Last Friday, August 18th, all eight episodes of season one of Marvel’s The Defenders released on Netflix. Luke Cage, Matthew Murdock, Danny Rand, and Jessica Jones reluctantly teamed up to fight The Hand, a worldwide criminal organization previously seen in Daredevil and, more extensively, in Iron Fist.

About a month after the events of season one of Iron Fist and the destruction of K’un Lun, Rand’s home after monks rescued him from the plane crash that killed his parents, The Hand returned with a vengeance with all of New York City in their sights. Their plot to extract a substance to bring people back from the dead would leave the entire city in a pile of rubble.

The Hand brought with it multiple more subtle evils from Iron Fist. The Defenders shares the plagues of inhuman dialogue and poor fight scenes from Danny Rand’s series. Amongst all of the characters in the show, Defender or otherwise, only Jessica Jones and Daredevil speak like normal human beings. Cage and Rand come across heavily as caricatures of the righteous black man and the martial arts expert, respectively.

Danny Rand also came across as incredibly unremarkable in fight scenes, especially given the fact his backstory includes his status as the greatest warrior in K’un Lun, a mystical city where the entire population trains every hour of every day. The relative ineptitude of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, down to their lack of martial arts instruction, makes sense, but that of Danny Rand does not. His moves in fights look like a three year old copying a Bruce Lee movie.

Considering both this and the uninteresting nature of both the villains and the plot itself, The Defenders would only rank above Iron Fist amongst the seasons of the standalone shows. It sustains all of the problems from Iron Fist, along with those plaguing Luke Cage. This, plus the performances of Charlie Cox and Krysten Ritter as counterweights draw The Defenders to slightly below average.

The Chant’s Grade: C-