Luke Cage: Suckas Need Bodyguards

October 1, 2016 1:56 PM - Season 1, Episode 6

After Cottonmouth's latest bloody clash, Luke realizes that saving the community may turn former allies into enemies, and enemies into allies.

AV Club binge recap - Luke Cage briefly heads in the wrong direction

Thembi Wallace: Which Harlem?
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Luke: Why can't coffee just be coffee?
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Geoffrey Canada wikipedia entry

*Jessica Jones' Trish Talk broadcast voiceover begins the episode.
*Scarfe tries to squeeze $100K from Cottonmouth for Domingo's guns, but gets bullet wounds instead.
*Soledad calls Claire to the diner when she spots Luke there with Bobby Fish, follows him back to the barber shop to continue the conversation.
*Mariah & Cottonmouth talk at the club. She suggests he try some other method of killing Luke than bullets.
*Luke and Claire find Scarfe hiding in the barber shop. She patches him up. When Scarfe admits to having murdered Chico, Luke nearly strangles him, then nearly leaves him to die, but Scarfe says his notes are enough to send Cottonmouth to prison and expose all his dirty cops.
*Scarfe had a son once, but he accidentally killed himself with Scarfe's gun.
*Luke finds the notes under the floorboards, but gets spotted by Misty running away (after jumping out the window several stories up). He and Claire load Scarfe into Soledad's diner van to get to One Police Plaza.
*Mariah has a live puff piece interview, but gets blindsided with questions about Moms Mabel, Cottonmouth, and the Crispus Attucks raid.
*The LT gets the van description to Cottonmouth, who offers 100K to whoever kills Scarfe.
*After a car chase puts them in a dead-end alley, Luke punches through the brick wall to make it a foot chase.
*Misty catches out LT about being dirty, records the conversation and gets his gun.
*Luke crumples a van with his body to keep it from running down Claire and Scarfe, but then Scarfe succumbs to his injuries and dies in front of Misty.
*Misty arrests Cottonmouth at the club. But the Captain says the brass may be inclined to let the corruption get swept under the rug.

posted by oh yeah! (13 comments total)

It's Patsy!! That made me unreasonably happy.
posted by Jugwine at 9:07 PM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love the little touch in the scene with Cottonmouth and Zip, where Zip calls Cottonmouth on not having any other choices in people to help him... because it's not just people he's short on, Cottonmouth doesn't even have a working phone to put the word out about the bounty, as he broke that too in a fit of rage, immediately before the conversation. It's such a little thing indicative of Cottonmouth's bigger issues.
posted by jason_steakums at 12:15 AM on October 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jidenna's performance of "Long Live the Chief" was so fucking outstanding, both in and of itself, and for how perfectly paired it was with Cottonmouth and the headspace he was in right there.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:53 AM on October 3, 2016 [12 favorites]

I checked out the lyrics page for Long Live the Chief on Genius.com and it gives some context that makes the song even better. The line about "slanging [his] cane" is ironic, because he isn't referring euphemistically to selling cocaine, he's referring literally to slinging around the cane he carries as part of his formal dress look. He really did turn down Harvard, too, as it says in the song. He went to Stanford instead. And the bit about meeting Clinton and going to school with the Kennedys? Also literal.

Anyway, all of this is probably old hat to people who actually keep up with hip hop, but for someone out of the loop like me, it was fascinating.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:31 AM on October 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

Fun fact about the actor who plays Cottonmouth, Mahershala Ali. "Mahershala" may seem like quite a long name, but it's his shortened nickname. When he was on The 4400 (on which he was terrific as an aw shucks 1940s style stand up guy), he went by his full first name: Mahershalalhashbaz.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:54 AM on October 3, 2016 [3 favorites]

How did it take me this long to realize that literally every episode of this show is named after a Gang Starr song?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:06 PM on October 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

Having Luke deal with yet another group of thugs who fire guns at him is getting old.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:04 PM on October 4, 2016

So, Cottonmouth gets arrested, but the DA doesn't want to press the case because or bad press. Oops.

This definitely has the feeling of a Hope Spot right before shit gets really real. With Cottonmouth in jail, who's going to fill that vacuum? Will Diamondback step in? Domingo? Or will Mariah, disgraced by her TV interview, trade in her dead-in-the-water political career to take up Mama Mabel's mantle?

Not to mention that conversation between Mariah and Cottonmouth about ways to hurt Luke despite his bulletproof skin...

I love the little touch in the scene with Cottonmouth and Zip, where Zip calls Cottonmouth on not having any other choices in people to help him... because it's not just people he's short on, Cottonmouth doesn't even have a working phone to put the word out about the bounty, as he broke that too in a fit of rage, immediately before the conversation.

That's a really great observation. Definitely drives home his downfall.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:10 PM on October 5, 2016

I don't know where the best place for the question would be (indeed it might have already been answered in one of the other episode threads), but has anyone written anything about the series' relationship with Harlem? I'm thinking firstly that the Harlem depicted surely has to be as mythologised as Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen - surely the actual area of New York can't have failed to come under the avaricious spell of the property developer; And the notion of Cage as an outsider - although he's African American, he's not from Harlem, which is a lovely frisson having seen so much drama that casts African American people as a single category. And the way the Harlem Renaissance is shot through the series with a sort of aspirational ache that can't fail to resonate even with someone like me - wrong class, wrong colour, different continent.
posted by Grangousier at 10:11 AM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Whenever Shades isn't on screen, all the other characters should be asking, "Where's Shades?"
posted by RobotHero at 8:32 PM on October 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

When he was on The 4400 (on which he was terrific as an aw shucks 1940s style stand up guy), he went by his full first name: Mahershalalhashbaz.

Which is the answer to the trivia question "What's the longest name in the Bible?"

The Lord said to me, “Take a large scroll and write on it with an ordinary pen: Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.”[a] 2 So I called in Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of Jeberekiah as reliable witnesses for me. 3 Then I made love to the prophetess, and she conceived and gave birth to a son. And the Lord said to me, “Name him Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. 4 For before the boy knows how to say ‘My father’ or ‘My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the king of Assyria.”
Isaiah 8:1-4
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:12 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

The scene between Mariah and Cornell when she's advising him on methods of killing Cage was amazing. The creepy intimacy born of their familial ties as well as their criminal ones was captivating. Among the many great things about the production of this show is that a lot of the time the actors get to act with each other in the shot at the same time, rather than acting opposite an off-screen character (which in production could be a stand-in or just a mark). And the actors make the most of that, listening and reacting and being really present in the scenes.

I thing Long Live the Chief opened the previous episode. This one had Trish Talk over the open. I thought the Trish Talk stuff was pretty weak, too on-the-nose. It felt like it had been written in a hurry.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:15 AM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

This was a pretty active episode, which was cool.

I remember being very thrown off to hear that actor changed his name from when he was on The 4400.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:12 PM on February 5, 2017