THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR MARVEL’S THE DEFENDERS.
DON’T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE SHOW (HOWEVER, IF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT THE SHOW, WHICH IS UNDERSTANDABLE, THEN GO RIGHT AHEAD).
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Marvel’s The Defenders has made its much-anticipated debut on Netflix.
It wasn’t very good, was it?
That much is clear. The interesting question is, why wasn’t it very good? Let’s explore that and see what lessons we can learn to help us with our own writing.
The characters, as in, the too many characters. Granted, there were only four heroes, but then there were the “five fingers” of the hand. (Did we see all five? I can’t remember. Worse, I don’t really care.) On top of that, there’s a resurrected Elektra. That’s ten so far. Then on top of all that we have side characters from each of the previous Marvel Netflix shows.
The characters, as in Danny Rand. Let’s face it, Poor ol’ Danny, that snotty nosed, none too bright, brat of a character is rather hard to cheer for. If you’re like me, you cheered when Luke Cage tossed Danny around like he was nothing more that a clothing store mannequin.
The characters, as in Misty Knight. What was up with the unrelentingly bemused smile she wore no matter what was going on? Even when she was giving our heroes heck, her expression never seemed to change much. I suspect this wasn’t the actor’s choice, but the director’s.
The characters, as in the villain(s). Much has been written about this already. The Kingpin: a great villain for Daredevil. Why? We understand him and his motivation. He’s three-dimensional. Plus he can be genuinely scary when he wants to be. Same to some extent with Cottonmouth in the Luke Cage series. The Hand? Well, they want to live forever. Okay. They also want to go back to Shangri La, sorry, I meant K’Un-Lun. Wow. But we know little about what makes any of them tick, even Madam Gao, after all the series she’s appeared in. As a consequence, they have less impact on the audience, even though they seem to pose a danger to life as we know it.
The characters, as in Elektra. What was up with her? Elektra was destined to be “The Black Sky” (I’m already shaking in my boots), the Hand’s ultimate weapon. The prophecies might have oversold things just a tad. We see that she’s a better than average ninja, but we also see that Daredevil can pretty much take her singled-handed. Or was she holding back because of her faint memories of their love affair? Who knows. What we can all agree on, I think, is that as an ultimate weapon, Elektra was a bit of a let down.
Fight scene exhaustion. We all love a good fight scene, and the Marvel series have excelled at that. But give people too much of a good thing and suddenly it isn’t such a good thing any more. Even amazing fights get boring after a while. You find yourself thinking, Here we go again, as you check your Twitter feed while the latest one plays out. The fight scenes were very effective in showing the differences between the heroes.
The silly premise. Everything leads to the climactic showdown between our heroes and the Hand. And it has to be them. It can’t possibly be the police. After all, it wouldn’t be safe for the police to even attempt to deal with the Hand. And yet, as I watched that climactic fight, it occurred to me that a well armored and armed SWAT team would likely do pretty well against the Hand’s ninjas. Then I remembered Indiana Jones just shooting the guy with the sword and started to chuckle. Probably not the reaction Marvel was looking for.
The ending. Did anyone actually think that they’d killed off Daredevil? I mean, for even a second? Of course not. So what was the point? I guess it gave the other heroes pause, caused them to reflect a bit, and we see that, in Matt’s honour, Danny Rand plans to stay in New York as a protector. Then we see him perched on a rooftop in a Daredevil-like pose, gazing out on the city. That, actually, was a very effective scene. But what happens when he realizes that Matt’s still alive? Does Danny say, “Oh well,” and then go off on holiday to Hawaii?
Well, that’s a lot of negative. Wasn’t there anything good about the show? Of course there was. There was some great humour, especially from Jessica Jones, whose job seemed to be to call bullshit. They also used poor Danny’s earnestness and eagerness to discuss his time in Shangri La, sorry, I meant K’Un-Lun, to humorous effect. In sum, the humour was character based, which is a very good thing.
There was some good acting. Our heroes were all good, even Finn Jones, who’s received a lot of flack for Danny Rand. But he isn’t responsible for the vision of the character that the show runners want to portray. He portrays their vision of Rand well. It’s just that, for most of us, that vision sucks. The side characters also did well, and Sigourney Weaver, as always, was more than convincing.
All this isn’t to say that I could have come up with a better story, but we can learn from failures and successes, ourselves’ and others’. Let’s do so.
SelimPensFiction 