I have obviously come late to this one-off Marvel series combining its four then-active solo heroes in one big arcing storyline. Moreover I haven't yet watched the Luke Cage or Iron Fist series so these characters, back stories and supporting characters weren't known to me apart from remembering Luke Cage as a brief boyfriend of Jessica Jones series 1. I have however watched all three series each of Daredevil and Jessica Jones and was attracted by this mega-crossover to see how these very individual characters could possibly be combined.
After watching all 8 episodes I'm bound to say it was all done well. My two pre-watched faves combined well, Matt Murdock's passion for his city of New York and ever-present humanity contrasted well with JJ's cynicism and selfishness. The Iron Fist character escaped me a little but I enjoyed getting better acquainted with Luke Cage after he left JJ series one early for his own show.
The story involving an unholy alliance between the five leaders of the worldwide crime syndicate The Hand, yes they are known as the fingers, to capture Iron Fist and use his power to access some kind of resurrection substance for their own nefarious ends was incidental, I found, to the interplay among the four reluctant heroes and by extension their group of friends and contacts. Sure there were a lot of reasonably entertaining ninja-style fight scenes, too many of them though enacted in the dark, but like any crossover, the fun for we comic-lovers is in seeing, for example, Cage and Iron Fist start to bond after initially knocking heads together, Jones pricking Murdock's "Protect my city" seriousness with acerbic one liners ("Love the ears!" she asides to Daredevil, the only one of them to go full super-hero and don a costume, "They're horns" he peevishly counters) plus it was just cool to see all their significant others hanging out too, as ever on the sidelines.
The big story, which principally revolved around a super-weapon known as The Black Sky, which turns out to be someone close to Matt, had enough twists and turns about it to keep me interested but it was incidental to just seeing the fab four gradually cohere into something capable of winning their fight to protect the Big Apple once again. Sigourney Weaver was the big surprise guest star as the head, or maybe that should be index-finger of The Hand and I also enjoyed seeing the return of the mystical Stick too.
Shorter than the usual 13-part series of the individual shows and noticeably less heavy on the psychology as the action-ante was exponentially increased, this for me was an enjoyable detour from the sometimes drawn-out problems of the individual heroes and probably will lead me too back to the series I've missed on Luke Cage and Iron Fist.
