‘Luke Cage’ Star Says Four ‘Defenders’ Series Have One Secret Villain

We’ve known as far back as Marvel’s Netflix Daredevil that one Hand-y threat would connect us to Iron Fist and everything in between, but has someone been pulling The Defenders’ strings all along? That’s what Luke Cage star Mike Colter says, claiming the same unseen villain has been manipulating all four series.

Colter’s curious comment came in conversation with TVGuide, suggesting that all of the major series have been connected by various factions of one threat. That’s easy enough to ascribe to The Hand, several branches (fingers?) of which have been directly addressed by Daredevil and Iron Fist, but might he mean to imply the group had a … well, hand in Jessica Jones and Luke Cage as well?

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.

If we take Colter’s word at face value, it might suggest that Kilgrave, or the shadowy IGH threaded through Jessica Jones had something to do with The Hand or its corporate entities, just as the mysterious experiments that transformed Carl Lucas into Luke Cage in Seagate prison. At the very least, we know the mysterious Madame Gao referenced Luke Cage in Iron Fist, suggesting perhaps some connection to the events guiding Danny Rand’s destiny, to say nothing of Sigourney Weaver’s Alexandra at the center of it all.

We’ll see for ourselves when The Defenders premieres on August 18, so check out the trailer below (as well as our extended breakdown), and stay tuned.

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