Iron Fist, Season 1, Episode 2: Shadow Hawk Takes Flight
Oh, definitely an improvement over the first episode, though it's not a super large bar to clear. The series is still bogged down by the show's strange need to focus on 'is Danny Rand really who he says he is, or is he hallucinating?' Which absolutely makes sense in-universe, and the note that so many people believe they have superpowers since the 'Incident' has increased, but we, the audience, know that, yes, Danny Rand is the Iron Fist. It's why we're watching the show in the first place. We're two hours down, and we're still playing a bit of a mystery story and spending an entire 60-minute episode on whether Danny Rand is just having vivid mental delusions or an actual mystical superhero just isn't the right way to go. Hell, Legion got through that phase halfway around its first episode, not at the end of its second.
I understand the need of some scenes of this episode. Harold slowly learning about what Danny thinks is true, how he's threatened by the hand; the doctor and Joy both realizing that Danny's delusions are in fact true; Colleen Wing picking a side and refusing to take Ward's bribes; the activation of the Iron Fist near the end... but the sheer amount of surplus scenes are also a lot. Did we really need another repeat of the entire plane crash scene literally ten minutes after I closed the previous episode? This is Netflix, where the entire season is aired together, not a weekly show. Did we really need the long sequence with Colleen Wing being stalked by her students in a sparring exercise? Did we really need Simon trying to stab Danny in the neck and later act as tour guide, who, while well-acted, was absolutely superfluous to the story?
The slow burn on revealing that, oh no, the main character is actually who he says he is is absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary, and both these episodes could've easily been crammed into one. Not doing any favours is the scripting on Danny Rand that goes all the way beyond 'naive' and into 'idiot'. Yes, the doctor was ready to let you go, just shut up about the chi and the Immortal Iron Fist, destroyer of the Hand and all that stuff and just accept it.
There are some nice moments of Danny ascending to a strange spiritual plane in Chinese garb, the titular 'Shadow Hawk', and the mention that K'un Lun is another dimension that intersects Earth every 15 years or so, as well as the fact that Danny Rand can only activate the Iron Fist when he's not drugged... but none of it really justifies taking up such a huge chunk of screentime. And, yes, the plot moves forwards -- Joy and Wing are allied with Danny, or at least believes in him. Ward is chafing under his father's strange orders, and Harold himself seems to know what the Hand is, and when he returns a handprint and the words "where have you gone" are etched into his office window... from the outside. And he's on a skyscraper.
The Hand, of course, is the mysterious ninja organization that debuted in Daredevil's second season, and it's apparently not destroyed. The tie-in into the Hand is unexpected but welcome, and I'm pretty sure the show'll keep the Hand mostly standalone with minimal references to the Black Sky plot from Daredevil season two, and Harold himself being seemingly in employ or in cahoots with the Hand is an interesting bit, especially when Ward's apparently been buying empty warehouses for no reason other than daddy dearest has been ordering him to, the same modus operandi that Nobu did during Daredevil's first season.
But it's too little, too few and far between that really doesn't justify the episode running this long. Yes, I get that all other Netflix-Marvel shows do start off at a slow burn, but even at its slowest, Luke Cage, Daredevil and Jessica Jones all showed their titular superheroes be, well, superheroes or at least wrestling with whether to be one or not. They certainly don't spend an entire episode cooped up in a mental institution with a doctor second-guessing whether this is a crazy man (and to be fair to the doctor, Danny's not helping matters) or some weird miraculous incident. Honestly, the character I can relate to the most is Harold, watching Danny's psych sessions via a hidden camera, asking the television "ask him where he's been the past fifteen years! Ask him why he's back!" Also what was Joy's plan to get the M&M's back from Danny if Colleen didn't show up coincidentally?
So yeah, the pacing is absolutely snails-pace, and unnecessarily so. You could have had more information told to us, you could have had our hero have far more proper screentime when he's not just trying to defend himself that, yes, all the zen and K'un Lun gibberish is true. Hell, Colleen and Ward feel like more well-rounded characters at this point in time, even if they're just a generic supporting character and a clueless antagonist respectively. Poor Danny's either drugged up or insisting that he's telling the truth, which, other than telling us that Danny's unbelievably naive and/or an idiot, doesn't really tell us much about the titular character. He's erratic, and after two sixty-minute episodes, the second one being a nearly action-free episode, we come no closer to learning who Danny Rand truly is. Really, both these episodes could've been compressed into thirty, forty minutes without losing anything important.
Still, credit where credit's due, the ending with Iron Fist and his glowing Chi-empowered fist is a pretty cool ending, so the next episode's hopefully going to be detached this absolutely weak opening two episodes and have more mystic wars and mysterious hidden not-actually-dead fathers.
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