The Defenders: What Went Wrong?I can’t help but feel that people have been giving the Netflix Marvel-verse an easy ride. When Daredevil debuted in 2015 nothing like it had even been proposed before. Everyone knew from the publicity that Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist would get their own shows and this would lead into a crossover event, the Defenders. It’s been a remarkably swift journey, although with some large breaks between season debuts. The Defenders arrived on Netflix in the latter half of August and therein lies the problem.
They arrived. They didn’t drop, explode or leap, they just kind of turned up. It wasn’t even a small surprise as the astroturfing campaign telling you they were coming had dragged on so long that in the end I was pretty sick even at the notion of the series having never seen a minute of it. Just the ads I’d seen in passing or by accident had overstuffed my mind for the concept. And if we’re honest the concept was better in 2015 than it turned out in the end. I was not even slightly excited for the series and, when I watched it, I was too pleased that it was mostly watchable, although the series pacing never even rated “brisk” on my action-ometer. In places, episode one a stand out, it plodded, it was ponderous, it was navel-gazing. In eight episodes they managed to cram in about half a Lost-season’s worth of prevarication, tangential detail and stuff that you just didn’t care about at all. So, what the hell, Marvel? What went wrong? You took a sure thing and turned into an iffy prospect. How did you manage that? Externally the world around the Marvel Television Universe project changed substantially between 2015 and late 2017. At the outset it was “all connected” by the Defenders - it was “barely connected if at all”. I understand the party line on scheduling that is trotted out as an explanation of how this came to pass. I think any creative team, though, has to look for ways in which a notion can work, whereas Marvel’s been expending actual budget on telling us how it can’t. There is no reason why scripts cannot be written to acknowledge events. Stan Lee manages to cameo in every movie, cameos are fun and reward viewers, crossovers, maybe not, but cameos? Come on, guys. I think that both sides of this equation get to share the blame in this. We’re in a “golden age of television” so TV can regard movies as gimmicky crowd-pleasing efforts. Movies, well they make the big bank so they can look down on TV. Both sides have reasons to believe the other side is somehow beneath them. I think this can’t help but have been of slightly less detriment to the MCU than to the Netflix-verse. For a start, the Netflix shows seemed to take it on their shoulders to be relentlessly much darker than the MCU, which is fine. The problem is, that since the nineties we appear, as a culture, to have forgotten that dark, and more specifically its melodramatic child “grimdark” is supposed to be, at some level, tongue in cheek. Comic enthusiasts look back on nineties comics as a painful and ridiculous adolescence, but I think all that spiky shoulder armour was supposed to be kind of fun, actually even sniggeringly funny and self-aware, not just overwrought and depressing. Not that the Netflix-verse is overwrought. It’s so under-wrought in fact that it could actually do with more soupy melodrama. Iron Fist’s punch failed to deliver on so many levels, but if you’re going to have a massive dollop of miserable, insane rich-people melodrama in your series at least think about turning it up to eleven. The fact that the concept of resurrection was brought up in Iron Fist and it still managed to overcompensate for being low key is proof, if any be needed, that the Netflix-verse needs to lay off the downers. I liked Iron Fist, it has to be said, a whole lot more than Luke Cage, where people appeared to think it was fine having the protagonist more than happy to sweep up hair for the first third. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with sweeping up hair, mind you. What I am saying is that nobody on earth should *aspire* to cut hair, particularly not if they’re bullet proof. It was a wrong-footed character move that Luke Cage never shook off in my opinion. 
Because of this tonal necessity I cannot blame Charlie Cox for his approach. However, what the others needed to do was step it up a bit. Luke Cage and Danny Rand in particular needed to make the thing work because the very character of Jessica Jones is there to provide all the earthed cynicism the series could possibly need. Both Mike Colter and Finn Jones are equally responsible for creating part of a world in which Daredevil appearing in his full costume ends up being a bit cringey. I honestly never thought I’d write a sentence describing seeing a Marvel superhero portrayed on screen would make me cringe when they’re in costume but there it is. JJ, Luke Cage and Iron Fist all work together, Daredevil looks like he got an invite that implied it was a costume party and now spends all his time at the gathering feeling like a dick and resenting the other attendees. To a certain extent Luke Cage has a tough time here, because he doesn’t need body armour, he just needs to not be attached to clothing that’s going to end up being more hole than costume. Jessica Jones makes leather jacket, jeans and fingerless gloves into a kind of superhero costume, somehow managed to nail that. I think that’s something to do with it being delightfully ridiculous that she can lift a 4x4 but she still gets chapped hands in cold weather. Anyhow, it’s an iconic look now, so that’s actually fine. Where we have the biggest problem is Iron Fist’s ludicrously specific iron fist. “His name,” I can picture the show runner saying, “is Iron ‘Fist’, not Iron ‘Fists’, so he gets ONE fist, not both. Also we have this cool digital effect where it looks like he’s holding a powerful yellow pen torch. Actually, it’s not digital, it’s just Finn, wrapping his fist round a powerful yellow pen torch. And we could only afford one. So that’s why only one fist glows.” I just did some research after I wrote that paragraph and I do note that the Iron Fist is often depicted as just being his right fist, but it’s equally depicted as being both. I think the production team had some choices to make and they made all the wrong ones, they stuck with right fist only even though that looks weird. Not only that but the fist should definitely actually, you know, catch fire and leave trails behind it. Just punching people with a fleshy torch is weird and kind of gross. The other major bad decision they made was that his chest tattoo looks exactly identical to the one in the comic. Unfortunately that black winged worm is part of the Iron Ffist’s full weird and wonderful regalia, a costume option the production team turned away from. In the case of Danny not donning a stupid super skin-baring green and yellow v-neck and bright yellow head scarf the tattoo needed to be something more elaborate and detailed. Instead it looks like something that one of those tattoo cover up shows would have a hard time turning into a design you’re not embarrassed to have on your body. It looks, seriously, like it was drawn on with a permanent marker. Unfortunately all these terrible decisions did was diminish and wash out the wacky mysticism of Iron Fist and made him into “random kung fu guy with a stupid tattoo”. Basically Iron Fist really needed to be creatively silly and instead it was studiously not silly until it just stopped working properly all together. I don’t know what’s going on here but both Colter and Jones should have been fighting these dumb decisions on the grounds that not fighting them made them look like dicks. Oh, wait, I didn’t remind you what dumb decision Colter should have been fighting. How about the one where his character aspired to mop up hair for four hours. Actors are not writers so it’s not their job to know that making the character basically unwilling to do anything but the bare minimum makes them kind of look like a douche, also I know that people complaining about “my character wouldn’t do that” is pretty obnoxious most of the time. However, I just wish someone on Luke Cage had looked at the character journey and worked out that what they clearly wanted Luke Cage to be is not what he came across as most of the time. Looking at the key points in Cage’s journey in Defenders tells us that Luke is supposed to be the most peaceful and outright heroic of the four, he has less self-doubt than Jessica, less obsessive thirst for vengeance than Daredevil and less anger and confusion than Iron Fist. Luke wants people to get along, doesn’t believe in killing and always wants to find a diplomatic solution. Given that there is still no reason to make him so confrontation-avoidant at the outset of his own show, by the end of The Defenders it’s clear he wants to be aggressively pushing a peaceful agenda, which is an interesting contrast between approach and desired end result. It rings hollow, though, because he began with the appearance of believing that if he just stayed out of trouble then things would be fine. That’s just asinine, it makes him look like an idiot. So there you have it, The Defenders strolled out of the gate, first being hipsterishly determined not to treat 8-episodes as a tight schedule, before becoming somewhat watchable, before sinking into an underwhelming finale where people kept telling you that the danger was real but you couldn’t feel any danger at all. I realise I’ve mostly managed to avoid spoilers in this article and I won’t change tack now, but if I were to pick some spoilery bones of contention I would have enough to go on for a whole other article. Suffice to say the danger wasn’t dangerous enough, the big fights took place in a cave so cheap even Doctor Who wouldn’t have used them in the 80s, and the villains were just so, so tedious and drab. The only two things the Netflix-verse has in its favour at this time are Jessica Jones and the willingness of subscribers to watch these franchises just because, for a while longer anyway. Personally, I am not anticipating anything more than JJ season 2, and they’ve shown they’re trying to ruin that with Kilgrave flashbacks.* 
* Don’t get me wrong I loved Kilgrave, see the top of the article. However Kilgrave got 13 eps to himself and that’s great and fine but it should be over, over, over, so, so over. JJ needs to keep moving forward, and I can’t help but see evidence of it looking back as a worrying symptom of the team that bought you the feckless, fearful bulletproof flip-flopper and the underwhelming glowy fist. How about you, reader? Did you try to convince yourself that you liked "The Defenders"? Let us know in the comments! 
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