It’s impossible to view Iron Fist in any other context but the Defenders. Danny Rand is the final piece of the quartet and there should have been a lot of interest in making him as different as possible from the other three. Because they are pretty indistinguishable thus far. First, we have Daredevil, the brooding handsome guy who punches people because he never got over his dad being killed when he was a child. Then there’s Jessica Jones, the brooding alcoholic who punches people because she hasn’t gotten over being raped, both mentally and physically, by a super-villain. Finally, we have Luke Cage, the giant brooding black guy who punches people because he’s … why is he upset again? Oh, right, dead wife. Also, clean up Harlem or something?

Anyway, with all this punching and brooding and clown shoe broke-ass goof ballery (the combined income of Daredevil’s law firm, Jessica’s private investigating and Luke’s whatever it is he’s doing might be enough for one of them to take a bus to Jersey), it’s incumbent on Danny Rand the Iron Fist to be something different. The Defenders could use a Spiderman-like breath of fresh air, comic relief, optimism instead of cynicism. Hell, even just someone following a warrior’s code rather than solving all his problems by punching the closest person in the face would have been refreshing. And for about 15 minutes, that’s exactly what we got.

The Premise

Spoiled rich kid Danny Rand is on a private plane with his parents, listening to Outkast so the viewer knows what year it is, and flying over the Himalayas on the way to China. The plane crashes and Danny is the lone survivor, rescued in the snow by a pair of monks who happened to be wandering by. Turns out those monks live in a magical monastery where they train Danny to be a warrior by shaving his head and beating him with sticks. Eventually, and possibly for petty revenge, Danny merges with a dragon in a cave and coopts the heritage of his rescuers, as foreshadowed by his affinity for hip hop. He becomes the mystical Iron Fist, guardian of K’un-lun, which is not the guy with the hat from Mortal Kombat but a mysterious land that only appears at certain times on Earth.

Years later, armed with kung fu, a glowing fist made out of his chi, a magical recharging iPod and no shoes, Danny returns home to NYC and declares himself no longer missing presumed dead. His father’s company (Rand Enterprises) has been taken over by other spoiled children, Danny’s former childhood playmates Joy and Ward Meachum. Their father also ran the company with Danny’s dad, before dying of cancer. OR DID HE?

…

No, he didn’t. Turns out old man Meachum has been kept alive and young by the Hand, a sinister yet vague organization made up nondescript Asian ninjas except when it isn’t. They were last seen in every single Marvel show on Netflix because ninja costumes are cheap and actors who can do a backflip when punched are surprisingly easy to find. So the Hand keep Harold Meachum alive in exchange for some office space at the Rand building, an expense account at Staples and the right to use some warehouses for drug manufacturing. Harold, in return, attempts to backstab them and betray them every chance he gets. Except when he doesn’t because they backstabbed him. Or his son Ward backstabbed him. Or he backstabbed Ward. The Meachums are basically one big pig pile of betrayal, like kindergarteners trying to perform Hamlet or the Red Wedding. It gets real old real fast.

Anyway, Danny starts out fighting to get his company back and prove his existence. Which he does after a remarkably easy court case involving a legal argument that hinged on a bowl made by a prepubescent child. Yet OJ is still in jail. Then Danny has to fight to prove he’s more than a killing machine molded by monks. He does this by falling in love with a karate instructor named Colleen. Who is also in the Hand, sworn enemies of the Iron Fist and K’un-lun. So Danny has to decide if he wants to go back to the monastery for a life of staring at a gate and hoping someone attacks him, like the troll in a poorly run game of Dungeons and Dragons, or if he wants to stay in NY and fight the Hand and get laid. It’s basically Gone With the Wind but with a heavy-handed (snort) metaphor about puberty.

I Hate Everything

So the hope was, make Danny different from the other Defenders so that show isn’t just eight hours of damaged heroes glaring at each other. For the first handful of episodes, Iron Fist kinda pulls it off. Danny can be charming, a handsome and athletic man who is still a little boy mentally. He trusts everyone because why wouldn’t he? He got adopted by monks at an age when policemen are still cool. This allows him to blissfully wander through the World War I Alliance system style machinations of the Meachums and the Hand, as you can’t double cross the naive or stupid.

As a secret identity, Danny Rand, Corporate Hippy, is pretty solid. Like Bruce Wayne, he has the vast resources of a huge monolithic conglomerate behind his do-goodery. Unlike Bruce Wayne, he doesn’t have to fake being stupid in order to accidentally do the right thing while pretending to do the wrong thing. Danny can just do the right thing, like when he apologizes to a grieving woman for a Rand factory possibly giving her family cancer. He then refuses to apologize for his apology and tells the board at Rand to shut down the offending factory. It’s surprisingly refreshing and straight-forward, while also being cathartic since no one does that in reality.

This could have been a neat character to follow. Superheroes have been inherently fascist since Frank Miller reinvented Batman. Even the choice in Marvel’s Civil War was a false one (costumed thugs who want to punch bad guys freely vs. costumed thugs who want people to have a license to punch.) Having a millionaire Bernie Sanders is something different. Someone who wants to use his fortune for good and not just to carry out vigilante justice? Combine this with a code of honor and you’d have a winning formula.

Instead, the show gets bogged down incredibly quickly. The only way to explain it is with an analogy to pro wrestling. Back in the day, Triple H, the current COO of World Wrestling Entertainment, was a villainous wrestler nicknamed “The Cerebral Assassin.” Which implied that he was going to outsmart his opponent, crafting an intricate strategy that would prey on their weaknesses and then striking when the moment was right. Except that in actuality, HHH’s plan was always the same: Hit the guy with a sledgehammer during a match. Dick Dastardly was more cerebral.

That’s the problem with season one of Iron Fist in general and specifically the Hand as villains. The Hand were lame and vague in Daredevil, they’re still lame and vague in Iron Fist. What do they want? To sell heroin. How do they do that? Well, obviously by bringing CEOs back from the dead, hiding them in conspicuous buildings in Manhattan and having them buy warehouses using giant corporations that have billboards everywhere. Or maybe it’s by draining blood for … why do the Hand do that again? Did they explain that in Daredevil? Anyway, they drain blood and run schools for wayward kids which are actually fronts for blood draining. Also, the Hand enforce their drug/blood operations with ninjas, except when they use heavies with machine guns. There are actual drug cartels in the real world who manage to sell heroin just fine without ninjas or bringing people back from the dead.

The only interesting thing about the Hand comes about halfway through the season, when it is revealed that karate instructor and V-card puncher Colleen Wing is working for a subset of the Hand, possibly called “On the Other Hand.” This group of the Hand is … well, doing the same stuff as the regular Hand, except their leader doesn’t like Hand matriarch Madame Gao because … well, he just doesn’t! For a brief moment, the show toys with the idea that the Other Hand isn’t evil and is actually trying to help at risk kids. Again, on the path to an interesting premise! A Deep State within a villainous conspiracy that is trying to do good? Clever! Except after paying lip service to the idea, it turns out all the Hand are evil. Those kids are unfeeling indoctrinated foot soldiers. The end, do not pass go, pick up your ninja costume at the door.

Compounding this morass of vague villainy are the Meachums. The show was going for the Lannisters and ended up with three Joffreys. The entire season is built on cascading betrayals, as previously mentioned. Ward is constantly trying to betray his unkillable zombie father. In turn, his zombie father has undying disappointment that his son isn’t a cold-blooded 80’s style businessman, which manifests via betrayal. Joy Meachum gets stuck with the boring role of “female authority figure/nag”, until she gets roped into the betrayal cul de sac and then she gets to be confused and betrayed all the time. Oh, except when she’s the damsel in distress. This is known as hitting the cliche cycle for poorly written female characters.

Again, if this had been played for laughs and Danny had just blissfully tiptoed through the evil tulips, it might have been OK. But the master plans turn out to be things like “Lock someone in a mental hospital” and “Change some spreadsheets so it looks like Danny was stealing money,” and these plot devices have to be taken seriously, with entire episodes devoted to their resolution. It’s soap opera nonsense and after the 15th time someone gets tied to the train tracks, the viewer starts rooting for the railroad company because at least they did their job competently.

Speaking of soap opera nonsense, the dialogue. Good god, the dialogue. Iron Fist has one job and it does it over and over again. There’ll be a passable kung fu fight, someone will take someone else down, climb on top of them … and vomit exposition all over their face. The show loves having people impart feelings directly to the recipient, especially during fights. The final episode contains such badass battle bon mots as “The funny part is now I’m gonna kill you” and “You’re going to prison. Only this time, it won’t be near as nice as the one you spent the last 13 years in.” When Danny wants to tell Colleen he cares for her, he says things like “We have to stop destroying everything.” It’s a far cry from Wilson Fisk’s “I am the ill intent” speech in season one of Daredevil.

The corny dialogue has a ready made excuse. Danny has been in a monastery. Maybe they all talk stupid! His buddy Davos from K’un-lun shows up late in the season and also talks like Drax the Destroyer, so that all makes sense, right? And sometimes it seems that way. Madame Gao loves talking in circular riddles, until Colleen calls her out for being full of it and not actually saying anything of note. Claire the Night Nurse (truly the Nick Fury of the Marvel Netflix universe) spends most of her time taking the piss out of other characters for being unreasonable cartoons. Some characters seem to realize that the other characters are driveling idiots. But then the Meachums and the Hand and everyone else flatly state their hopes and dreams and suddenly there’s no real difference between how any of the characters talk or act. It’s all just bad.

The crux of the show seems to be on what Danny wants to be or what he has an obligation to be. Is he the Iron Fist? The Iron Fist would have crushed the Hand, love interest Colleen included, geriatric Madame Gao included, kinda sorta innocent at risk kids included. Does he want to be a corporate crusader? Does he want to be a kid and play with fast cars and hot girls? There is no resolution. Well, there sorta is, in that Danny decides to have his cake and eat it too by returning to K’un-lun with his hot girlfriend. Which is kinda breaking rule number one of living a life devoted to spiritual development. But it’s all moot, much like the rest of the show, when Danny discovers that Daffy Duck has shown up with his giant eraser and erased K’un-lun. So we’ll probably get more of THAT in the Defenders: Danny Rand being indecisive and not knowing who he is and wondering what the monks found in his sock drawer before they vanished.

As a character, Danny suffers no consequences, learns nothing, gains nothing, becomes nothing. He literally buys clemency from the DEA at one point, so it’s unlikely any villain short of Thanos can do more than inconvenience him. The power of his chi seems to wax and wane depending on how he feels he’s doing in life. Am I making my dead mom happy? Super fist! Did I leave Collen’s toilet seat up? Sad fist … The fluctuation is never explained. It’s Thor’s hammer but without any context and without any learning. In that regard, Iron Fist  is one out of two Seinfelds: All hugging, no learning.

This indecisiveness carries over to the show itself. Iron Fist doesn’t know what it wants to be. Unless, of course, it wants to be the last show before the Defenders. In which case, mission accomplished. Is it a redemption story? A family drama? A law and order procedural? A horror show with undead businessmen? A kung fu flick? The show never makes up its mind and in the end, it doesn’t matter. The entire thing felt like the preparation for a half-assed dinner party. OK, we put out the plates, we cooked the roast, here’s the wine … oh no, did you get coasters? You forgot the coasters? Oh God … OK, just put these doilies down and let’s hope for the best. Iron Fist is a doily on the Netflix table. It’s there because something had to be.

It’s a shame. There are elements of a good thing in Iron Fist. But after 13 clumsy episodes, you wouldn’t know it.

Other Things of Note

-The fight scenes are fine. Marvel has a formula and they do it well enough. If you’ve seen one hallway fight, you’ve seen them all. This one has hatchets.

-The acting is largely unremarkable. Slumming movie actors Rosario Dawson and Carrie Anne Moss perform ably in small roles. Everyone else is varying degrees of wooden, from the moments of competence displayed by Jessica Henwick to the beaver dam that is Finn Jones. But with the dialogue being what it is and the plot being what it is, it feels like blaming the victim to call the acting “bad.”

-But all that said, when Rosario Dawson is the most capable actor on your show, you’re in trouble.

-Davos is pretty great because his existence points out how terrible Danny is at being a decisive human being. Danny spends 20 minutes every episode flipping around and making every random henchman look like Mike Tyson. Davos calmly kills thugs with workman-like focus and shows what a killing machine might actually look like, with a surprising amount of charm and humor in his early scenes. But his character is exactly the same as Baron Mordo in Doctor Strange, a magical stoic of uncertain ethnicity who is angry over a entitled white guy taking his stuff. And as in every other case, the movie universe does it better.

-Claire smacktalking Danny and Colleen for being idiot children is good for a laugh once an hour in the later episodes. But Daredevil is still in Hell’s Kitchen, right? Jessica Jones is somewhere, right? Hey Claire, maybe instead of psychoanalyzing magical karate people and being judgmental, you could GO GET HELP, HMM?

-So why exactly are the Hand and K’un-lun enemies? K’un-lun exists on a different plane of reality most of the time and doesn’t seem to have anything of value, except Danny’s iPod and some beating sticks. Maybe the Hand makes heroin out the same dragon that gives Iron Fist his magic powers? That might be a little too on the nose, even for this show. Although, the original Jessica Jones comic series had a story arc involving superhuman blood being used as a drug for normal people, so it’s not implausible. If that’s what the Hand’s blood bank operation is for, at least it would make sense.

-The last scene teases the mighty triumvirate of Joy Meachum, Davos and Madame Gao as the next Big Bads. Expect them to backstab each other 8 times and then get run over by Penelope Pitstop.

-Seriously, Joy Meachum was the least evil Meachum and her claim to fame was “semi-capable businessperson.” Captain America isn’t having night terrors over her.

-Danny in suits with sneakers is consistently adorable. The only way it could have been better is if they gave him a juice box at the office.

-It’s gonna take Shaquille O’Neal’s shoe horn to make Danny and Luke Cage best pals like they are in the comics. Unless Danny sleeps with Jessica. Then he and Luke can bond over being Eskimo brothers. “White girls be cray, right?” “I don’t know,  I’m still haunted by the death of my mom and several betrayals. Do you wanna trade music on our Zunes?”

-Coming this summer, The Defenders! Marvel as they defeat advertised villain Sigourney Weaver by punching her and then brooding about dead relatives.