You Know My Steez draws down the curtain on the first season of Luke Cage.
In many ways, the season finale encapsulates the best and worst of the season before it. The episode is strongest when it focuses on the characters and their performers, allowing space for actors like Alfre Woodard and Simone Missick to breath. It underscores the core themes of the season, from the importance of having a black superhero show through to the cultural significance of Harlem. Indeed, You Know My Steez does an excellent job bringing the show around a full circle from Moment of Truth and Code of the Streets.
At the same time, there is an awkwardness and a clumsiness to the storytelling, from the decision to open with an underwhelming fifteen-minute brawl in the centre of Harlem to the choice to spend the rest of the episode setting up threads to be divided between an inevitable second season and the launch of The Defenders. Pacing and structure have never been a strength for Luke Cage, and that is particularly obvious with You Know My Steez. It is an episode that seems stitched together from a selection of dangling threads leading into and flowing out of the season.
Still, You Know My Steez has a winning charm to it, one that almost excuses the strange pacing and the contrived plotting. If anything, the decision to wrap up the inevitable climactic throw down a full half-hour before the end of the episode ensures that Luke Cage never loses sight of its characters and its world.
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