There's a very, very subtle musical touch that I LOVED in this episode, as Matt strikes one note on the piano three times— as one half-note, and then a couplet— to discover the hidden map… and then once they open up the piano, the score repeats that three-note motif for nearly all the rest of the scene. That little…

OH MY GOD THANK YOU!

Wow. Wow. A solo Joker origin movie? That's almost as stupid as, say, the AV Club switching to Kinja.

Between this and Watchmen, it's pretty clear that the one place Zack Snyder excells is in opening credits sequences.

Yeah, I didn't either, until I noticed Daredevil was wearing the OLD mask (with a big, poorly-sealed crack in it) in a promotional shot of DD chained to that chimney from episode three.

The season one mask had brows that were squidged down too close to his eyes, which were too small and too close to the edge of the mask. The eyes were also bracketed by really thick, triangular seams that pointed up to his horns. It made him look like he was constantly squinting. Or constipated.

You'd think Luke could at least put his tiara on for the big team-up…

It's funny, but I get the impression that the whole "Black Sky" thing was supposed to be the MacGuffin driving The Defenders— what it does, what it is, how it can help the Hand— but somewhere along the way, they kind of lost interest in it and came up with a different goal for the villains to pursue. So the whole…

I have never laughed so hard at anything as I did at the flip between Sowande's "They say you can't be broken. We'll see about that," to Luke showing up a couple of minutes later with Sowande unconscious in a van. That moment was beautiful.

Soooo they're like the Chitauri in The Avengers, or the Droid Army in the Star Wars prequels, or any other enormous, insurmountable army in sci-fi/fantasy fiction that the author wants our heroes to defeat in a single grand, climactic action?

Because Joss Whedon is popular, he's often held up as an example of a feminist storyteller, and a scandal that suggests "hey, maybe he's not ACTUALLY a feminist"— whether the argument has any merit or not— is gonna get clicks.

Oh, sure— all those anxieties we have are DEFINITELY going to dissipate. Mostly because there won't be anybody left on the f@#*ing site to be ANXIOUS anymore.

Ahh! Thank you! That actually clears that up a LOT— I keep forgetting that Jessica has super-jump/limited flight abilities (mostly because the shows are strangely averse to SHOWING it— either for budgetary reasons, or for fear of looking too "comic book-y" or ridiculous).

The Hand serve the same basic story function as the Chitauri did in The Avengers: they're a big, domineering, generic army of bad guys for our heroes to team up and mow through. After all, half the appeal of a superhero team is watching them all fight together; they have to have someone to HIT, while still saving the…

Yeah, but with new showrunners and the positive influence of The Defenders working for it, season two may actually turn out to be something worthwhile!

Yeah, the other guys are kinda dull. I'm surprised that, three seasons in to the Hand being central antagonists on these shows, we still haven't gotten Kirigi or anything.

That's why this show actually has central antagonists with some character to them— unlike Daredevil season two. Alexandra, Madam Gao, Elektra… the ninjas are just there to give us awesome fight sequences.

This episode. God damn.

I love how, in the Danny/Luke fight scene, all of Danny's attempted punches, kickes, and sweeps just stop DEAD when they smack into Luke. No follow-through, no recoil; all the momentum just evaporates. But Danny keeps on trying as Luke completely no-sells every single blow, and it's HILARIOUS.

I'm all for talk, character development, and slow-building tension… but honestly, the exposition in this first episode is beyond clunky. It's not just that the show is all talk; it's that the talk is all very on-the-nose and inelegant, clearly only there to catch us all up with who the characters are and where they…