1x08 The Defenders

[6.9/10] Whether you enjoyed this episode, and really, this whole team-up season, basically comes down to one question: did you like the back half of Daredevil’s Season 2? If so, if you were engaged by the Matt Murdock vs. mystical ninjas storyline, and more to the point, the tortured romance between him and Elektra, then “The Defenders” and The Defenders should be the peak of something grand and enjoyable. If, like me, you found both to be tiresome and tedious, then the way that this finale, as the culmination of four separate shows, doubled down on both those elements, makes it a disappointing conclusion to both The Defenders and this phase of the Netflix universe.

Let’s be frank here, Elektra’s been a pretty middling-to-awful addition to Daredevil’s world from the beginning. Anchoring so much of the team-up series on her was a gamble, and when she could be an essentially silent badass, one who had history with Matt that complicated things, it was fine. But now that she’s back to monologuing, trading reheated Batman-Catwoman barbs with Daredevil, and taking up all the oxygen in the room, we’re back to this being the pits in the pit.

It’s not like this is a surprise. Lord knows that the thread of Matt’s feelings of Elektra has been followed throughout The Defneders. But it’s still a disappointment that the story of these four heroes joining forces basically comes down to Matt and Elektra hashing out their stock tortured romance with painful, facepalm-inducing dialogue. This series could have been so much more, and about so much more, than Matt’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend, and instead it devolves into poorly-written, fatalistic crud.

Still, while that’s a big piece of the puzzle, it shouldn’t obscure all the things that the Defenders finale does right. For one thing, despite the disappointing outing in the prior episode, we get a pretty damn good fight here. Long takes have been a trademark of the Marvel Netflix shows for a while, and while it seemed a bit overly choreographed, the camera swirling around the room, flitting around the action as each of heroes kicks some ass, was a truly satisfying moment that circles back (nigh-literally) to the famous shot from The Avengers. Everyone knew this series was going to have to end up with a big team up battle, and while it’s mostly empty calories, The Defenders delivers.

Heck, even the four-on-one battle with Elektra worked pretty damn well. There’s some of the same quick cuts and people being shrouded in darkness, but it did sell Elektra as a threat to even four people with superpowers, and helped build her up as a villain physically even if the show couldn’t quite do that emotionally.

On top of that, the show even gave the secondary characters a nice rumble of their own! I’d be lying if I said I was super excited to see Bakuto back and spouting his typical bad guy banalities again, but I really appreciated that they gave Colleen in particular a chance to be a part of the fight in some way, and even get a bit of closure on her arc from Iron Fist. I’m glad Claire was there, though frankly it made little sense that she got involved in the physical clash, but I suppose as the link between these shows she needed to be a part of the major proceedings. And even Misty got a badass moment, one of the few good guys to pay a real price for all these threats.

(As an aside, I wasn’t expecting it to happen, but I would have absolutely fistpumped if when Colleen was talking to Misty about Danny’s “connections” in the hospital, she had beckoned in Fitz and Simmons to rig up an arm like Coulson’s for her.)

But at the end of the day, the major plot points of the finale are simply uninspiring. The reveal that there’s dragon bones in the ground beneath Manhattan is fine I guess, but the whole mining operation from The Hand mixed with Elektra comes off like a standard villain plot, replete with Gao and others spouting even more hoary old villain lines. Using the bomb to bring everything down creates a nice ticking clock for the episode, but otherwise just feels like a way to add more explosions and cheap high drama to the finale.

What’s worse is that much of the climax of the story and the tone of the aftermath centers on the obvious fake out that Matt Murdock died in that explosion. Maybe I’ve just watched too many superhero shows to fall for this type of thing, but it feels insulting to play up the overwhelming tragic air of this event when you just know that they’re going to undo it within five minutes, in a franchise where at least four people have already come back from the dead. We never saw a body which, in TV land, means he’s not dead, and it makes the emotional material that comes afterward seem built on an obvious lie (particularly with Karen’s “it doesn’t feel like this is over” nonsense at the church).

It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of good work being done with everyone picking up the pieces after all the excitement. (And before it for that matter, with Karen and Trish making for a great pairing in a well-acted scene that makes each understand their relation to their hero of choice a little more understandable. There’s a lot of core problems with The Defenders, but the show at least has the decency to tie off all its loose ends and character arcs.

That means that Jessica Jones has her moment of starting to feel better, to where she can clear the sign at her office again. It means that Foggy can get The Defenders and their hangers on off the hook with police, and share a nice moment with Claire where he comes to terms with his role in Matt’s “death.” It means that Luke and Jessica can have a moment to get where they’re good after everything that happened between them. It means that Iron Fist can take Daredevil’s instruction to protect his city to heart and loom on the rooftops as Matt once did.

It goes on for a little long, but the finale gets credit for treating these characters’ stories as if they matter, even after the city-threatening threat is neutralized. Centering the whole thing on the relationship between Elektra and Matt, a boring set of Hand villains, and a cheap death fake out takes a lot of the wind out of The Defenders sails (not to mention the heaps of cringe-worthy dialogue), but you can tell the showrunners and writers care about the stories and emotional arcs of The Defenders and their allies, and that goes a long way.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to fully redeem this miscalibrated finale for a miscalibrated mini-series. The prospect of teaming up these four characters who were established independently and letting them loose together in a shared conflict was an exciting one. When The Defenders stuck with that idea, giving us interesting pairings and moments for the good guys to clash and take comfort in one another, it paid dividends.

When it rehashed threats and characters from the individual shows that weren’t all that interesting the first time, it felt like a waste of everyone’s time. It’s a very watchable eight episodes, that ends with a watchable finale, but never quite hits the heights it should have been able to reach for such a momentous, nearly unprecedented type of storytelling on television.