Finished it last night. I thought it was ok, not great. I was fine watching an episode at a time, whereas I binge watched DD and usually watched 2 or 3 of JJ and LC. Some random thoughts:
The actor who played Ward reminded me of a cross between Phil Hartman and Willem Dafoe. Creepy.
Did the power that allowed Daddy Meacham to return from the dead also regrow fingers? The pinkie he cuts off early in the series is back when he crawls out of the lake…
In the comics, did Danny ever punch Luke Cage with the Iron Fist? If so, what happened?
That’s actually how they first met: Danny slugged Luke with the iron fist, which sent Luke flying across the street – and through the wall of the building across the street, which I guess was a load-bearing wall, since the building then obligingly fell in on Luke, who took a little while to make his way out from under.
There’s at least one comic where Iron Fist knocked Luke Cage right out but, as always, relative power levels are left to the whims of the writer and the era.
I’m just starting episode 4 so I’ll go back and reread the thread when I’m done. I know there were bad reviews but I didn’t read them. So far I can see it suffers from the same problems that most of the the other Marvel Netflix series do. Bad pacing. I think Daredevil season 2 was the only one that didn’t drag. I got bored with seeing him struggle to be recognized. It didn’t need to be 3 episodes long. I’ll see if it gets better.
Overall, I actually liked it, but there were a bunch of things that I wish they’d done differently. The style they were going for with the Chinese martial arts was supposed to be relatively realistic (i.e.: limited wire-fu) and was kinda okay for the unarmed bits. The Japanese-style fighting was just bad. You don’t use a katana the way Colleen does. (Granted, I’ve been doing Japanese martial arts for literally half my life, so I have to overlook a lot of shitty portrayals of martial arts in film.) They had this problem with Daredevil too; all of the “Japanese” fight like their first martial art was Wushu and they dropped in on a kendo class at the Y every once in a while.
The main problem I had with with Iron Fist is that I didn’t give a fuck about Joy or Ward. The entire Meacham sub-plot was crap. It was about horrible people doing horrible things to each other. Fuck them. I started to look at how long the episode was going to last every single time one of those two showed up on screen. It’s not the fault of the actors, they just had no real role or impact on the story until the forced-feeling and rushed conclusion.
Ward was set up as a budding sociopath in the early flashback scenes and then neutered into a whiny shitbag in the present day. Not believable that a teen who likes torturing people younger and weaker than himself would grow enough of a conscience to be a pill-popping wreck destroyed by conflicts between filial loyalty and his attachment to his sister. They tried to make him too sympathetic when he probably should have been nastier instead of kind of pathetic.
Joy was alternately presented as sympathetic and horrible. They couldn’t make up their minds which way her character was supposed to be. She has no believable motivation for anything she does since every action they have her take contradicts something else she just did or said. They should have made her a stronger contrast to Ward by making her much more sympathetic.
Harold should have been the main villain for this season, with the connections with the Hand being brought in midway or toward the end to set up the next season. The Madame Gao plot was the best part, like others have said, but the reveal and confrontation with the other faction of the Hand felt shoehorned in and should have been left mostly to a second season as well. The coming confrontation could have been set up as a hook for the next season.
After an initial “Oh wow, I’m back in the real world” phase (which was actually done well at the beginning) Danny should be laser-focused on finding out what happened to his parents. Danny should have discovered Harold’s involvement in his parents’ death relatively early in the series, after fending off a few attempts on his life (similar to what did happen in the first couple of episodes) and should have been conflicted about what to do about the situation because of a stronger connection with Joy made possible by her more sympathetic treatment.
It would have been a much more interesting show if Danny was a martial arts bum who got tangled in the machinations of the Hand. Having to deal with being a nobody with no place to live instead of being (yet another) billionaire playboy would have been more interesting. Instead of being able to get back into the company so quickly, having Joy as a lifeline would have created conflict between the siblings, and by extension Harold.
The relationship between Danny and Colleen could have been fostered by repeated encounters as she inadvertently uncovers Hand activity — that at first she doesn’t recognize as Hand. A slower build-up of that relationship and a growing realization would have made for a more powerful connection and reveal later in the series.
They were trying to set up a sweet/naive boy taking a dark turn, but didn’t quite pull it off.
I finally powered through the last few episodes. It definitely did start to drag on.
I think the biggest flaw is that it tried to do all the plotlines. If they’d done just Mme Gao and the drugs, or just the Meachums and the corporate espionage, or just Bakudo and the cult, or just WTF happened in K’un Lun, they could have had room to do the character and plot development well. As it is they just packed so much in that none of it was done properly.
Eh… not sure I agree with that. For instance, I thought the character arc of Ward Meachum was fascinating and very well portrayed, while the whole “there are two hands” thing was a mess. Is that because there was enough time to do the first and not enough time to do the second, or just because they did the first one well and the second one poorly?
I really think they blew it not giving the role of Iron Fist to Lewis Tan – i.e., the drunken Hand fighter from Episode 8. In addition to being a legitimate martial artist, he just had a dynamic presence. Now, he ultimately might not have been able to bring to life some of the dumbass lines that Finn Jones had to deal with. But I wish that he’d have gotten the opportunity.
I’m trying to imagine 13 episodes of Iron Fist beating up drug dealers interspersed with Madame Gao cryptically saying “I put pee-pee in your Coke, Daniel-san. Search your feelings; you know it to be true.”
So I managed to finish it, more out of sheer determination than pleasure. Most of what the critics have pointed out is valid, but there’s one point that I don’t think gets mentioned enough: Danny is a dupe. Whether you find his naiveté believable or not, it’s frustrating and depressing to watch a series in which the so-called hero is so thoroughly lied to, manipulated and toyed with by people around him. A protagonist should have vulnerabilities, but Danny is in so far over his head he crosses the line between sympathetic and just pathetic. And while he eventually figures out just how many people are lying to him, he never grows as a character because of it, never becomes any wiser or less impulsive. I neither liked nor respected Danny, and his struggles, such as they were, did not engage me. That’s fatal for a main character.
I’m just getting around to seeing this myself. I’ve gotten as far as Episode 4, and all I can think is, “This is what happens when you let your monk use INT as a dump stat.”
Finally getting around to this in the run up to The Defenders. And episode 1 is not good. And that’s 12 hours that I don’t want to spend watching if it doesn’t get a lot better very quickly.
I haven’t read the whole thread, because I don’t want to spoil myself if I do watch it - but should I? Is it worth finishing? Or should I just go to the Defenders knowing “there’s an Iron Fist guy, he knows some martial arts stuff?”
It…gets better. But then it gets worse. And then it just gets confusing.
‘Danny Rand does martial arts, and, doesn’t like the Hand’ basically covers everything you need to know for Defenders, presumably (since anything else IF set up is presumably going to be used for Iron Fist Season 2).
It’s honestly pretty skippable. Here’s the series in a nutshell, spoilered if you decide to go through with watching it:
[spoiler]
As a young boy, Danny Rand survives a plane crash that kills his billionaire parents, and is rescued by monks from the mystical city of K’un-Lun, which only appears on Earth every ten years or so. He’s trained in the martial arts, and eventually passes a test to become the Immortal Iron Fist, which lets him punch things really, really hard. The Iron Fist is meant to protect K’un-Lun from the Hand when K’un-Lun is on Earth.
Danny promptly abandons K’un-Lun and returns to New York to take back control of his father’s financial empire, which is currently being run by Danny’s childhood friend, Ward Meachum. Ward, and his sister, Joy, are the kids of Danny’s father’s best friend, Harold, who died of cancer some years prior. Except, he didn’t die! The Hand used their ninja magic to return him from the dead. Harold’s still manipulating Rand Corp. from behind the curtains, on behalf of the Hand. He’s the big bad of the season, and far and away the best thing in the whole show. Particularly the parts where he’s an epic douche to his son, Ward.
Danny meets a woman named Colleen Wing, who runs a martial arts dojo for teenagers, and they start to have a relationship.
The three Meachums spend most of the series alternately stabbing each other in the back, and throwing Danny under a variety of buses. The specific details don’t matter, except that it takes Danny a comically long time to figure out that he’s being gaslighted. At one point Ward murders his dad, but it doesn’t take.
Colleen turns out to be a member of the Hand. Danny is super upset for, like, a minute, then Colleen decides to betray the hand and help Danny foil their plans. Which are… drugs? I think? It doesn’t really matter.
In the finale, Danny defeats Harold, but doesn’t kill him. So Ward does. Again. Ward stays on as CEO of Rand Corp, because Danny is so awful at business. Danny takes Colleen and returns to K’un-Lun - but the pass is filled with dead Hand ninjas, and the portal to K’un-Lun is gone. Danny does his best Darth Vader “NOOOOOO!!!” and the series ends.[/spoiler]