Full story
Luke Cage has cleared his name and become a Harlem celebrity. There's even an app that tracks where he is. But fame weighs on him: he loses his temper, fights with Claire and feels the pressure of being everyone's hero. Misty Knight, who lost her arm, is off the force and angry at everything, until Danny Rand and Colleen Wing give her a bionic arm and she gets back to work.
Mariah Dillard wants out of crime. She plans to sell the family guns and become a respectable businesswoman, with Shades at her side as right hand and lover. The past won't let her. From Jamaica comes John McIver, Bushmaster, a man as strong and fast as Luke thanks to an herbal treatment. He wants revenge: Mariah's family, the Stokeses, betrayed and killed his family decades ago and took Harlem's Paradise.
Bushmaster beats Luke head-on, humiliates the hero in front of the city and wrecks Mariah's businesses. Luke also tries to patch things up with his father, Pastor James Lucas, whom he hasn't spoken to in years. Tilda Johnson, the daughter Mariah always pushed away, learns about the herb's poison and the truth about her mother. Mariah answers with a massacre of Bushmaster's family, and Shades starts to see he's on the wrong side.
In the end, Luke defeats Bushmaster, who returns to Jamaica. Shades turns himself in and testifies against Mariah, who goes to jail. There, Tilda gives her mother a poisoned kiss and Mariah dies. Before that, Mariah left a will: Harlem's Paradise goes to Luke.
Luke accepts. The season ends with him sitting in the club's office, receiving the crime bosses to keep the peace in Harlem his own way. Misty watches and worries. The hero has become something else, and the show never got the chance to show where that was headed.