people [like the Punisher], we need heroes’. Later he remarks to Frank, ‘Maybe just this once your way is what its gonna take’ before making the sign of the cross and embarking on a mission together.
Just as MCU films set up their characters in individual films and then brought them together at the end of Phase One in The Avengers, the same process was adopted for the four Netflix superheroes, with each given their own season (two in the case Daredevil) before being brought together in the eight episode miniseries The Defenders (2017–) broadcast on 18 August 2017. Show runner Marco Ramirez experienced the same issues Joss Whedon had in bringing very different characters, visual styles and genre influences together. He remarked, ‘One of the things early on that I found helpful was not to think about how many differences [the other series] have but to go the opposite way and think about how much they have in common’ (qtd. in Li 2017). The Defenders, set in New York, featured supporting characters from across all four shows, including Foggy Nelson and Karen Page from Daredevil, Misty Knight from Luke Cage, Colleen Wing from Iron Fist, and, of course, the ex-nurse Claire Temple, in a narrative designed to be a continuation of all the narrative arcs of the previous shows and a self-contained event in and of itself.
Fig. 34: The Defenders brings together the four Netflix Marvel television shows as The Avengers once did with their cinematic superheroes: from right to left Luke Cage, Stick (Matt Murdock’s trainer), Danny Rand, Jessica Jones and Matt Murdock
Notes
1 However, at the same time as this Luke Cage features the disappointingly simplistic and pantomime-like villain Willis ‘Diamondback’ Stryker and Iron Fist the unshaded Meachums, father and son.
2 Each has the prerequisite Stan Lee cameo too: in Luke Cage on a police poster which says ‘See a crime? Report it!’, in Daredevil (1.13), Jessica Jones and Iron Fist in the same photo in the police precinct as a decorated police officer.
3 In Taxi Driver Travis Bickle suggests something very similar: ‘All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.’