Iron Fist: Dragon Plays with Fire

 "It was someone much more treacherous than I..."

And so the season ends, at last. And the finale is, in the end, superb. What could have been a tiresome tale of false accusations turns out to be much deeper.

This is about Harold, the arch-manipulator, who always was the malevolent puppet master. I suppose we didn't need Gao to tell us it was Harold who arranged for the plane to crash, not wanting Danny's father to expose what was always his heroin operation. I'm sure I wasn't the only viewer who had more than an inkling.

But it's about more than that. It's about Ward redeeming himself, being loyal to Danny and enen showing some wise self-knowledge at the end. It's about Joy realising the terrible truth about her father, yet being perhaps easy prey for Davos trying to turn her against Danny as Gao smiles. It's about bad, abusive families and the damage they cause across the generations, some treatable, some bad. Colleen and Danny are a sweet couple but, as Claire says, they're both pretty damaged people.

I saw thend coming, too: K'un Lun is gone for the next fifteen years now. Yet Danny has learned a lot about himself, and what he wants to do as an Iron Fist: to be a hero. It's fitting that he and Ward are reconciled. Both of them have grown.

Yes, this series was uneven in places. But overall the final episodes are strong enough to make it a very impressive serial.