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.

Iron Fist: Bar the Big Boss

 "I know a good family therapist that could help... should any of you survive the night."

This is an excellent season finale, wrapping everything up, or at least wrapping enough things up. Yet there's an episode to go after the surprise cliffhanger. It'll be interesting to see where this is going.

The episode is all about family relationships.We see Ward for the first time in a while, offered freedom from the, er, psych ward by Bakuto and the Hand, causing an almightily dramatic hostage situation with a helpless Harold and Joy. Harold and Joy continue to have a lovely daddy/daughter relationship- poor naive Joy. Yet Harold's ultimate reaction to Wards's betrayal, the betrayal of the son he called a "disappointment" when seemingly about to be beheaded- is admiration. We learn that he, too, killed his father out of ambition. Which is, well...

Meanwhile we have the total breakdown of trust between Danny and his "brother", Davos, who continues to feel abandoned by his bettrayal of his duty to guard K'un Lun... and be with him. They clash over everything, not least the trustworthiness of Colleen, who goes on an admirable redemption journey with the loving help of Danny... who has regainedthe power of the Iron Fist. Fittingly, it is Colleen who defeats Bakuto. Yet she refuses to kill him out of ethics... only for Davos to do so, angrily fight Danny, and leave all mardy like. Well then.

We end with Danny and Colleen declaring they've found family in each other. Good, because it seems the Meachums, or at least Harold, have utterly betrayed them...

Superb telly. But what happens now?

Iron Fist: The Mistress of All Agonies

 "Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is leave."

Argh. This episode could have been really good. The ideas are good, the plot is even good. It's just... the script and some of the performances are not up to par.

I'd exempt Wai Ching Ho from that though. She's a chillingly evil, gaslighting power who seems powerful even when tied up and interrogated, perhaps partly because she "spend most of the 17th Century being interrogated. Then there's David Wenham as the resurrected Harold, a kind of evil Captain Jack Harkness who, Ward is told by a rival, is fated to become a little more evil with each resurrection.

Harold has quite the journey, first acting like the wandering monster in Frankenstein before remembering who his is, ultimately killing his underling suddenly and callously on a whim. He's a dangerous man, manipulating Ward into the clutches of the same psychiatrist who "treated" Danny. And then Joy has the shock of her life, falling right into his manipulative clutches. If handled better, this could have been superb, with both Gao and Harold being manipulative and evil.

But there's more- Sacha Dhawan as an assassin after Danny. Our- and Danny's- proper introduction to Bakuto. Who is he? He certainly knows a lot, to the point of knowing more aboiut what the Iron Fist can do than Danny does.

This should be good. This is a fascinating plot, on paper. Why am I not enjoying this? Because by this point things are feeling a little off.

Iron Fist: The Blessing of Many Fractures

 "Are you a moron? You thought you could end a criminal conspiracy by destroying a few test tubes?"

Iron Fist continues to be inconsistent. This episode is, on the whole, quite good. The opening is clever: Danny suspects that Gao is after his friends, Colleen makes sure Claire is safe... and Danny finds the corpse of Harold, naturally assuming the Hand was responsible, with Ward, of course, not only allowing him to think so but twisted the knife. The contrast between Danny's naive goodness and Ward's damaged cynicism could not be clearer. And the contrast permeates the episode.

Ward and Joy are offered a prisoner's dilemma of a severance package: it must be accepted by both or neither. Both play games behind each others' backs, with Joy ultimately outsmarting her brother and rejecting it, believing sjhe can fight back. Yet she does so in a way she sees as being Ward's... gathering dirt on the board. The key brother/sister scene is very touching, with Ward resolving to tell Joy all. Yet he can't, seeing blood everywhere like Lady Macbeth, something that will surely continue... and ends by being a total arse to her. Yet again.

Danny, meanwhile, supported by a loving Colleen and a wisely critical Claire (I love the letter from Luke!), rather naively resolves to go to China and get at Gao there, which leads to some rather cool adventures, not least with a drunken boxer, although I'm not sure how he can still afford this after having been ejected from Rand, knowingly or not. There are some great character scenes with him, Colleen and Claire and much discussion of the ethics of killing and revenge. Yet the most cutting comments come from the boxer: is Danny really motivated by his loyalty, as Iron Fist, to K'un Lun? 

We end with triumph, as Danny captures Gao, but not before it looked as though he would kill her. It seems it was indeed Gao who killed his parents. 

This is actually good telly. Who knows what next episode will be like.

Iron Fist: Felling Tree with Roots

 "And it makes my hand light up..."

Wow. This series is bizarrely all over the place. Last episode was pretty awful. This episode is pretty damn good. Yes, we get a very sweet, heartwarming sex scene between Colleen and Danny, the sort that feel very real between two people who genuinely feel an intimate bond. Yes, Danny has the courage of his convictions and gives a defient speech to the board of Rand, showing himself to be media savvy in the process.

Yet it's a dark, dark world. Madame Gao visits Danny in Rand's offices, where she has a pass: "I've been in Rand a lot longer than you have." She's there to troll him, yes, to annoy and disorient him, but also to warn him off. As it turns out she uses the thirteentrh floor of the building for her heroin trade. The continues to goad Danny about his father. Yet, by the end, after Danny, Collen and the Hand's rivals have trashed the heroin factory, it turns out that the whole operation is now, like much Western industry, outsourced to China. And it seems Danny's own father may have had connections to heroin too. Wow. Quite the bombshell.

The opiatre addiction between Ward and a frustrated Joy is not quite working, but it certainly shows the stress Ward is under from the way he's exploited by his manipulative, amoral father, who has Danny eating out of the palm of his hand. Ward's sudden patricide i shocking, yes, But not foreshadowed. It's quite the ending to quite an episode. Oh, and who is Bakuto? And what happens now that the board have removed Danny and the Meachums? This really feels like a turning point. Unexpectedly good.

Iron Fist: Immortal Emerges from Cage

 "I had the fastest donkey cart in K'un Lun too."

Hmm. I liked the stuff with Ward's unravelling opioid addiction, sudden though it is, and Joy's alarm. I like the arse-kicking partnership between Colleen and Claire as they protect Radovan with their complementary talents. They're quite the team.

But the stuff with Danny and that monk from his past as he spends much of the episode fighting agents of the Hand in a contest... it's just a poor man's Luke from The Empire Strikes Back, isn't it? That monk is Yoda, encouraging Danny to destroy his ego, past and feelings to be Iron Fist. He cannot be allowed anger, lust, emotion, feelings. And he must focus only on destroying the Hand even at the expense of an innocent girl's life. 

Danny's act of mercy at the end is where he leaves Dagobah and metaphorically goes to Cloud City. He and the monk from his pazst turn their backs on each other. But... we've seen this all before. With Darth Vader. It's disappointing that an episode trying to show the depth of K'un Lun and its martial arts should be so derivative and shallow. I hope things donb't stay like this; this episode shows an alarming drop in quality.

Still, Madame Gao's revelations are shocking. She's lived in K'un Lunn? She has dirt on Danny's father...?

Iron Fist: Under Leaf Pluck Lotus

 "I want the leak under the sink fixed!"

Things get more and more intriguing. There's a new, synthetic heroin on the market, being pushed by the Hand, manipulating the Rand corporation. Yet there are other kinds of drug abuse too. Ward, ignoring Harold's calls, takes pills and gets high, much to Joy's consternatiion. And Rand's drug factory appears to be emitting chemicals that cause cancer in children. We see the dodgy ethics of big business, the dangers of under-regulated capitalism, and juxtapose this with the innocence of Danny.

Speaking of said innocence, this is the episode where Danny and Colleen start exuding huge amounts of sexual chemistry and it becomes clear, in the cutest possible way, that these two socially awkward martial artists rather like each other.

Conflict is brewing between Ward and Danny about business, that is clear. Yet we also start to see both the insidiousness and the power of the Hand, with Claire Temple turning up to explain what happened in Daredevil. Suddenly, Danny, fish out of water, has a purpose. And Colleen too.

I'm not sure we quite have a format or status quo yet, but thatr's no bad thing. I'm enjoying this,

Iron Fist: Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch

 "It's my name!"

Like the two previous episodes, this is utterly gripping. We have the narrative of Danny trying to prove who he is and asserting his rights against the Meachums. Colleen (I liked the reference to Daughters of the Dragon) has an interesting arc with her joining in the cage fighting she'd previously denounced as dishonourable: sher's up to something. More compellingly, though, what drives the status quo forward now is connections with the wider Netflix Marvel world.

We know from laast episode that Harold wants to defy the hand. We now see him humiliated, controlled and belittlred by Madame Gao. Meanwhile, a seemingly desperate Danny finds none other than Jeri Hogarth, gains her trust, and suddenly his legal situation is looking up. The legal machinations of Jeri are hugely entertaining. What's more Danny seems to be starting to suspect that Harold may well not be quite so dead...

So far this is as good as any of its predecessors. Acting included, overall.

Iron Fist: Shadow Hawk Takes Flight

 "We're not bad guys, if that's what you think..."

For a series apparently disliked by the critics, this is pretty damn good so far. Yes, I know it's a cliche: the hero is stuck in a psychiatric ward where no one believes who he is and he's in the Catch-22 of having to pretend to be someone else- but it works here, and it's a nice means of both developing character and giving us more exposition.

So Danny was in K'un Lun, one of the seven capital cities of Heaven, that appears on Earth only once in fifteen years.There he learned to focus his chi into the Iron Fist... that won't work when he's drugged up. We see him slowly convince everyone that he's Danny- Joy, Colleen, Harold, even his doctor... who, ironically, proceeds to detain him for superhero fantasies, a nice touch.

Harold thinks Danny may be useful as an enemy of our old acquaintances the Hand... but Ward has a different agenda, as we see at the end. I'm not sure why, plot-wise, Danny's power suddenly works, but it's an awesome conclusion. More please.

Iron Fist: Snow Gives Way

 "That's my building."

"You should sell it and buy some shoes,"

Apologies, but I'm having trouble sourcing further watchable episodes of Robin of Sherwood so that will have to be paused for now. Instead, having caught up with the Disney Marvel series, I'm going to crack on with the Netflix stuff so it's hopefully done in toime for Daredevil: Born Again. I can only hope. I'll continue to alternate with other stuff, Dead Set for now.

So, Iron Fist. I read a few issuyes of Power Man and Iron Fist in the '80s not long before cancellation, mostly the Secret Wars II stuff. I vaguely know the broad strokes of the origin story. That's about it. So I enjoyed thr mystery here. It's an intriguing sert-up- Danny Rand, in theory a rich man, arrives back home after fifteen years to find himself unrecognised, friendless, homeless and, perhaps, conspired against by the family of his late father's seemingly dead business partner. The family dynamic is well developed so we get to know the characters- Danny is naive and good; Ward will always be the bully he was as a kid.

There is mystery upon mystery, though. Harold faked his death a dozen years ago: why? What happened to Danny after that plane crash, of which we see only dreamlike flashbacks. What and where is K'un Lun? Why indeed hid humanity abandon the paradise of hunter gathering for the hard slog of agriculture?

Also, we meet Colleen Wing, having met Misty Knight in Luke Cage.And we get some very, very cool and borderline supernatural martial arts. I'm aware the critics are a bit lukewarm about this show but so far I'm intrigued.