【Friend's Mother 4 (2025)】

One of the coolest things about Netflix’s Marvel series is Friend's Mother 4 (2025)that it takes its New York City setting very seriously. The characters live at believable addresses, walk down identifiable streets, and even the little incongruities that would make an IRL New Yorker squint — Matt Murdock being able to afford a massive studio apartment while building a law practice from the ground up, for example — have in-universe explanations (only a blind person would put up with a glowing Midtown billboard shining in their window every night).

But New York City is more than a collection of neighborhoods. It's the people who live there, and Luke CageSeason 2 is the first Marvel series that totally nails the way real New Yorkers would react to having a known superhero in their midst.

The New Yorkers of the MCU have, to put it lightly, seen some shit. A big green dude came out of nowhere and punched Harlem into pieces. Aliens attacked Midtown in 2012, and the Avengers had to step in and save the day. A guy wearing devil horns started fighting the mob in Hell’s Kitchen, and just a few years later, a convicted felon came back from the dead and turned the streets into a war zone. Coney Island is a planenow. It’s a nightmare of a city, but plenty of normal, non-powered people still live there, and they can be forgiven for latching onto Luke Cage, as they do in Season 2, as a shining example of a hero who has their back.

In the beginning of Luke CageSeason 2, the people of Harlem adore him. The specific optics of Luke being a bulletproof black man in 2018 are never forgotten or glossed over in his interactions with the New Yorkers who ask him for selfies and track his location on the “Harlem’s Hero” app. In one scene reminiscent of so many impromptu gatherings in the city’s many outdoor sports fields, people flock to watch him work out while Todd Bowles (the current coach of the New York Jets) and Jemele Hill look on with approval. He’s a symbol of hope in a community that has much to fear, and like many symbols, his image is only perfect if he remains constant. It takes one video of Luke getting knocked on his ass to file the first offense in the court of public approval. The more physically vulnerable the unbreakable man becomes, the less love he receives.

That’s the classic New York zeitgeist cycle right there. In a city that has an entire cadre of micro-celebrities who only exist within the five boroughs, it’s extremely believable that it would take one knockout video for everyone to turn on Luke Cage. That punch is to Luke what licking a doughnut was to Ariana Grande, or those rodent training videos were to Pizza Rat — the exact moment a local myth got demoted to a standard curiosity in a city famous for an abundance of those. Once nobody wants to buy the “Sweet X-Mas” merch anymore, Luke experiences a crisis of conscience that cripples him, until — in another very New York City turn of events — his hippie friend comes over and convinces him to meditate.

For all of Iron Fist’s cab-hopping outside of Gramercy Park or Daredevil’s pontificating about Hell’s Kitchen, it's story touches like Luke Cage essentially becoming an NYC-specific meme that makes the setting of the Netflix MCU come alive. It’s cliche by now to say “New York is a character in the story,” but it’s fair to notice that in Luke CageSeason 2, the whims of ordinary New Yorkers have an outsized effect on the show’s title character. That’s pretty much the same thing, right?