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The Defenders: watch the first trailer for Marvel’s Netflix series

The series’ first look reveals how Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Luke Cage, and “the kid with the glowing fist” come together in New York.

Alex Abad-Santos
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.

Everything is connected, and it’s all beginning to make a bit of sense.

On Wednesday, Marvel and Netflix dropped the first trailer for The Defenders, the Avengers-like team-up project that brings together the four Netflix properties of Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Iron Fist. The clip’s main purpose is to show us how the four heroes — Matt Murdock a.k.a. Daredevil (Charlie Cox), Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), Luke Cage (Mike Colter), and Danny Rand a.k.a. Iron Fist (Finn Jones) — find themselves on the same side.

It opens with Misty Knight, a police investigator in Luke Cage, interrogating Jones before she’s stopped by Murdock, who says he’s her attorney. Jones apparently tampered with a crime scene, presumably one involving Cage, who she was romantically linked with in the Jessica Jones series. And in the second segment of the trailer, Claire Thomas, who played a prominent role in both Luke Cage and Iron Fist series — introduces Luke Cage to Iron Fist.

As everyone is coming together, the trailer introduces The Defenders’ main villain, a woman credited on IMDB as “Alexandra” who’s played by Sigourney Weaver. It also brings the return of Stick (Scott Glenn) and the resurrected sociopath assassin Elektra (Elodie Yung), two enigmatic figures from the Daredevil series.

And of course, in true Marvel style, it ends with the Defenders in a hallway fight scene — the signature calling card of the Marvel Netflix universe.

The Defenders premieres on Netflix on August 18.

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