Iron Fist: "Dragon Plays With Fire"

The Sound Of One Hand Fapping

Well, that was even more underwhelming than I expected.


Now that the season is over, I guess we can determine that the story of Iron Fist is his struggle against a middle aged undead businessninja who he thinks of as a father figure because our hero is stupid.

Everything along the wasy was a distraction. Madame Gao? The Hand? Bakuro? Davos? All distractions. It came down to Danny Rand vs. Harold Meacham on a roof, with the incredibly convenient trope of the hero refusing to kill the villain so that someone else (Ward) could kill him (for the second time) so that the villain ends up dead (for the third and then presumably fourth times).

Did the series bring Danny Rand to a point where he can be a decent quarter of The Defenders? Fuck no. I'm still not sure which particular of the various hinted at epiphanies allowed him to summon that one Iron Fist in the hand that got shot at the end. And more importantly, the series ends with Danny trying to get back to Kun'Lun, only to find dead Hand and a closed off portal and thus is WRACKED BY INCREDIBLE GUILT which, as we've seen on the CW, is a thing you do to your protagonist when you want their future adventures to be maudlin and irritating.

The question of whether Bakuro is dead or not? Up in the air. Rand Corporation? Up in the air. The Hand? Up in the air, but we knew that was gonna happen. We're left with an even shittier version of the Luke Cage ending, where we resolve very little and are given a Next Season's Threads montage, which inexplicably includes Joy and Davos plotting to murder Danny, which barely makes sense for one of them.

What we're left with is not just the worst of the Netflix series, but clearly the single worst thing in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, because at least Incredible Hulk is eleven plus hours shorter.