So, after sixty five lead up episodes spread out over five individual seasons that cover four different lead characters (not to mention the seven previous episodes of The Defenders itself), we finally reach the end of the expansive experiment held by Marvel and Netflix that tried to do for streaming televison what the Avengers managed to do for cinematic franchises. As a result, the big question isn’t so much whether the mismatched quartet can manage to save New York, but whether the show managed to fulfil its potential when trying to present a sprawling, superhero community on the small screen.
However, the rather underwhelming answer appears to be “sort of” as the show didn’t quite manage to display the narrative nimbleness of its big screen cousins or convey the dense complexity of the previous seasons. However, their is a big fight, a sacrifice and a proper, swirling team shot – so that’s something.
While Danny Rand marvels at the dragon skeleton that lurks at the bottom of the whole located in the middle of New York, Madame Gao explains that harvesting a particular substance from its bones will grant the Hand continued long life much in the same way the Iron Fist obtained his power by punching a similar beast in the heart. However, even though Elektra has seemingly achieved what Alexandra couldn’t and managed to secure the Hand’s dominance for centuries to come, back on the surface, the group of Murdock, Cage and Jones (also joined by Coleen Wing, Claire Temple and a shit load of C4 explosive) plan to thwart her aims by rescuing Danny, beating everybody up and blowing up the building above to seal the gargantuan, dragon-filled hole once and for all.
While some (specifically Luke) feel a bit iffy about detonating a skyscraper in the middle of New York, he’s talked round by the lure of finishing off the Hand once an for all and while the non-powered members of the team stay topside to plant the boom-putty and fight with Bakuto, the superfriends descend in a lift to engage in the final battle. Fists fly – both Iron kind and original flavour – and as the Defenders slowly manage to win out, Coleen’s fight with Bakuto not only costs Misty Knight an arm, but his decapitated body manages to start the timer, giving our heroes a mere two minutes to mop everything up and get the fuck out of dodge.
Of course Matt Murdock, ever the believer in sacrifice thanks to his Catholic leanings, insists on staying behind in order to try and talk Elektra out of her bout of resurrection induced villainy and as the warring couple get back to doing what they do best (repeatedly crossing that line between fighting and flirting), the timer inexorably ticks down to zero.
Will New York be saved? Can the Defenders emerge victorious? Are we finally going to see Misty Knight’s bionic arm subplot? And will Daredevil pay the ultimate price to keep his city safe?
As finales go, The Defenders is actually quite adept at hitting the right marks and getting the story to where it needs to be with a minimum of fuss, but anyone hoping for a big finish that could change the very face of superhero shows on TV may need to check their expectations at the door. In many ways, the seismic effect the MCU has had on modern franchises may have raised our hopes that Netflix could duplicate the trick, but the dual restraints of television and the super gritty tone of the entire Defenders side-universe seems to make that an impossibility. For a start, the series seemed doomed to never pinpoint the correct number of episodes to fully do its core concept justice; more episodes would have flushed out the storyline and given everyone’s individual stories more room to breathe while less episodes could have meant more money for a more spectacular final battle that didn’t have to be located almost entirely in a cave. Still, it’s easy to smugly announce what might have made a show better after all the dust has settled, so while the final quarter of The Defenders succumbed at times to rushed plotting, garbled motivation and lapses in logic in order to get things to a pre-ordained conclusion that benefits future shows, it still has its good stuff too.
OK, so a lot of the villain stuff didn’t make sense, and by that I mean Elektra’s entire lack of plan concerning her gaining control of a global, timeless, secret society only to completely tank it in under twenty four hours. The show never actually managed to pin down the powers she obtained by becoming the Black Sky, but if I didn’t know better it was the power of inconsistency as one minute she’s successfully fighting off all four of the Defenders at once and the next she’s struggling to fend off Daredevil on his lonesome. They try to palm it off as her inner feelings for Matt holding her back, which honestly creates more questions than it does answers (why turn evil or take over the Hand at all, then?), it does manage to give the whole Matt/Elecktra plot that started back in Daredevil season 2 some closure while finally bringing the whe, overarching Hand plot to a close.
Again, while Matt’s apparent death seems a little contrived (remaining with Elektra in death may create that doomed romance vibe, but it still seems like something of a middle finger to Foggy and Karen) and predictably short lived, it’s also used as an excuse to galvanise his team mates into continuing to fight the good fight. However, while the more cynical might only see this as a way to start Daredevil’s third season in a completely different place, the moment where Foggy and Karen stare mournfully at an empty doorway waiting for Matt to enter behind his battered, but victorious teammates is genuinely powerful and beautifully subtle.
However, no one came to The Defenders expecting subtlety and even though the gritty, no nonsense tone sits a little awkwardly with the more overtly, superhero stuff, but you can’t deny that the swirling, single take that sees the four once again standing shoulder to shoulder still carries some power.
So once the dust settles (literally, considering we get a collapsing, CGI building as a big finish), we’re ultimately left with conflicting feelings and a sneaking suspicion that the tenuous, virtually non-existant link between the Netflix stuff and the MCU has never been so ill defined. However, while the likelihood of a reformation is anyone’s guess right now, at least we got to see the plan carried out and if nothing else, we got that fantastic episode that saw all the members laying low in a Chinese restaurant that somehow managed to be more inventive and energising that a whole string of fight scenes. While they certainly didn’t change the world, the Defenders did manage to save it and they did it with a certain amount of style; but as each member returns back to the solo life of solitary superheroing, let’s hope they can regain their previous focus now that they’re once again a bunch of Billy no-mates.
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