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| Image Courtesy www.screenrant.com |
The
Defenders brings
together four different heroes and their supporting casts into a single
miniseries (only 8 episodes) in order to deal with a threat larger than any of
them. The parallels between The
Defenders and The Avengers are obvious, and I will try to avoid
harping on them during my reviews, but there are at least a few things that
need to be said. First, The Defenders
includes two less heroes (depending on whether or not you want to include
Colleen and Misty in the team) but close to four times the runtime, allowing
for greater character interaction and more buildup as the characters are
introduced and allowed to come together naturally. Second, while The Avengers pulled all
of the heroes out of their own series and away from their supporting casts and
plopped them all down into an entirely new setting with a new cast of
supporting characters, The Defenders merges the settings of all four
constituent series together and draws the casts of the four series together,
allowing for the supporting characters to interact in interesting ways.
However, at
this point we are just talking about the first episode, before any of the
heroes have interacted (beyond Luke and Jess in Jessica Jones season
1). At this point the four prequel
series are all distinct and their influences on The Defenders are
obvious. The showrunners do an excellent
job of allowing the mood of each series to shine through as each Defender is
introduced. Matt’s scenes focus on him
as a lawyer, hinting a bit at his struggle to keep the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen
(metaphorically) contained. Jess is back
to her old ways of drinking, ducking her friends, and avoiding cases until they
practically grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Luke is being released from prison and
returning to Harlem and to Claire to resume his role as the Protector of
Harlem. Danny meanwhile is tracking the
Hand across Southeast Asia until a lead sends him back to New York. It’s not as clear in the Matt and Danny
scenes, but the color schemes of the individual scenes echo the primary colors
of the hero’s series—Yellow for Luke and Purple for Jess in particular—and the
soundtrack picks up the themes from the hero’s series, as well—hip hop for
Luke.
There isn’t
too much to say about this episode, actually.
Most of what it does is laying the foundation for the rest of the
season. It establishes where the
characters are, introduces some connections between them, such as Foggy
representing Hogarth as Luke Cage’s lawyer, and starts drawing them together in
a single “investigation” into the Hand.
There isn’t
a ton of action in this episode; the biggest action piece involves Danny and
Colleen fighting a mysterious assassin who turns out to be Elektra in order to
save a secret contact who is revealed to be a member of the Chaste. It’s really poorly-lit, so the action can’t
really be seen. That’s actually a
serious problem in the Marvel Netflix shows:
the action needs better lighting so we can actually see it!
Of course,
since this episode does so much to set up the rest of the season, there isn’t
all that much more to say about it without talking about the next episode.
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