Just what does it takes to break an unbreakable man? This is the crucial question that is asked throughout the second season of the breakout Netflix superhero drama, “Marvel’s Luke Cage,” with Luke played perfectly by actor Mike Colter.

Luke Cage, also known as Power Man, was created by Roy Thomas, Archie Goodwin and John Romita Sr., who first appeared in “Luke Cage, Hero for Hire” # 1 in 1972.

Colter first appeared as Cage on the Netflix series “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” in 2015; “Luke Cage” season 1 debuted on the streaming service in 2016 and appeared on the Netflix super team show “Marvel’s The Defenders,” all part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity.

The barrel-chested, baritone-voiced Colter had always effortlessly channeled the confidence and the smoothness that defined Luke, a character trait reflected by the unbreakable skin he got from a lab experiment gone wrong. The show’s acclaimed first season established Luke as the reluctant guardian of Harlem.

But in this new season, Luke is shaken by many things, but most by an encounter with a man named Bushmaster (Mustafa Shakir) who may be as, or even more powerful than him. Luke spends the season struggling to regain his lost mojo.

“That was great, that’s what’s fun,” Colter told Super. “As an actor you’re looking for something to do. For us, we wanted to really challenge the character and challenge the audience. We wanted to change what people’s perceptions of superheroes are, what it means to be tough and make them relate to somebody. What happens when they can’t? It’s fun, but if you can’t hurt him, what’s the point? So we had to find a way to hurt him, whether physically or emotionally, we had to find a way to get to him, that’s what we did in the second season.”

Boxing metaphor

The show’s brilliant creator and showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker explained that boxing was the metaphor that filled the show’s writing room: “Mike Tyson said famously everyone’s got a plan until they get hit in the face. That was kind of the metaphor for what happened between Luke and Bushmaster. But the other thing, the reason that (Muhammad) Ali is my favorite boxer of all time, is that he doesn’t have a perfect record (Ali’s professional record: 56 wins. 5 defeats). If you have a perfect record as a boxer, it means you didn’t challenge yourself. It means that after a while you didn’t keep pushing the edge. Ali lost some critical fights but he always came back and defeated whoever beat him. Yes, Luke is vulnerable, yes, he can be beaten, but he will not quit until he wins again.”

Shakir said playing the antihero Bushmaster, based on a fairly obscure Marvel villain, was a lot of fun. “It’s one of my dreams to be inside the Marvel comic book character world, so it’s just a joy,” he said. “But to be able to take an obscure character and bring him life is a once-in-a-lifetime situation. Cheo gave me all the leeway to have fun and what you see is the natural result.”

Bushmaster is just one of the new elements on the show. “The thing that I’m proudest of is that, with all these new characters and all these new moments, we never lose Luke. It’s his show,” Coker said.

One of the much-praised elements on “Luke Cage” is the music, the hip-hop vibration that gives the show as much character as its Harlem, composed by Adrian Young and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, featuring Method Man and Faith Evans.

Bulletproof ‘Lemonade’

“When you actually get down to it, for me, I’ve always kind of seen the show as a concept album with dialogue, so that’s why I always called it a bulletproof version of ‘Lemonade,’” Coker said. “It’s basically we pick the song titles first and then we thematically try to build them. The weird thing is the episodes always fit the titles. I pick every single needle drop we do on the show. This comes directly out of my personal record collection. It’s the fun thing to do for the show is pick the songs.” The second season features performance by Ghostface Killah and Jadakiss.

When Colter talks, it’s really hard to think he’s not really Luke. This is demonstrated by his perfect answer to the question, who is Luke’s favorite lover between Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson): “Luke is a man who believes that variety is the spice of life. You can have your mocha frappe on Monday, and you can have your basic flat white on Tuesday or you can have your hot chocolate on another, and it’s all good. You can go back and forth. You can’t define him, man. He just sippin’.”

Real-life challenges

“Luke Cage” faced its own real-life challenges when it lost one of its own. Veteran actor Reg E. Cathey, who plays Cage’s father, finished his scenes before he died in February from cancer at 59. “It affected us on every level,” Coker said. “He was always so optimistic that he was going to beat it. His voice is the first thing and the last thing you hear this season.” Colter added: “He was always just powering through.”

There are many things to enjoy about the show, new and old. Old-fashioned Marvel fans will enjoy how Luke and Danny Rand’s Iron Fist (Finn Jones) join forces late in the season in the classic manner of the comic book heroes’ “Heroes for Hire” series. “It was great seeing Mike and Finn do a different version of Luke and Danny, like ‘48 Hours’ or a buddy cop comedy,” Coker said. “It’s in the spirit of the comic channeled through the prism of the show. Hopefully at some point, we’ll get to expand on that.” Fans will also see the one-armed cop Misty Knight (Simone Messick)  sharing scenes with Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) that hint at the possibility of the two truly becoming the Daughters of the Dragon team-up from the comics.

But the best thing about the show is the cast, uniformly incredible: Alfred Woodard, Theo Rossi, Gabrielle Dennis, among others. “The challenge is trying to write as well as they act,” Coker said.

Where exactly Luke is morally at the end of the second season is something that Coker said they would answer if a season three is ordered.

“You just have to stay good,” he stressed. “We are lucky that we are the show that broke Netflix. We are lucky that if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, we are the highest rated Marvel show rated critically (94 percent), something we’re proud of, but we don’t rest on our laurels, because it’s going to be even harder to match that if we get a season three, but, you know, we’re going to try our damnedest to do it.” Sounds like the break’s over.

“Marvel’s Luke Cage” season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.