Cage, known in comic bookdom as "Power Man," had finished two seasons and, like Iron Fist, set the table for new developments in its third. Netflix executives apparently didn't hear what they wanted in the pitch for the third season, which is really not surprising. Cage has suffered from one of the same problems all of the Marvel Netflix shows had -- too much season for its story. But it had some other structural issues that would probably have made for a pretty limp third season.
Season one opened with one of the better villains the Marvel shows have had, Mahershala Ali's crimelord Clarence "Cottonmouth" Stokes. But seven episodes in, the story kills off Cottonmouth and hands the evildoing off to the considerably less charismatic characters of Alfre Woodard's city politician Mariah Dillard and her new lieutanenant, Hernan "Shades" Alvarez (Theo Rossi), as well as the one-note run-of-the mill Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey). This trio might have managed to hold viewer interest over a couple of episodes, but not the six they were called on to serve.
Season two again offers too much of the load to Dillard and Alvarez. Alfre Woodard's considerable acting talent simply can't make Dillard anything more than a standard corrupt politician, even with the significant backstory the show uncovers, connecting her to her daughter Tilda Johnson (Gabrielle Dennis). And Rossi's weirdly affected performance and strangely cadenced speech give Shades an artificial manner that completely short-circuits his character's arc. Mustafa Shakir gives John "Bushmaster" McIver a dash of charisma, but since the meat of his moves in Harlem concern Mariah Dillard it would need to be more than a dash, and the standard-issue storyline offers him no room to bring it.
The season's main problem is that it can't figure out what it wants to do with its title character. Mike Colter's Cage is supposed to be a man who pairs his great strength and invulnerability with top-level smarts and a serious nature, but he's all over the map with no real consistency. Is Luke a man who wants to give his Harlem community a chance to bring itself forward, using his great gifts to guard it against dangers it faces? Or is he a man too clueless to see that a bully picking on the other bullies doesn't make people feel safe, it just makes them scared of him too? Does he understand that true manhood isn't measured by how much ass you kick, or does he see every problem as solvable as long as he can punch it? Different episodes present him differently. But rather than show any real sense of a developing conflict between the two views, the series just flips him back and forth like a switch. Colter's own powerful acting skills can't wring coherence from scripts that push against it, and when he winds up the season taking more or less the same authoritarian role that Cottonmouth had and Mariah sought you kind of have to wonder why you watched him at all.
Although I have no idea what shortcomings Netflix execs heard that made them back away from a Season 3, I would sympathize. It's not that a Luke Cage trying to walk the line between power and persuasion as he seeks to elevate and redeem his community is uninteresting. Every monumental smack he lays down can prompt people to see him as someone to fear rather than someone here to help -- how does he resolve that conflict? The showrunners to this point haven't given much reason to believe they'll be able to handle those ideas in an interesting enough way to get people to watch.
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