In the comics (and graphic novel) industry, particularly the Superhero “sub-genre” that headlines for the Big Two (DC & Marvel), there’s what’s called a “Crossover Event.” For those of you not hip to this (which is fine), it’s the outwardly incredibly simple idea of mushing multiple characters from the same universe into the same story line. DC has Justice League. Marvel has The Avengers. You probably don’t need more examples.

I feel like it’s being accepted more and more that–unless you’re a younger fan, in which case bless you and perhaps don’t read this–these actually tend to kind of suck. The equation seems like it should be incredibly simple: you take characters that are fun, you put them in the same series, and it’s even more fun. Fun plus fun plus fun should equal three funs, right? Well, as a number of better writers than myself have illustrated, this usually isn’t the case. As detailed in this excellent essay, Crossover Events and Renumberings actually tend to be a “jumping off point” for readers when it comes to the Big Two. Marvel especially.

In addition to the in-depth and heartrendingly accurate breakdown of how messed up the direct market in comics are, I’d also like to throw out what I think is the practical problem in terms of writing these types of stories. You’re basically taking the main characters from a bunch of different series and having them all on the page or on the screen at the same time. When this leads to witty exchanges of views, co-operation, and fun over the span of a short period of time, you can get the rare success of this type of subgenre. For all of the grief I’ll give Marvel and even with how disenchanted I’ve been with superhero flicks in general, I’ll concede that the first Avengers movie is a good example of how this can be done in a non-infuriatingly bland way.

 

However, I think part of what explains why that worked is that two hours and thirty minutes of the same MCU characters being on-screen together is a relatively short period of time, where as a result the writers don’t have to worry as much about things the clash of the different series tones. It’s when these endeavors have to explain themselves in a little more detail (such as in the comics runs or in, say, a Netflix series) that some of the contradictions become more obvious. Part another way: “The Avengers” is basically everyone in the MCU having a two-and-a-half-hour cameo, and it’s way easier to nail that format.

When the characters who normally headline their own series come together for a longer period of time, the problems tend “pop out” right in front of your face. A lot of these characters have different goals/ethics, which would be more interesting if it weren’t for the fact that the stories usually detail them all coming together to fight for a common cause. Each of their own individual series has its own tone–Jessica Jones’s tenacity in the face of an oppressive shit world, Luke Cage’s sizzling energy as the series has him deal with corruption in the community he loves, Daredevil’s split between getting things done within the system and concurrently asking the question of whether the system is too broken, Iron Fist being an excellent reason to not cast Finn Jones as White Buddhist Batman–and it’s hell of a thing to try to let these spill into each other without accidentally muting them all. And the villains have tended to be either ridiculous (even by Supervillain standards) or just a pathetically lame foil to let the Superheroes stand out more.

Understand, I’m not saying every crossover ever has failed to take this all into account, but basically all of them have had to deal with the above challenges. And I can tell you, personally, as someone who owns too many DC trade paperbacks, that the above challenges and the fact that writers tend to shrink from them a bit is the reason I own all of Scott Snyder’s Batman run for the New 52, and approximately zero of the Justice League trades.

But back to Marvel’s Defenders. As you probably guessed by now, I don’t think it’s really up to snuff. I know there are people who’ve become pretty disillusioned with the Netflix Marvel series in general, but I’m not among their number; I liked Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Daredevil quite a lot, and I tolerated Iron Fist. I really did think there was a significant chance for The Defenders to break through the tape that way too many crossovers seem to wrap themselves in. Sadly, it’s really impossible for me to say that it did. And I really wanted to like this, if not love it.

But it really is the same old stuff. There are a couple of neat hooks where the characters are brought together in not totally contrived ways, and otherwise it’s that weird feeling where you never really get to spend enough time with any one of these characters (except for Iron Fist, whose mentor is cooler than him, but hey), and the overall plot rushes into focus fast enough that the reasons that they’re able to hash out their differences and co-operate feel cardboard. Maybe if I didn’t enjoy three out of the four of these series so much, this wouldn’t bother me as much. But that’s sort of the opposite of the point here, isn’t it? I was watching Defenders because I did like the other series.

There’s two exchanges that sum up the entire series for me. For one, it’s one of those scenes where the writers threw two characters into conflict for contrived enough reasons that it’s just hard to sit through (see also: Arya and Sansa Stark’s conflict from Season 7 of Game of Thrones), so it’s got a strike against it right off the bat. Secondly, Knight, a detective, is questioning Jones. Now, I know Superhero stories are never really going to break from the whole “cops are generally good with a few bad apples” perspective so I’m willing to give that a bit of a pass, especially since the police in Luke Cage weren’t exactly heroic-it’s really just Knight, as his friend, who stands out as trying to do the right thing. But I’m also really not sure why Knight would be treating a known associate of Cage as hostile. She even goes as far as to give Jones shit for offing Kilgrave at the end of Jessica Jones Season 1. Kilgrave had raped Jones (and other women as well), so this is downright wince-worthy stuff.

Jones’s reaction is to basically continue the dialogue while acting annoyed, and it’s really hard to figure out why doesn’t have a stronger reaction to this. It’s even harder to figure out why the writers thought this needed to be in the series at all. This scene could’ve easily been an interesting back-and-forth between characters who’re trying to do the right thing and taking vastly different approaches, and instead it ends up with an unconvincingly vanilla conflict that’s derived from Knight saying something uncharacteristically awful. Add some incredibly forced dialogue into the mix and it’s just pretty much the perfect example of things not fitting together and god-awful writing turning it into a total mess.

There’s another one where Luke Cage calls out Iron Fist for being an entitled prick, which is a scene that’d work approximately one thousand percent better if Finn Jones wasn’t a wooden actor, Iron Fist wasn’t an entitled prick, and if Cage’s decision to call him out on this had a bit more of a lead-up to it. On that last point, I’m all for Luke Cage yelling at Iron Fist, but the scene managed to be rushed, robbed of impact, and once again display how Jones really, really cannot act all that much at the same time. If you replaced him with a board with a slightly constipated expression on it, Mike Colter’s words would’ve had more impact.

But seriously, I know I’ve made it more than clear that I don’t care for Jones’s acting or the Iron Fist in general, but the weakness of that series combined with his central role in this one is an issue. When Cage goes after him, the viewer might be inclined to take his side, but a better constructed Iron Fist character with a better actor would’ve given that scene an appropriate amount of nuance, prompting there to be a range of different opinions that could arise from viewing it, like “Cage is right, but Rand clearly didn’t get his point across” or “Cage came on too strong, Rand doesn’t get what’s going on yet” in addition to (what seems like the only possible conclusion unless you’re just the hardest-core Iron Fist fan in the world) “Cage is right and let’s move on.” It takes a scene that should be thought-provoking, and turns it into something much less.

I could go on–the villains are pretty wooden aside from a Madame Gao reappearance–and the show manages to take eight episodes and make it feel like it both should’ve been shorter (for reasons I mentioned above re: The Avengers) and longer. But instead I’d rather just focus on the picture above.

In the end, I do keep coming back to this and other shots from the promo material, and being annoyed by how cool some of these look, too. Because once the series got going, it was impossible for me to not wonder exactly where the gritty, “it’s just a bunch of friends hanging out trying to deal with the impossible burdens of life” feel of these actually went. Because hell, that is so something the viewer can relate to. There’s another one where they all look like they’ve been hanging out all night and are beginning to feel slightly hung over. These are also pretty cool in their own way, and a series that had found a way tap into that feel of them all genuinely bonding probably would’ve also been the same kind of series that actually managed to figure out how to balance its characters and tone better.

As it is, we got something that played it way too safe and ends up feeling like it could be a show about any four slightly bland superheroes, rather than two whose personas (and actors) carry the hell out of their own series and one who’s the only blind criminal defense lawyer that I’m aware of in superhero canon.

You can enjoy parts of this series, and if you watched the others, you’re probably going to watch this one. But if you were expecting “awesome+awesome+cool+Iron Fist = more awesome” (or some variation on that equation), I don’t really think that’s what you’ve got here.