The Defenders Review

It's not groundbreaking or spectacular, but it's a solid series that's fun to watch.  Full review below the cut.

Marvel's The Defenders is to the Netflix series what The Avengers movies have been for the cinematic universe, a way to bring all the players together for a grand fight against an epic evil and save the world. Or, the city, but whatever, same principle applies.  And like the other Netflix series that've come before, The Defenders benefits from having eight hours to flesh out the story and team dynamics instead of just cramming everything into two.

Which is good, because none of the heroes really want to be here.  Matt Murdock is doing everything he can to convince himself that he's happy to just be doing pro bono legal work in Hell's Kitchen, Jessica is sinking further into her PTSD even though Kilgrave is dead, and Luke Cage just wants to go back to Harlem, have some coffee with Claire, and work on making his home safe from predators on both sides of the law.  Even Danny Rand, who starts the series looking for allies to fight The Hand, turns against the idea of being on a team when that means he's not everybody's super special boy anymore.  Seeing the various combinations of Matt, Jessica, and Luke all trying to drag each other into a fight that's way too big for them is the best thing about the series, which is nice since that's the whole point of the show, it'd be sort of screwed otherwise.  In all seriousness, though, watching everyone go from hesitant because of their own personal hangups to reluctant partners to respected comrades is great because the show doesn't rush any of it, it allows everyone to have and work through stumbling blocks as they find out more about each other and their respective histories to The Hand.  Having all that extra time gives everyone a chance to legitimately respect the other members of the group and commit to fighting alongside them.  Well, everyone except Danny Rand, that is.

In a way, I feel bad for Finn Jones as Danny Rand- he is the obvious weak link in this entire thing both in terms of his series being by the far the worst of the origin shows, and because his character is the least interesting in the group.  In a team of street level heroes dealing with street level issues and concerns- Matt trying to keep his neighborhood and its people becoming the flotsam in the tide of gentrification, Jessica being a rape survivor confronting her abuser and dealing with that aftermath, Luke being a bulletproof black man- Danny Rand is the Ultimate Hero of Ultimate Destiny with a glowing fist.  Three of these people had to go survive their own personal Hell's to become what they are, Danny just has the standard issue tragically dead rich parents and...and... a cool dragon logo? Part of this just comes from the character's creation, he was a cash-in on the Kung Fu craze of the 1970's, so where Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage have a long publication history dealing with specific social, religious, gender, and race issues, Danny Rand is pretty much the Mighty Whitey Bruce Lee.  So, yeah, Danny doesn't have anything near the depth that his compatriots do, but really, even if his creators never meant him to have a third dimension, Marvel could've done something about it when they adapted him.  Instead, they looked at that empty shell and said "Yeah, looks good to all of us" and marched themselves straight into the blandness. 

To Marvel's credit, they seemed to have realized their mistake and have taken active steps to correct it because anyone not named Colleen Wing couldn't give a shit about Danny Rand in this series and it's fantastic.  Every single member of the Defenders has the exact same "...And?" reaction when Danny tells them about that he's just, like, super important because it's his destiny to stop The Hand and they should just help him, right now.  Hell, even The Hand has no respect for him; Danny interacts with each leader of the group individually and all of them make a point to tell him specifically that he isn't a real threat and that he's just a means to an end for them.  When discussing their evil plans, the leaders of The Hand always mention that the only threat related to the Iron Fist are his allies, and every time Danny tries to prove that he's a Big Boy making super serious decisions, he gets his ass handed to him in incredibly short order and the other three have to then quickly bail him out.  If just having the world dump on him for eight hours straight is Marvel's way of saying that in order for Danny to be interesting, he needs to learn some actual humility and make himself a better person instead of just expecting people (and audiences) to be appropriately awed when he goes around calling himself The Immortal Iron Fist, than I'm willing to grant them the benefit of the doubt that the future work with that character won't be as disastrous as the first.

On the villains side, The Defenders continues the tradition of the Netflix having better antagonists than the movies do  and The Hand specific goals and actors instead of the being the faceless nebulous ninjas of evil that plagued the back half of Daredvil's sophomore season.  Sigourney Weaver is amazing as Alexandra, the centuries old leader of The Hand's original five members.  Alexandra is a woman who has done so much and held power over so many for almost as long as she's been alive, but becoming vulnerable to the permanence of death has given her the very human need to cling to life no matter what the cost again; the desperate intensity Weaver imbues her performance with keeps the fantastical stakes grounded to something real which prevents the story spinning off the rails into "who gives a shit" territory these team-ups can so often end up in. 

Structurally, what this series also does well is solve the pacing problems that the rest of the Netflix series have never been able to handle all that well.  With just eight episodes in the series, every hour has to be spent moving the story and the conflict forward with no down time.  What also helped is that no one really knew the full stakes of the story until the very end, so that was a nice change of pace from the usual "Introduce main conflicts and villains int eh first four episodes, spend five milling about and stalling, then bring it on home for the finale" that the rest of the series have used so far.  I'm hoping that Marvel and Netflix take note of this and use the shorter episode format to tighten up the arcs the individual series use from this point forward.  The show does still stumble a bit out of the gate, though, when the four heroes are apart and interacting only with their own secondary casts, but by the end of episode three and all of episode four when they come together, they spend the rest of the series with each other at pretty much all times which allows the momentum to keep building without any pauses.

There's a lot to like in this series and for any future team-ups the street punks have together moving forward.  My hope is that now that they all each other, they'll drop in for a visit on each others individual series to keep the camaraderie alive.  And sure, there's nothing ground-breaking here, no exciting or new twist on the super-hero team up that the series brings to the table, it's just a solid bit of storytelling executed very, very well.  And that, is really all we need sometimes.

Grade: B+