Think back to 2015. The Avengers were teaming up once again for the massive Age of Ultron, DC's clash-of-the-titans Batman v. Superman was deep into production, and the comic book movie business overall was positively boomin' (minus a hiccup or two— shoutout Fantastic Four). It was all buoyed by the more mature sensibilities of The Dark Knight and the genius billion-dollar universe-building being done by Marvel Studios. On the small screen, though, things were ... less momentous.

Superhero TV was fun, for sure. The CW had built a soap opera-ish universe of tights and fights starting with Arrow and followed by The Flash (and now many others). Fox's Gotham was a delightful bit of camp, and ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a serviceable trip to the MCU between big-screen installments. But nothing on TV truly tapped into that unique blend of comic-book storytelling and visuals that the movies had discovered. Until 2015. Until Drew Goddard's Daredevil kicked off Netflix's Marvel Universe.

That first gloriously violent clash between a conflicted Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and a multi-layered Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) set the stage for a new brand of comic book TV: something darker, more grounded. This was a show that will mess you up with a brutal one-take fight scene, but also wasn't afraid of flashes of heightened reality that make comic books fun even in the blackest nights. What followed was an entire mini-MCU with its own tone and New York aesthetic; Jessica Jones brought a noir twist, Luke Cage bumped to the inimitable rhythm of Harlem, and Iron Fist tried its darndest to blend curly-haired earnestness with the culture of Chinatown. The Netflix MCU then teamed up in The Defenders and spun-off into The Punisher. And like any entertainment universe, there have been just as many low-lows as there has been high-highs. For that, there's been no better example recently than when Netflix debuted the critically acclaimed Daredevil Season 3 while simultaneously cancelling both Iron Fist and Luke Cage.

But all that change means there's no better time to revisit the past. With all that said, here is every Netflix Marvel season ranked from worst to best.

13) Iron Fist Season 1

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Image via Netflix

Pinpointing a single issue with Netflix's fourth Marvel series is like making it through an entire conversation without mentioning you are the Immortal Iron Fist. It simply cannot be done, at least without dangerously draining your chi. Under showrunner Scott Buck, Iron Fist was plagued with criticism from the moment Finn Jones was announced as estranged boy billionaire Danny Rand; it isn't that the choice wasn't comics accurate—Danny has always been a blonde-haired white dude—it's that those original comics about a skinny white New Yorker who becomes the best at martial arts were more than a little ehhhhhh to begin with. But Netflix powered on, hoping the quality of the show would be high enough to tamper down the detractors.

Folks, it wasn't. Your choices of antagonists are A) One half of a shadowy ninja cult so secretive they don't actually have a personality, B) The other half of that ninja cult, which turns out to mostly be a day camp, or C) Harold Meachum (David Wenham), who spends 90% of the season locked in the same room. Opposing these forces of vague evil is a man we are reminded again and again—and again, and again, and again—is a Living Weapon who takes part in fight scenes so blandly terrible the editing team had to put the film in an actual blender to hide the fact everyone is actually standing still.

The lone bright spot that isn't a glowing yellow fist is the introduction of Jessica Henwick's Colleen Wing, a fierce, fiery performance that should have been the series' focus from day one.

12) The Defenders

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Image via Netflix

Marvel's first big team-up between Matt Murdock, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Danny Rand is what happens when you don't plan past the point of the team-up itself. I was not on the writing staff of The Defenders, but I do confidently assume the whiteboard just said: 1) Meet 2) Banter 3) ??? 4) Profit.

It's a miracle that The Defenders is the only Marvel Netflix season that runs eight episodes and yet still feels like it was stretching its story too thin. Because really, for most of the runtime there is no story; a large portion of Defenders is spent discussing how The Hand is definitely up to something, not sure what, but something, and it's pretty likely to be bad. A lot of this puffed up vaguery falls on poor, misused Sigourney Weaver as Alexandra Reid, who spends too long monologuing about the mystical Black Sky, which appears to give Elektra Natchios (Elodie Yung) the power to be like, 1% better at fighting.

The rest of our time is spent coasting on the idea that seeing these heroes sitting at the same Chinese restaurant table will be enough to hold your interest. And it almost works; there is, admittedly, some top-notch banter here. Krysten Ritter and Charlie Cox prove that New York's two mopiest superheroes deserve their own spin-off—possibly a rom-com?—while Finn Jones, ten times more charming here than in his own show, works best as a foil to his Heroes for Hire soulmate Mike Colter. But in the end, all that charismatic bickering can't hide the fact that the story itself is as hollow as a set of old dragon bones.

11) Jessica Jones Season 2

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Image via Netflix

More than any other Marvel Netflix season, Jessica Jones' sophomore outing falls victim to the 13-episode-mandate slog. Jessica Jones Season 2 is the Return of the King of Marvel Netflix seasons, a superhero story that pushes on past so many logical endpoints you start to feel like a crazy person trapped in a Netflix loop.

Janet McTeer is fantastically balanced between unhinged and maternal as Jessica's mother Alisa, but the odd pacing and logic loopholes of that storyline do her no favors. It also largely leaves the season without a true antagonist, which could be interesting in a contained character study but, again, falters in a story that must in no uncertain terms be 13 hours long. Krysten Ritter is the perfect Jessica Jones as she always is, but the nature of this drawn out plotting means there's a lot of scenes where we just watch Jessica get drunk and pass out at her desk. Jessica and Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor) also have the same conversation about trust roughly 13 separate times.

While I completely understand why Melissa Rosenberg did it, I do think the decision to center one episode around the (hallucinated) re-appearance of David Tennant's Kilgrave was a mistake. It's the danger of fan service; when you remind the audience of something at its best, they realize they're currently watching it at its worst.

10) Luke Cage Season 1

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Image via Netflix

Luke Cage Season 1 is the only show in history where you can literally say "man, that story really went out the window."

Showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker brought a completely different, breath-of-fresh-air sensibility to Netflix's MCU with Luke Cage, a show so immersed in the sights, sounds, and street-corner personalities of Harlem that your couch turned into the curb at East 125th and Lexington. For seven episodes, Luke Cage—bolstered by the mighty Mike Colter and Mahershala Ali, a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime talent, as the villain Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes—was on its way to being a top-tier superhero series. And then, in the episode titled "Manifest", Mariah Dillard (a fantastic Alfre Woodard) launches Cottonmouth through the window of Harlem's Paradise and the show quite simply could not recover.

I'm not even saying that Ali was carrying the show, but it's hard to deny that the character's death jarringly derailed the story and faltered from that point forward. Cottonmouth was replaced by the incredibly bland Diamondback (Erik LaRay) and a twist (that Diamondback is Luke's brother) so poorly explained and executed it barely counts as a twist at all. The climactic fight scene is laughably bad, with bystanders chilling like ten feet away and talking into a news camera as Luke and Diamondback tussle like drunk dads at a softball game in the background.

9) Iron Fist Season 2

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Image via Netflix

To its credit, Iron Fist Season 2 worked hard to fix most of the baby-punch problems that plagued its debut outing. Danny Rand is still a dingus, but less obnoxiously so -- it's now in a lost-child-at-the-mall way. Though the bar was so low, the fight scenes were drastically improved thanks to new choreographer Emmanuel Manzanares and stunt coordinator Clayton Barber. And most importantly, there's a lot more of Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing, whose chemistry with bionic-armed Misty Knight (Simone Missick) makes a strong, strong case for a Daughters of the Dragon spin-off series.

Unfortunately, all that maintenance work also resulted in a middle-of-the-road story. Davos (Sacha Dhawan) as an antagonist and story driver was ... fine. His quest to steal the heart of the dragon from Danny is equally fine. Iron Fist Season 2 is fine! Really, the best way to describe it is not as actively, insultingly bad as Season 1, but not particularly great either. It's the Finn Jones American Accent of seasons, perfectly serviceable in short bursts but definitely flat in the long run.

Rising above all that mediocrity, however, is Alice Eve's incredible performance as Mary Walker. Eve's double-sided Mary is a top-tier Netflix villain alongside D'Onofrio's Fisk and Tennant's Kilgrave, and it's a shame Iron Fist introduced her and then decided to get truly bonkers in the last two minutes of the season right in time for Netflix to pull the plug.

8) Luke Cage Season 2

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Image via Netflix

For a season that sees Luke tossing monster truck tires and Misty rocking a robot arm, Luke Cage's second chapter is probably the quietest story in the Netflix MCU.  But thanks to Coker's much more tightened focus the second time around, it works. Luke Cage's whole thing is that he's a Hero for Hire. It's a living, as they say. He's weary, a man with a whole lot of responsibility thrust on him simply because of the bullet-proof-ness of his skin. In Season 2, Colter does a tremendous job embodying that quiet storm that's always rumbling inside Luke, occasionally rising to the surface and (literally) punching its way through the wall of Claire Temple's (Rosario Dawson) apartment.

Luke Cage Season 2 is more like a stage play than it is a superhero story, focusing on individual performances and the ironic tragedy of it all. Again, like Jessica Jones Season 2, this doesn't hold up for 13 straight hours—this season hits a deep slog for a few episodes—but it does stick the landing better than a good number of its Marvel peers. Luke Cage has always been the most Shakespearian of the Netflix MCU shows, and there aren't much more situations ol' Willy liked more than a well-meaning man living long and hard enough to become something of a villain. Luke inheriting Harlem's Paradise is a stellar ending, setting up what would have been a highly intriguing Season 3.

7) The Punisher season 2

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Image via Netflix

The Punisher season 2 is a tough gun to cock. On one hand, it almost completely does away with the quiet meditation on PTSD, gun violence, and familial bonds that made season 1 such a miracle. (More on that below.) On the other hand, The Punisher season 2 straight-up whips ass. All kinds of asses. Every ass available to be whipped is, in fact, whipped in season 2. For better or worse, this is The Punisher, blood-soaked and packing heat for gun fight after gun fight, decked out in that iconic skull vest more than he's not.

Plenty about season 2 doesn't work. While I do admire what showrunner Steven Lightfoot was trying to achieve with Billy Russo's transformation into Jigsaw being more about mental scars than actual physical deformity, it comes off more unintentionally funny than anything when he still just looks 95% like Ben Barnes, a.k.a. more attractive than 95% of people on Earth.

But season 2 also has more than a few bullets in its chamber that keep it burning hot. The addition of Giorgia Whigham as runaway Amy develops into a girl-and-her-monster story that grounds Frank in a really endearing way. And there's just no denying that Jon Bernthal is the best Frank Castle adaptation there ever was—dude just has a seething intensity that's unmatched on-screen—and possibly ever will be, given what a Disney version of the character might look like in the future. Despite the flaws, getting a chance to spend more time with this version of the Punisher is a killer opportunity.

6) Jessica Jones season 3

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Image via Netflix

The expectations that come with being the "final chapter" of Netflix's Marvel universe are unfair to begin with, especially because the Jessica Jones creative team didn't know season 3 would even be the final chapter until well into production. The funny thing is that season 3 is satisfying no because it's some grand finale, but because it's low-key as hell. Melissa Rosenberg and Co. stripped down the story, bringing in a non-super serial killer antagonist in Gregory Salinger (Jeremy Bobb) and using his personal attacks to focus in on the relationship between Jessica and Trish.

In a lot ways, season 3 is Trish's story, her official transformation into violent vigilante Hellcat, and Rachael Taylor is more than up for the heavy lifting, even if 90% of the scenes she's in begin with her aggressively doing push-ups. The Jessica Jones character works best when she's bumping up against a line even she won't cross, and that story in season 3 essentially places her in a battle for Trish's soul. The tragedy of it all is that she loses in the end. But Jessica Jones has always been a tragedy, both the show and the character; it's always been about somehow making one of those superpowered leaps out of rock bottom, again and again. That season 3 ends on such an uncharacteristically upbeat note after all that darkness—purple-lit Kilgrave cameo notwithstanding—is maybe the best way for Netflix's MCU to end. The fact that it goes out to the sound of Le Tigre's "Keep On Livin'" is just one final bit of brutal irony.

5) Daredevil Season 2

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Image via Netflix

Daredevil Season 2's massive one-take fight scene between Matt Murdock and an entire biker bar pretty much sums up the season as a whole; it's good, really good even, but it's also so crowded, an attempt to go bigger and badder that succeeds but ultimately loses the simple, personal thrills that made season one a near-masterpiece.

Really, this season's biggest sin is just being too busy for anything to shine. New showrunners Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez introduced Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle—better known as the one-man army The Punisher—as well as Matt Murdock's assassin ex-lover Elektra Natchios and an endless horde of shadow ninjas in The Hand. The elements that work are masterful. Bernthal's Punisher grabs your actual damn face in every scene and demands your attention, and the central thesis of his beef with Daredevil—killing criminals is Good, Actually—cuts right to the core of both characters.

But everything that works is constantly ruined by The Hand, the least interesting Big Bad in the MCU, big-screen or otherwise. (Yes, I'm including Christopher Eccleston's evil Party City elf in Thor: The Dark World.) There are only so many times you can watch faceless members of The Hand pouring out of the woodwork like ants before it becomes more of a parody than a threat. There are a few scenes where I'm pretty sure you can actually see Charlie Cox roll his eyes, like "here we go again with these ninjas."

4) Jessica Jones Season 1

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Image via Netflix

Daredevil had a lot of responsibility to introduce the world to Netflix's Marvel Universe, but Jessica Jones had to shoulder the work of keeping that vigilante train rolling. There are two things the character hates, responsibility and work, but hot damn Jessica Jones' first season is a great ride. From the moment that tinkling piano theme kicks in, Melissa Rosenberg's story is superhero noir through and through, using an unwanted case of super-strength to illustrate the ways past trauma shapes us into who we are, but doesn't need to define what we become.

Of the core four Defenders crew, Krysten Ritter is not only the most magnetic performer, but she understands her character the best, from every roll of the eyes to the smallest hints of humanity that peek out from under Jessica's carefully hardened exterior.

And woof, what a villain. Kilgrave was the the kind of villain that no other live-action comic book series was touching; the man in the purple suit is not only a casual murderer and rapist in this story, but he serves as a stand-in for every sexual assault perpetrator that gets away with it, every awful man who rises to power anyway, every cat-caller on the street who thinks a woman's attention is his right by default. The genius stroke was casting the endlessly watchable David Tennant in the role, ensuring this inarguable monster would also be horrifically charming. Kilgrave has the power of persuasion, and Tennant ensures that ability works on the audience as well.

Jessica Jones Season 1 ends on the most satisfying neck snap in TV history. But it wouldn't have worked if every moment before that wasn't such a perfectly-plotted example of creating a character who walks such a moral tight-rope that even her best decisions look like murder.

3) Daredevil Season 1

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Image via Netflix

I'll probably never forget where I was when I first watched Vincent D'Onofrio decapitate a man using a car door. It came just an hour or two after turning to a friend during that brutal hallway fight scene and asking "has there been a cut yet?" Watching Daredevil Season 1 for the first time was a delightful series of realizations that it was doing things the big-screen MCU would never.

But it's not just nostalgia. Steven S. DeKnight's story of blind lawyer Matt Murdock becoming the devil to save his city from going to hell holds up to this day as a near-perfect example of smart, achingly human storytelling in a black stocking mask.

I hope that doesn't sound like I'm saying this season isn't—to use a technical term—cool as shit. That hallway fight scene, Matt Murdock's fiery duel with Nobu (Peter Shinkoda), and the climactic alleyway brawl with Fisk are all technical marvels from a straight badassery perspective. But these set-pieces happen around characters you really, truly care about. That central dynamic between Matt and Foggy—avocados at law—and, eventually, Karen Page, is so well-crafted that you start to fear more for these people's friendships than you do their lives. It's not the best season of Daredevil—we'll get to that—but it is the most simple and endearing. Watching it now feels like finding a beautifully gritty corner of New York City still untouched by the hands of time.

2) The Punisher season 1

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Image via Netflix

It was quite the risk spinning off an entire show for Frank Castle—a character whose superpower is "has a shit ton of guns"—in 20-freaking-17. What made it all the more surprising was when The Punisher out-classed most of its Defenders brethren in its depth, storytelling, and just an overall sense of something to say. The Punisher isn't about guns at all, it's about the deeply-felt pain that comes days, months, and years after pulling the trigger.

Simply put, no one could or should play Frank Castle after Jon Bernthal, whose performance crackles with a genuinely intimidating intensity every second he's on screen. Bernthal is just as adept at displaying barely-suppressed rage as he is exploding into monstrous violence, and the effect is ten times more jarring than the most expensive Hulk CGI Disney could afford. But he's also so, so good at making it clear how damn hard normal human interaction is for Frank; you see it in scenes with Sarah Lieberman (Jaime Ray Newman), how awkward Frank Castle—a man who has done bad things and will do them again—feels just standing in a clean suburban kitchen.

Of course, things can't be all bleakness all the time. The Punisher is shockingly good at lightening things up even in the middle of a bloodbath, be it Ebon Moss-Bachrach's performance as the immensely likable David Lieberman, or Karen Page showing up to provide the most ill-advised, blood-soaked "please just kiss already" moment in on-screen history.

Make no mistake, The Punisher is one violent show. But the violence is the point. It wears you down like it's work Frank down. By the time he's dragging former friend Billy Russo's (Ben Barnes) face across broken glass, Bernthal's primal scream is something you feel, man. When, in the season's quiet, pitch-perfect ending, Frank Castle finally sits down and admits that the endless cycle of violence scares him, the audience is ready to admit the same.

1) Daredevil Season 3

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Image via Netflix

Daredevil's third season is one of the most perfect, seamless mixtures of Dark Knight moodiness and MCU fun ever put to screen, and it's largely because showrunner Erik Oleson's story isn't beholden to anything but itself. It's inspired by comic book arcs like Born Again and Guardian Devil, but it's not ever a straight adaptation. It owes a lot to the more mature, more violent stylings of Frank Miller but it's just as comfortable bordering on straight-up comic book silliness. (The fight where Agent Dex is just violently launching office supplies at Matt Murdock is a prime example.)

What's impressive is that this is a multi-level story; among Wilson Fisk's return to New York, Agent Poindexter's descent into perfectly-aimed insanity, and Matt Murdock's crises of faith and personality, there's a lot happening in Hell's Kitchen here. But it never drags, not even when Episode 10, "Karen", flashes back to Karen Page's origin story, an absolute knockout highlight reel for Deborah Ann Woll. The whole cast, really, puts in their best work in Season 3. Vincent D'Onofrio is on another level—communicating the gears turning in that Kingpin brain with the slightest of facial tics—but Charlie Cox is wonderfully conflicted about every choice Matt makes, and Wilson Bethel is inhumanly intimidating as the increasingly unhinged man who will be Bullseye. It's an ensemble capable of proving Daredevil is about more than just the fight scenes.

But man, those fight scenes. A large amount of attention will be paid to the Episode 4 prison fight (with good reason, that thing is straight nuts), but for my money that first confrontation between Dex and Matt will go down as one of the most intense superhero scenes of all time. That's the thing -- these scenes find ways to consistently top each other throughout the season, building toward the finale's three-way dance between Fisk, Daredevil, and Dex, a character-driven bloodbath that breaks bodies but not Matt Murdock's soul.

"So the Devil is back," Fisk says early into Season 3. If future stories are as dynamic as this one, I hope like hell he's back for good.