Netflix ‘Luke Cage’ season 1, episode 9 review: Diamondback and Mariah partner up, Luke faces death
We finally have a few worthy adversaries for “Luke Cage” in Mariah and Diamondback. While Mariah is destroying Luke’s reputation and credibility, Diamondback is ripping at his super strength with his magic bullets. When we last Saw Luke he was bleeding out in a pile of garbage… can Luke survive this?
After attacking Claire in the interrogation room, Misty is forced to see the department shrink. This gave us a bit of background on Misty starting with why she became a cop. When she was younger she left her cousin with some boy to go get a lemonade and when she came back her cousin was missing. Two weeks later her body was found and the cops never did anything to nail her murderer, striking a fire in her to become a cop and fix things from the inside. After a lot of self examination in therapy, the commissioner decides to send Misty out to bring in Luke.
So where is Luke? He’s not dead, but after seeing his face plastered all over the news he’s also not reaching out to anyone, which isn’t great since his bullet wounds aren’t getting any better. After beating up two cops, stealing their car and revealing his super strength to the cop car dash cam, he decides to seek out Claire’s help. She tells him that their best bet is to find the doctor that gave him these powers. When the get to the doctor, Claire gives the him the hard drive that Reva stole from the prison, and he thinks he can help Luke with the information. After going into the doctor’s make shift lab, Luke learns that Reva knew the whole time that Luke had been on the list for the experiments going on at the prison and that his near death experience just bumped him up on the list. The plan is to dip Luke in an acid bath to pull apart his skin to get to the bullets and he tells Claire that if anything goes wrong that she needs to get Reva’s data back from the doctor, no matter if she has to kill him to do it.
Diamondback isn’t happy with Shades, blaming him for Cornell’s death and saying that Cornell was his best seller and a friend. More then that Diamondback is pissed off that no one has found Luke’s body and he doesn’t believe him to be dead until his body is produced. Shades pushes Mariah to take the leadership role in Cornell’s business to make sure that everything continues to run smoothly, otherwise he knows that Diamondback will unleash unholy terror on everyone.
Mariah brings all of the bosses that Cornell worked with together to figure out a transition, or maybe even a buy out. Before anyone can really answer, Diamondback shows up to the meeting and kills all of the bosses except Domingo and Mariah. With this killing spree not phasing Mariah, Diamondback becomes very interested in forging a friendship with her, something she is also interested in since they both have Luke Cage problems. She suggests that they make Luke the biggest threat Harlem has ever known, then swoop in with his magic bullets to take him down. They will create the disease, then sell the cure to take down the super-humans. Mariah is also using the leaked footage of Luke throwing cops around like a sack of potatoes and the tragedy surrounding Cornell’s death to regain political favor.
Watching Luke go into cardiac arrest and flatline in the acid bath is bad news all around, but it’s exciting to see that there are things in this world that can actually hurt or kill him. Like Superman, it’s hard to worry about someone with super strength that seemingly can’t die. Also, the Diamondback, Mariah partnership is going to be a good one, we are excited to see how this plays out. Episode grade: B
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