Between
expanding on Claire and adding Misty and Mariah, Luke Cage definitely does its part to contribute to Marvel’s BAMF
Ladies Club. While the tough,
intelligent police detective is well-trod ground for compelling women on TV
(pour some out for Abbie,) Misty is a wonderful example of the archetype (a few
Misty-related spoilers.)
In the
show’s pilot, I figured I knew where things were headed with Misty. She and Luke share a mature meetcute at
Harlem’s Paradise and spend a steamy night together, and we then get the reveal
that Misty is a detective who’d been undercover at the club. I thought we were on a clear trajectory to
either love interest/detective ally to her vigilante beau, love interest/detective
conflicted about trying to throw her unit off her vigilante beau’s scent, or
love interest/detective who’s unaware that the vigilante she’s investigating is
her beau.
But
even though Misty’s storyline stays tied to Luke’s, as does most everything in
the show, it’s still undeniably her
storyline. Her romantic encounter with
Luke keeps him on her mind but doesn’t make him an immediate part of her life
in that way. Rather, it’s her repeated
run-ins with him adjacent to her investigation into Cottonmouth and various
associated dealings that really makes him stick in her head. She knows he’s more connected than he
pretends to be, and she can feel that there’s something off about his stories
involving him being in rooms with a shower of gunfire and luckily never getting
hit. However, she also senses that,
while he’s mixed up in something,
he’s not the bad guy that some of her colleagues are interested in making him.
Misty
is an excellent detective: deeply
intuitive, very brave, and plugged into the heartbeat of Harlem. She’s a local girl who could’ve moved on to
greener pastures long ago, but she chooses to stay in her neighborhood, doing
her best to keep its people safe. It’s
also very much to her credit that, as she starts looking into Luke, she
considers the idea of him being “special” very early on. Granted, this is a world with the Avengers in
it, and even though Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. really doesn’t cross over at all with the Netflix shows, I’m
assuming Misty knows about the recent proliferation of Inhumans as well, but it
still takes the right sort of person to see evidence that she may be dealing
with an enhanced person and consider it a valid theory. Misty is equally good at connecting the
logical dots and entertaining the
more “out there” possibilities.
As
such, Misty doesn’t find out Luke’s secret through him telling her or stumbling
onto the scene of blatant hero stuff that Luke can’t deny. She doesn’t get it through an admission or a
bombshell; she collects the scraps of clues she sees and puts it together
herself, which is enormously refreshing for a non-powered person in a superhero
story, especially a female potential love interest (who always seem to be kept
in the dark way too long.) And after she
figures it out on her own, her response is reasonable. She doesn’t recoil from the “freak” or fawn
over the “hero.” She gets what Luke is
trying to do – to an extent, she kind of admires it – but she also recognizes
that he’s an unstable variable offsetting the balance of how justice is
supposed to work, and while she doesn’t want to see him brought down, she does
want him out of the police’s business. I
like that. It’s level-headed and
understandable, and although it’s informed by her interest in him as a person/gorgeous
wall of a man, her view is ultimately objective, influenced more by her
convictions than her private feelings.
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