Strip away Easter eggs and fan-friendly cameos and you’ll realize that the core concept of a superhero crossover series is a logistical nightmare. Behind the scenes, creators and producers are often left facing scheduling headaches, continuity issues and a raft of other preexisting entanglements as that crossover begins to coalesce, and over the past two years we’ve witnessed that process unravel from concept to completion – give or take three months – in the form of The Defenders, Marvel and Netflix’s team-up show in which Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and Iron Fist unite in the face of a common enemy.
The exact identity of said adversary largely remains a mystery. Prior to the unveiling of last week’s show-stopping trailer, a morbid new promo for The Defenders all but confirmed that The Hand would be making an appearance – alongside Elodie Yung’s resurrected Elektra – while there’s also Sigourney Weaver’s imposing uber-villain, Alexandra, to consider. It’s no wonder New York has to call about four superheroic drifters to save the day.
Daredevil and the rest of the gang will have a lot to contend with on August 18th, then, and when TV Guide (via Screen Rant) caught up with Mike Colter to discuss The Defenders, the leading star touched base on how the ensemble series strings together many of the villains that have populated Netflix and Marvel’s four principal standalone series.
The villains that we’re dealing with are a combination of several entities, and they all have something to do with our separate stories that have played out in each of our own individual series. So this has been going on for a while. It wasn’t obvious in each individual series, but in this series you’ll find out that the things that happened to all of us basically were all because of one entity and that’s what’s gonna kind of tie things together and then we’ll see that, we’ll understand that, and before you know it, eventually we’ll fight together or not.
The Defenders is locked in for a premiere on August 18th. It’ll run for eight episodes in total, which ought to allay fears that Marvel and Netflix’s team-up series will start to spin its wheels around the mid-way point – a common and arguably fair complaint directed toward Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist in particular.