What I’m Watching: Iron Fist (Season Finale)

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 13 “Dragon Plays with Fire” (C-)

All I could think throughout this entire episode was that I really hope we don’t get a season two. I wasted so many hours of my life watching this show both under the pretense that it was going to get good and that I needed to be up to date for when “The Defenders” finally premieres and hopefully proves to have been worth the wait. Despite the fact that star Finn Jones, who is truly terrible on this show, has suggested that the show’s renewal is soon to be announced, there’s no confirmation anywhere that this show will join the ranks of the other Marvel series to earn a second season pickup. Bakuto’s death in the previous episode means that the stakes weren’t all that high in this hour, and instead it was just a matter of who was going to kill Harold, who got to go full-on evil in his latest incarnation and almost beg for his death by trying to become all-powerful. I hesitate to say that there was an intriguing moment towards the end of the episode where Davos and Joy were sitting down for coffee with Gao at the next table, three crucial players in the show all with very different motivations who you wouldn’t expect to see in the same place as the others. Colleen was ecstatic to be invited by Danny to come to K’un-Lun, and as Danny childishly got excited about arriving just in time for afternoon kung fu practice, we got to see that it’s all destroyed. I don’t want to find out more, and I sincerely hope that no other viewers do either.

Season grade: C-
Season MVP: David Wenham as Harold

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 12 “Bar the Big Boss” (C)

Just one episode left! I’m so glad, though I’ll have to spend more time with Danny Rand when “The Defenders” premieres. Apparently star Finn Jones is talking like this show is going to be renewed because a lot of people watched it thinking it would be good, and somehow the terrible reviews it got won’t outweigh the initial hype. I contend that, as I was discussing with a friend, any Marvel show is much better without the Hand, and while I know the express purpose of the Iron Fist is to destroy the Hand, I do wish that he would get on with it. I don’t know how many times we have to debate whether it’s worth putting an all-powerful mega-villain behind bars rather than just killing him, and considering that he was ready to cut off Harold’s head in front of his daughter, who he had just shot for no real reason, he and Joy should have been far more decisive about getting rid of the man who’s clearly become evil over the course of just two episodes. Colleen is firmly on the good side of things, and that leaves just Joy as the remaining pure ally (not counting an absent Claire, of course). Ward was all too willing to make a deal with the devil, and Harold even expressly said that he has no use for Danny anymore and that he might have disposed of Bakuto or the other hand, both of which would satisfy him. Maybe everyone on this show will take each other out in the finale and we won’t have to deal with the completely unexpected introduction of the DEA as a new threat to Danny’s livelihood.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 11 “Lead Horse Back to Stable” (C)

Well, it didn’t take long at all for Colleen to realize that the Hand is bad news. I laughed at the notion that the Hand provides internship placements, one of Bakuto’s championed assets of the group he’s trying to defend as honorable. One of her students called Bakuto on her, another few showed up to bring her in, and then two of them straight up tried to kill her on Bakuto’s orders with the creepy pronouncement that she would serve the Hand in her final moments. We knew that she was good, but it still throws this whole Hand thing into question, and Claire’s suggestion that she should have chosen another body part to name her non-evil part of the organization just about sums up the complexity of the issue. Claire trying to get Davos to appreciate the best pizza in New York was a minor distracting subplot, and there was also far too much emphasis on Davos’ resentment of Danny for taking the Iron Fist that wasn’t supposed to be his and leaving. Davos isn’t the ally that Danny needs in this, and the fact that he made up with Claire, who tried to attack him because she was racked with guilt and had just almost been killed just puts him back where he started. Joy’s expectation that they were going to have Bakuto arrested is unrealistic, but I think all this enthusiastic drive to cut the head off so that the snake will die is going to get to her and cause her to become a liability to the mission.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 10 “Black Tiger Steals Heart” (C)

I don’t know anything – and really don’t care – about the mythology of this show and the Hand. That said, I find it extremely hard to believe that, this whole time, Colleen has actually been a member of the Hand, which she claims is not all bad but is represented poorly by Gao. That’s pretty much the foundation of their relationship, that Colleen had no idea what Danny was rambling about, and now she’s known the entire time who he was and, most importantly, she’s been lying to him about pretty much everything. Bakuto’s whole operation did seem a bit too organized, and now Danny doesn’t have any allies aside from Davos and the increasingly unreliable members of the Meachum family. Joy is experiencing a lot of emotions with her father, who had one moment of pure rage and then, after a meeting with Bakuto, went in to intimidate Lawrence Wilkins into killing himself, only to shoot him in the head before he had the chance. He’s only lying selectively to Joy, and choosing to trust her in his newfound quest to take down Bakuto, who’s far better than Gao but still an enemy. With three episodes left in this season, I’m more than ready to be done with this show, and I hope that Danny and anyone from this show who appears there will prove more tolerable when they are on “The Defenders.” Maybe Claire can prove helpful since she didn’t know Colleen wasn’t actually a good guy, and something tells me that Colleen is still going to prove to be an ally.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 9 “The Mistress of All Agonies” (C+)

So, apparently Harold’s alive, and he took quite the bug-eyed walk home, re-experiencing things like sprinklers and street food with a completely new lease on life. I guess he can’t be killed, which is convenient to a degree, though the timing of his long-awaited reunion with Joy was not so fortuitous given that he’s become a completely transformed person. Buying his eager assistant ice cream and then beating him to death when all he wanted was vanilla was deeply disconcerting, and the fact that he’s alive again didn’t sit well with Ward, who promptly got arrested for drug possession and then said exactly the things he needed to get him flagged as a crazy person in strong denial of reality. Danny tried to be as productive as possible in this hour, getting the truth serum to make Gao talk, and it would have been helpful for him to know that he could have used his iron fist to heal Colleen from the start. Gao knows exactly how to get inside everyone’s head, and while Claire and Colleen both put up a good fight, she definitely had an effect on them. It’s not clear what’s going to happen next, but Danny is in theory much closer than he’s ever been to finally taking down the people who ruined his life, starting with the woman in charge. Whether he and Joy will be able to ascend back to where they were in the company from which they’ve now been ousted remains to be seen.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 8 “The Blessing of Many Fractures” (C+)

All of this show’s characters have lost any sense of normalcy, with Danny, Colleen and Claire jetting off to China and Ward and Joy turning down a $200 million settlement with the board of the company that ousted them. Danny didn’t start off on a good note when he walked to find Harold missing and presumed dead and Ward there to blame him for it. It’s definitely not a good sign that Ward is seeing things, and that he was ready to open up to Joy about everything but then couldn’t go through with it because he was hallucinating blood seeping into the elevator. Joy is currently existing in such a different universe, where the Hand isn’t anything and where a private investigator she hired – any chance it was Jessica Jones? – was able to dig up enough dirt to help her get ahead in business without the threat of death by sword at any moment. Claire, despite being put in harm’s way more than a few times during this hour, came in quite handy to help Colleen defeat her opponent, and even got to advocate for mercy despite the terrible nature of other people. As soon as he realized that Gao was the one who had killed his family, Danny went full Iron Fist, and it’s hard to know what’s going to happen next as a result. If anything is clear, it’s that Danny is ready to be in control and to ensure that no one else gets hurt at the hands or the behest of this evil woman.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 7 “Felling Tree with Roots” (C)

A lot happened in this episode, and things are a huge mess now. Just as Harold was about to be punished for what he was up to with Danny while he was trying to deny it, Danny showed up and salvaged that situation, leading to Harold very casually chopping some dead bodies up when his son showed up. Danny has gone from insisting that he is who he is to building a legitimate connection and romance with Colleen and ensuring that he’s able to make serious change in the company by insisting on ethical policies and leaking them to the press so that the board couldn’t contradict him. He was busy tracking Madame Gao and trying to enlist others to band against the Hand, and it seems like that battle is going a lot better than his corporate fight. The board didn’t waste any time in removing all three of the descendants of its founders, which seemed like a brash move. It’s hard to believe that it happened, and I suspect that Joy won’t go down without putting up a fight. Ward, on the other hand, didn’t even notice since his private embezzlement fund was drained by his father. I’d say that Ward stabbing Harold is just about the most inconveniently-timed development we could have seen right now, and the somewhat predictably turn of Ward from jealous businessman to evil, disturbed killer feels like a contrived plot device that is only going to get in the way of everything else that’s currently going on.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 6 “Immortal Emerges from Cave” (C)

It’s hard to understand how this show’s two worlds come together. I was equally amused and excited to hear our protagonist proclaim “I’m Danny Rand!” but then he realized that he might need to let Danny Rand die in order to let Iron Fist truly take over. The Danny we know who apologizes to clients and spends his time searching warehouses with a very unhappy Ward doesn’t track at all with this person who has been training his whole life to defeat the Hand. Just like the last episode, the entire second half of this hour was devoted to some shenanigans that played out slowly and, in this case, had me very puzzled. Having to complete a handful of challenges in order to get the girl back felt strange and wholly unnecessary, and fighting against opponents who could be in two places at once didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Realizing that he has to withdraw so that the girl could be saved and that maybe he should have made the other choice was also hard to swallow, and it just drags all this out even more. Claire always seems to show up to infuse shows with her own plotline where she takes people to the hospital and then gets attacked, and it’s a good thing that she had Colleen with her this time. Ward is spiraling out, and accompanying Danny to discover a head on a spike in a truck in his warehouse didn’t help matters at all. On top of all this, the friend who told me to keep watching this show because it gets good said that he was at the middle of the season at this point, and then it all got bad again. I’m not sure I should really be investing my time in this anymore.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 5 “Under Leaf Pluck Lotus” (B-)

So it’s true that this show has definitely improved from where it was, and I laugh every time someone says something like, “Oh, you’re Danny Rand?” This installment was mildly intriguing, though I’ll admit that, by the end of it, I didn’t understand why so much time had been spent on Danny and Colleen’s surveillance of the pier. That’s something that’s pretty standard for “Daredevil” and “Luke Cage” also, exhausting unnecessary effort on showing its characters staking somewhere out before a big battle ensues. In another connection to those two shows, we got to see Claire Temple, played by Rosario Dawson in what must surely be one of the coolest five-series deals ever signed, for the first time on this show. Her introduction was timed perfectly since they needed someone with serious medical knowledge to come in handy when they couldn’t take their newest ally to a hospital. Danny has been training for this his whole life, but it seems that the quick-to-decapitate Hand is also well aware of this fact. What Danny isn’t quite as adept at is navigating the new business world in which he exists, since he managed to get himself caught on camera promising to make something right that was supposed to be settled in a more official, legal setting. Even Joy seems to be losing some patience, and the emergence of her humanity after her initially cold response to the loss others suffered still pales in comparison to her business savvy and her vision of the big picture.

What I’m Watching: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 4 “Eight Diagram Dragon Palm” (B-)

Okay, so maybe now we’re getting somewhere. I don’t think Danny once uttered his signature catchphrase - “I’m Danny Rand” - in this hour, and that in itself is a tremendous improvement over the first three installments. Far more crucially, this whole charade of people pretending that he’s not who he claims he is and trying to make him seem insane is over, and that’s a relief. I was surprised with the level of honesty that Harold shared what had happened to him, and how the way he’s portrayed changed dramatically during this episode alone. Being given the opportunity to see Joy in person for the first time by the Hand showed that he hasn’t completely lost his humanity, and asking for the one favor of killing the person who hit her demonstrated his loyalty to family above all, though clearly his preferred child is the one he’s not allowed to see. Ward is becoming extremely jealous of Danny, and he didn’t waste any time in following his father’s orders to be clear about Danny’s radical new policies that came within moments of his being announced as alive and then given some say in the company due to his majority stakeholder status. At least Joy has the patience to deal with Danny, and now she owes him a lot after he saved her life in a big way. Colleen is embracing her underground fighter status, and her students were actually very into it, though I think she would rather keep that part of her life a secret.

Take Three: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 3 “Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch” (C)

A few minutes into this episode, I decided to start keeping a count of the number of times Danny said “I’m Danny Rand!” I found myself sadly disappointed, as, unlike the previous two episodes, it was only actually uttered once, with “it’s Danny Rand” and “it’s my name, it means something” counting for partial credit. The action on this show, which is hard to find, still leaves much to be desired, with Danny hiding on Colleen’s ceiling at the start of the episode and then finally up for some violence when he fought the man attempting to torch his records and when he smacked Colleen’s ungrateful student who made a joke of what Danny considers an art form. The leopard punch didn’t impress me too much either, and I think Colleen is a far more formidable fighter, though she did get a bit cocky while trying to take down her opponent in the underground ring, something that worked out well enough for her in the end. Danny’s not laying low at all now, trying to make a peace offering with Joy only to have her offer him a deal to walk away and change his name. I couldn’t be happier than he decided to approach a character from the Netflix Marvel universe that we already know, Carrie-Anne Moss’ Jeri Hogarth, though she’s nowhere near as terrific as she was on “Jessica Jones.” Danny doesn’t care about money, but being recognized as who he keeps saying he is will end up happening that way. Harold’s trapped condition is an intriguing one, and it seems that he’s nowhere near as in charge of things as he makes it out to be.

Round Two: Iron Fist

Iron Fist: Season 1, Episode 2 “Shadow Hawk Takes Flight” (C)

Well, this wasn’t much of an improvement. After a more than shaky and unenthusiastic start, this second episode was quite plodding and only broke through – literally with a punch to a wall – at the end of the episode after 58 minutes of boredom. For how quickly and effectively the Meechums were able to get Danny committed and locked up, it didn’t take much longer for it to become clear to everyone involved that Danny was in fact Danny. His repeated insistence that he is who he says he is doesn’t do him much credit and just make him seem whiny, and I’m glad that people are now starting to finally believing him. The doctor got there with just a quick confirmation of details from Joy, yet he still wanted to classify Danny as crazy, unwilling to believe everything that he said. Ward going to visit and intimidate Colleen after Danny called him was the best possible confirmation that something suspicious was going on that he could have given, and he really doesn’t understand subtlety. I’ve been trying to figure out how I know Ward, and a visit to IMDB reveals that actor Tom Pelphrey played Kurt Bunker on “Banshee,” a far better show than this. Something tells me that, after being put in a mental ward and forced to take medication, Danny might enjoy eating a few of the M and Ms rather than just taking the brown ones out to prove his identity, passing an admittedly clever test set up by the one non-evil member of the Meechum family.

Pilot Review: Iron Fist

Iron Fist (Netflix)
Premiered March 17

I feel like I need to be watching all of these new Marvel series, partly because I know that I’m going to want to follow “The Defenders” when it premieres and won’t want to miss anything from the mythology. While I was completely enthralled with “Jessica Jones” from the first episode, it took me considerably longer to warm to both “Daredevil” and “Luke Cage.” This show, on the other hand, seems markedly different, and much, much less sophisticated and impressive. This introductory exposition felt like it dragged so much, with the nonchalant and mysteriously alive Danny Rand insisting over and over that he was who he said he was while two people from his past refused to even acknowledge the possibility before eventually turning much more sinister, making their intentions to keep his potential existence quiet clear. The one scene in which Danny did something impressive, flipping himself out of the way when a taxi nearly took him out, also felt somewhat forced and out of place, and I can only hope whatever action awaits going forward will be far more convincing and compelling. I feel like I need to give this show another try just to see if there’s anything of interest to be found, but at this point, I’m not at all optimistic given this extremely lackluster and plodding start. No one in the cast did much to help that, and I’m finding Danny more irritating than anything else, hardly what you want to be saying about your main character from the very beginning.

How will it work as a series? We know that there’s more to Danny than he’s letting on and that he is indeed who he says he is, and so I assume we’re going to learn a lot more about what turned him into who he is today and why everyone seems to want him did. It might be a bit interesting, but I’m not sold.
How long will it last? Premiering this show last was probably smart for Netflix since, seeing the dismal reviews that it has gotten across the board, I assume there’s going to settle for Iron Fist being a character on an ensemble show and not getting another showcase season of his own.

Pilot grade: C