Defenders drive-by review

[sabotabby]

On a more trivial note (yes, yes, the world is ending, and I'm blogging about telly), I really enjoyed hate-watching Defenders. Which is to say that it was nearly all shit except for the scene where Luke Cage teaches Iron Fist about white privilege. I mean, I can't believe I wasted like 8 hours of my life but in the same way, it made me feel like a better writer because I didn't write it.



Here are the things I hated in particular:

1) Zero character development for anyone. Which would be fine if the action sequences were good, but those were choppy to disguise Finn Jones' lack of martial arts training.

2) SO MUCH BICKERING. This isn't fucking Seinfeld; this is a superhero show. I don't want to see the heroes bicker, I want to see them punch stuff. I don't want to see the villains bicker, I want to see them murder people.

3) Really, you're going to have Luke fucking Cage be the one concerned with property destruction?

4) What's the point of the Black Sky oh yeah to remind me of how much I hate Elektra.

5) The villains are like ludicrously underpowered compared to the heroes. I don't want to watch a bunch of 20-something heroes battle with a gaggle of whiny geriatrics, especially one who is dying of all the things. What's next, invulnerable hero punches out a granny in a walker?

6) Because of this, I couldn't believe that the villains posed any threat to our heroes, and neither could the writers, because the worst they could do was pathetically threaten the loved ones and sidekicks, leading to the horrible plot device of having to gather all the loved ones and sidekicks together. Among other things, this drove home how similar they all were in personality. The Hand should have just bombed the precinct to show what a stupid plot that was.

7) OH GREAT ANOTHER OVERPOWERED POC WOMAN WHO MUST BE REINED IN FOR HER OWN GOOD BY A STRAIGHT WHITE DUDE kill me now.

8) The dialogue was so bad. I'd compare it to the dialogue in the comics from which the show draws its canon, but to be honest, it's far worse than that. Case in point: Two back-to-back scenes where a villain tells a hero to save their strength. Were there no script editors? It's excusable in comics because they're written to a deadline and sometimes you have 20 pages of plot to fill 22 pages, but in a big-budget TV show with real actors saying the lines, it's inexcusably sloppy.

9) Did I mention my dislike for zombie ninjas? Because I have a dislike for zombie ninjas. I know, right? You take two random things that the internet loved in 1999, and you combine them, and somehow they get more shitty. AND YET.
 
10) With all that badness, it was mostly boring and I spent most of the show petting the cats and playing PhD. 2048 on my phone.

Comments

[kore]

Things I really liked -

Luke smacking down Danny re privilege
Luke and Claire!
COLLEEN AND CLAIRE
Colleen in general. That actress was fab
MISTY my true love <33
Jessica telling Matt what a jerk he was
how the real Defenders at the end were Matt, Luke, Jess, Claire and Colleen saving everyone in the building
how Danny was a damsel in distress
STICK DIED, THIS MADE ME VERY HAPPY
Elektra was a lot better

....and that was about it really. It was nowhere near JJ or Luke Cage, definitely better than Iron Fist, maybe a bit better than Daredevil S2. It was pretty much the Avengers of the Netflix shows, and I enjoyed it in the same way I did Avengers: fun, pretty, brightly coloured, surprising good spots here and there, not much depth.

Altho of course then I have to imagine Michelle Yeoh in the Sigourney Weaver role and Lewis Tan as Iron Fist and then I want to cry. ARGH. (And I got into actual arguments with dudebros who were all: "Privilege and whiteness are intrinsic to Iron Fist! If you don't want that, just don't use Iron Fist!" and I was like YOU DO REALIZE THE IRON FIST HASN'T ALWAYS BEEN A RICH PRIVILEGED WHITE BOY) -- Anyway. It was fun. Even if I want them to kill off Danny, have Karen and Trish work together, and give Colleen and Misty their own Daughters of the Dragon series.

[sabotabby]

Plz don't hate me but I can't stand Colleen. Nothing to do with the actress; she did the best with what she was given. In fact, I kept thinking that I'd like Iron Fist much more if she was cast instead of Finn Jones. I just found the character, like most MCU love interests, completely irritating and indistinguishable in personality from, say, Pepper Potts. Or whatever her face was in Doctor Strange. Or Jane. It's like there's some rule that every male MCU hero must be paired with a spunky, supercompetent woman who grounds him in humanity and is supposedly so cool but is basically a helpmeet whose storyline revolves around supporting and propping him up in his darkest hour. By making Danny the damsel in distress and having Colleen be the only person with close to a plan, they inverted it a bit, but that's the role she fills in most of IF, and it carried over here.

The bits where they had all the love interests hiding in the police station really drove that home for me. The shows that I liked, LC and JJ, were the only ones that didn't have that dynamic, by virtue of not giving Jessica a love interest and giving Luke two but two who had actual reasons to be there.

I hate to say it, because I love Claire and Rosario Dawson, but I didn't care for her in this. Same reason. I felt her personality was overwritten by the need to make her Luke's assistant.

I did like that they killed off Stick, but unfortunately not before he shat up my screen a lot and managed to not do the one useful thing that he could have done, which would be to kill Danny and end the stupid plot.

/RANT RANT RANT

[kore]

Plz don't hate me

NEVAR

Those are all actually good points re het female MCU love interests! I would have loved Henwick as Iron Fist, I thought she did really well with what little and poor quality material she was given and she certainly could have carried the lead role. I was thinking about Jessica Jones -- arguably Trish and Malcolm are the people who "humanize" her in her own series, but they're both fleshed-out and with flaws of their own.

Seeing poor Colleen go on and on about how they had to rescue Danny and how important he was in the last few eps was really grating, yeah. I think I just more or less completely ignored most everything to do with him in favour of bits like Colleen telling Claire she was a superhero too, which I really loved.

[sabotabby]

Colleen deserved better. So did Claire, but at least Claire had four seasons of being awesome in other shows (I have no idea if she was awesome in IF because I didn't watch to the point where she shows up).

The dynamic with Jessica-Trish-Malcolm is so much better because she's not fucking either of them. Which, of course, makes me want her to fuck one or both of them, but that's because it allowed enough space for them to grow personalities.

PhD 2048?

[franklanguage]

What is that—because my favorite version of 2048 is called DOGE2048.

Re: PhD 2048?

[sabotabby]

Say goodbye to your productivity.

[the_siobhan]

The best thing about it is they brought down the Hand and maybe now we can have decent villains again.

[sabotabby]

Oh, like that actually took out the Hand.

[the_siobhan]

Shush you, let me have my fantasies.

[sabotabby]

Sorry! The remaining organization was absolutely, definitely killed in the building collapse, and since they're the heads (or fingers) we will never hear from them ever again. The next seasons of all the things will bring back proper interesting, nuanced street-level villains like Fisk, Mariah, and Shades.

[the_siobhan]

I loved Fisk.

I really want to see Vanessa come back as a Big Bad, she would be fantastic.

[sabotabby]

God, she would be great.

Netflix MCU just consistently fails when they try to do epic villains. Cottonmouth? Excellent. Diamondback? Ridiculous. The Hand? I want to scream.

[lapinlunaire]

Then I guess I won't watch this. Thank you for saving me 8 hours of my life!

[sabotabby]

I watched it so you don't have to!

[ironed_orchid]

Wait for the fan edit which is the 25 minute version with all the good bits featuring Luke and Jessica and Claire and Malcolm and Bitchy Lesbian Lawyer.

[conuly]

That's rather compressed. Does it still make sense?

[ironed_orchid]

It doesn't exist. But that is anout how much of it I enjoyed.

[sabotabby]

I want this.

[firecat]

All of that. And why was Sigourney Weaver's character so BORING?

[sabotabby]

I don't know! They wasted an excellent actress. She seemed like she was supposed to be Fisk, but without the physical strength and street-level support that made him a believable match for Daredevil, and without the specificity of character that made him so sympathetic and understandable. Also how hard is it to kill someone whose organs are all collapsing or whatever?