For most critics and viewers, the first season of Marvel’s Luke Cage was a slight improvement to the Netflix superhero roster that suffered from its predecessors’ many problems. Even so, Cage’s (Mike Colter) first standalone outing as one of the Marvel-Netflix partnership’s four “street-level heroes” did something pretty remarkable: it offered fans a powerful, complex vision of Misty Knight (Simone Missick), a New York City police officer who stands out in her own right. Instead of being yet another one of Luke’s coffee dates, Knight holds her own and, in some instances, carries the weight whenever Harlem’s titular hero can’t.
Then The Defenders happened. While the long-promised team up didn’t quite overcome the preceding series’ many issues (especially Iron Fist), it did put Knight onscreen with Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), Danny Rand’s (Finn Jones) fellow martial arts expert and love interest. The pair work together as the Daughters of the Dragon in the comics, and Luke Cage season 2 isn’t necessarily focused on their budding partnership, but a new clip offers enough of a tease to suggest it’s a real possibility. So real, in fact, that the one-armed Knight (following an incident in The Defenders) will fight off a bar filled with goons to prove it.
To be honest, most of the minute and a half-long clip consists of Knight beating the crap out of a bunch of angry men (after one of them calls her an unpleasant word) while Wing watches from the sideline. The latter doesn’t enter the fray until the very end, and aside from a few brief exchanges, the two don’t actually talk to each other all that much. But hey, it’s only a short clip!
Maybe Luke Cage season 2, which drops June 22, is Marvel-Netflix’s way of testing the waters for a Daughters of the Dragon spin-off.