After a Comic-Con teaser that mostly served to reassure fans that Luke Cage would feature one of the hallway fights that are the Marvel Netflix show’s trademark, it’s nice to see in the first trailer that the show will also feature plot and dialogue. And Rosario Dawson, whose character Claire Temple is shaping up to be the thread that connects the Netflix shows. (Temple originated in Luke Cage comics, so this is something of a homecoming.) It seems like she and Do the Right Thing’s Frankie Faison are going to jointly serve as the conscience of Mike Colter’s Luke Cage.
The trailer also gives us our first real look at Cornell Stokes (aka Cottonmouth), the drug kingpin played by Mahershala Ali who will be the show’s main villain. The comic book character, like Cage himself, owed a lot to Blaxploitation films; Ali’s version has a better tailor, at least. And it’s hard not to like a man with a framed copy of Barron Claiborne’s portrait of the Notorious B.I.G. on the wall. Cottonmouth’s “shower everthing with bullets” strategy will face off against Luke Cage’s “be impervious to bullets” strategy when Netflix releases the entire season on Sept. 30.
