1x11 Now You're Mine

6.1/10. What if a siege happened, and nobody cared? If you've ever wanted to know the answer, Luke Cage has you covered.

So what should be a taut thrill of a bottle episode, where everyone's trapped in the same building, becomes a dull collection of scenes that feel like placeholders between here and the next episode.

We get Luke and Misty commiserating a bit after Misty gets shot and Luke takes her to a convenient hideaway in the bar that Diamondback's goons don't know about. There's not much there, beyond the same "I know you're innocent" routine and a little exposition to get through.

The same goes with Diamondback pontificating his backstory to Boone in the main office of the club. He's basically just reiterating information we already know from the last episode, and while there's a few added details here and there, and while it matters to get his perspective on what went down, it doesn't really amount to much besides repetition and scene-chewing. We get it. Diamondback is resentful of Luke because Luke was the golden boy and he was the bastard. The real jerk is Luke and Diamondback's dad. We're with you, Luke Cage.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't make their conflict compelling given the uninteresting nature of the personalities involved. Sure, there's a little juice to learning that Luke and Willis committed the same crime, with Luke getting off easier thanks to his dad and Willis having to go to jail, but it's more clumsily delivered storytelling that fails to make Diamondback feel like an antagonist worth caring about, and the attendant small universe problems abound.

Oddly enough, the best scenes in the episode have the least to do with Diamondback or Luke. The scene between Clare and Misty, where Clare treats Misty's gunshot wound and the pair of them then team up to take out Shades are pretty solid. There's an interesting rapport between the two of them, and for once the whole "coffee" line works as coded "I saw him first"-style jousting and acknowledgement. And their shared knowing laugh after toppling Shades is a nice moment too. Again, the acting can occasionally overcome the writing on this show, but that just throws the dullness rest of the proceedings into sharp relief.

The other interesting pairing is the NYPD Inspector and the ADA who helped out Karen Page in S2 of Daredevil. The idea that they're two cooler-headed people in this hostage situation, who both realize that something fishy is going on and are worried about superweapons ending up with the cops, and then on the street, is intriguing, and adds a certain amount of logic and realism that's been missing from the show in recent episodes.

Heck, the same even goes for Shades here, who basically calls out Diamondback for being reckless and kind of all over the place. There's a suggestion that he's ready to go Starscream on good ol' Willis, and that Willis's crazy obsession with Luke is leading him to improvise and make some less than optimal decisions. Maybe Shades is in jail for good and that's the end of it, but I'd be curious to see if he helps take down Diamondback to save Mariah or help in some other way.

We also get some resourcefulness from Clare, which is always nice to see. The way she not only learns the info from the Harlem Paradise cocktail waitress from the first episode, and then manages to get to Luke despite being a hostage, shows a cleverness that isn't always present in the writing. And her "you're so corny" response to Luke's action hero line took the words out of my mouth.

But after that, we just get angry Luke, conveniently overhearing Diamondback's monologues and trying to "make amends" while Diamondback spews more cheese. Diamondback's been a big flop as a villain so far, with him seeming better suited to a saturday morning cartoon than a show aiming for something approaching realism, albeit exaggerated realism, like Luke Cage. Granted, Kingpin fits into a similar mold, but Erik LaRay Harvey doesn't quite have the chops of Vincent D'Onofrio, and it becomes more and more apparent that the show should have stuck with Cottonmouth and Mariah as antagonists, as they make for more interesting foils and seem like better actors.

Now Luke's in custody, which portends some kind of one-on-one interrogation or break out or something, which, like this siege, should be interesting on paper, but probably won't be.