The Defenders 1x07 Review: Official Legal Advice

​“Fish in the Jailhouse”
Written by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and Marco Ramirez
Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá
 
The Story
Flashback! Elektra reports to Stick that she failed to get Matt to kill his father’s murderer. Stick thinks it’s because she fell for Matt. In the present, the team is still laid out in the room where Elektra killed Stick. And that includes Matt, as Matt. Cue flashing police lights. Uh oh.
 
Jessica wakes up in Misty’s interrogation room. Misty is insisting on answers about the two dead bodies in that club/theatre place. Jessica starts explaining. Matt wakes up and kinda flips out. Foggy finds him. He makes with very incomplete explanations and Foggy is very confused. Misty comes in and informs him that Luke and Jessica are both there and fine, but she would like to know what the heck is going on. Matt wants to skip over all this crap and go help Danny.
 
Claire is worried about Luke, because he’s out again from the weird incense. Colleen’s worried the weird incense might’ve killed Danny. Claire marvels at what her life has turned into. She tried pretty hard to not get involved in this. Colleen gives Claire a similar pep talk to the one she gave her a couple episodes ago. I love this friendship.
 
Minions clean up Alexandra’s body. Bakuto, Gao, and Murakami aren’t keen to follow Elektra’s orders, and she reminds them that they have no immortality juice. Gao wants to know how the infrastructure of the organization will hold up without Alexandra’s crime and corporate connections. Elektra doesn’t give a crap about that, she just wants the immortality juice.
 
Matt, Jessica, and Luke are led into the police captain’s office. Misty has convinced him to treat them as witnesses, not suspects. Luke starts answering the captain’s questions, but he and Jessica (pretending Matt is just their lawyer) want to take care of the Hand themselves. The captain isn’t interested in endorsing vigilante justice and tries to book them, but Matt asks for a minute to talk to his clients. Misty convinces him it’s a good idea. Karen grabs Matt for a sec. She doesn’t understand why he’s getting in this so deep when he had come so close to getting his life back together. He corrects her. This is his life. BOOM.
 
Colleen looks at all the crime scene photos of stuff the Hand has done. She’s worried about Danny and there’s a glint of a crazy plan in her eye. Misty grabs Luke. She wants in. He doesn’t want her in danger, so that’s a no.
 
At Midland Circle, Elektra takes a very long elevator ride down the giant hole with Danny, who’s semi-conscious and still strapped to an upright gurney thing. The bottom of the hole has a cavern in it.
 
Matt, Jessica, and Luke get in a room to talk. They figure Elektra took Danny alive, probably to Midland Circle. Foggy pulls Matt out very insistently. He’s brought a bag with the Daredevil suit so he can help Matt avoid being found out as Daredevil. Matt goes back in the room to give Luke and Jessica his “official legal advice.” Misty’s job seems to be in a somewhat precarious position. Alarms go off, because Luke and/or Jessica have punched through the outer wall of the building and taken Matt with them.
 
Elektra and Danny are staring at a wall covered in K’un-Lun writing. She explains it’s a seal that can only be broken by the Iron Fist. Behind it is the immortality juice. She argues that he doesn’t need to do what his masters told him. They can both just be free and do what they want. She unstraps him.
 
Colleen grabs a bunch of the C-4 and the building plans from lockup. Jessica and Luke are being pursued by the cops, who think they kidnapped Matt. The three are forced to take the subway, where Jessica steals a beer from a passed out dude’s six pack. Karen and Foggy are freaking out (well, Karen is freaking out). Foggy thinks Matt just needs to do this one thing and then they’ll get him back, sans Daredevil. Misty and Claire discuss Luke. Claire isn’t helping Misty stop him, and then Misty realizes Colleen is gone.
 
Luke, Jessica, and Matt work on getting inside the building. They will have to go through Gao, Bakuto, and Murakami. Aww yeah, boss fight. Here we go. Colleen shows up and helps Matt against Bakuto. Bakuto and Murakami set Luke on fire (very ineffectively), then disappear with Gao. Claire and Misty show up. Misty will be stalling the cops for them, but they better move fast.
 
Down in the cavern, Elektra is still trying to convince Danny to be on her team, which is neither K’un-Lun’s nor the Hand’s team. Yeah, he’s not interested. So he’s got his own boss fight against her. She riles him up by talking about killing his people. And I knew exactly how it was going to end the first time I watched. With her tricking him into punching the wall with the Iron Fist. Which causes a blackout. Police show up and Misty successfully pretends no involvement.
 
Colleen reveals she’s brought a bag of C-4 so they can collapse the building like Jessica’s client wanted. Even Matt agrees that killing the leaders of the Hand is the only way to end this, and, bonus, there’s nobody else in the building. Claire is least happy with this, but she doesn’t speak up.
 
Danny and Elektra are now lying in a cavern propped up by dragon bones. (Okay, I’m super confused on the logistics here. Did Danny just open a portal? Are we now in whatever dimension K’un-Lun is? Is this another access point like the pass to K’un-Lun? If that isn’t explained, then I’m just going to assume it’s the case, because otherwise the perspective of that wide shot makes no sense. If you can zoom out and see the whole skeleton, then that door Danny punched through is not the only way to it. It only works if that door was a dimensional portal.
 
Okay, some good fight scenes in this one, and Matt, Jessica, and Luke do feel like a team now. That’s pretty cool, considering that Danny was the one who wanted to be a team and none of them did. Now that he’s been captured, the three of them come together on his behalf (and the city’s, obviously, but still). I like the symmetry there quite a lot. Several of the supporting characters are frustrating because they make themselves into obstacles, but at least Foggy, Claire, and Misty come around. (Colleen was never an obstacle, so bonus points for her.) Alexandra’s obsession with the Black Sky is once again made ridiculous when we see the Fingers of the Hand in action, though. She’s super strong and about as skilled a fighter as you can be, but I’m not sure she’s more powerful than Gao or Murakami.
 
Things I Liked

• Elektra hesitating at the idea that this war needs so much death
• Jessica’s level of concern for the rest of the team
• “A witness? What, do you want me to describe how it sounded, detective?”
• Matt’s chuckle when Jessica mentions wanting a drink
• “Karen? This is my life.”
• “It’s what family’s for!” *Matt/Foggy hug* *me screaming*
• Matt, Luke, and Jessica on the subway
• “These people aren’t really alive.” THANK YOU, COLLEEN.

 
Things I Didn’t

• Dangit, Stick! How can you call yourself one of the good guys when your whole strategy for getting warriors is corrupting them? Elektra explicitly says she brought out Matt’s darkest impulses on Stick’s orders. What the hell?
• Misty...kinda gets in the way a lot. She did on Luke Cage too.

 
The Characters
Holy crap! Does this mean Foggy has accepted Matt as Daredevil? Or is at least resigned over it? He still doesn’t seem to believe that what Matt’s doing is actually necessary, just that he can’t stop him from doing it. That’s frustrating, but baby steps, I guess. Also, I think I just realized something important about Karen and Foggy’s attitudes. They knew Matt as just Matt for a long time (Foggy much longer, but Karen with romantic feelings). They still don’t fully appreciate how much of the Matt they know has been a ruse to enable him to be Daredevil. He’s not just acting out. He needs to do this, because this is what good people with superpowers do. And Matt certainly seems more sure of himself now that he’s listening to his soul. Good. Keep doing that, Matt. But make sure your friends know how you feel about this so they don’t keep wrong-headedly trying to talk you down.
 
Jessica still can’t believe she got sucked into this particular storyline, but she’s all in. I wonder if S2 of her show will reflect this. Is she going to be more willing to help people going forward?
 
Luke is solid, as ever. Claire seems to be despairing now over the likelihood that his life will always be chaotic because he can’t help helping people.
 
Danny is incredibly easy to manipulate. He needs to work on that. And there was a distinct lack of Danny being adorable moments in this one, which was a serious flaw.
 
Overall Rating
4.5/5