Iron Fist S01E07 Review: Company Problems

Iron Fist, Season 1, Episode 7: Felling Tree with Roots

Man, imagine if Iron Fist started off at this kind of pace and storytelling quality. This really should've happened earlier in the season instead of a little after the midway point. There's a lot here that goes down. Ward and Harold have a confrontation. Danny tries pushing his weight around in the company one too many times. Gao and Danny have a confrontation. Danny, Colleen and the Yang Triad gang unleash a raid on a Hand base.

Let's start with Ward first. Can I just say how much I like Ward and Joy's relationship in this series? It's a bit rare that a show manages to portray a brother-sister villain team with a relationship that felt as healthy as this. Their immediate predecessors, Cottonmouth and Mariah, are also a sibling team whose familial loyalty is marred by a deep-seated resentment they have for each other's methods. With Ward and Joy, they disagree a lot but at the same time, Joy still backs Ward all the time, and even at his worst Ward snapping at Joy a little is immediately followed by apologies. Joy truly doesn't know what Ward is hiding -- she thinks it's something that's just a harmless drug addiction when Ward has a little Frankenstein Daddy hidden in the proverbial basement -- but doesn't push. She tells Ward that he needs to get out and maybe take a holiday for a bit because she recognizes the problems her brother has.

But Ward's relationship with Harold? Oh, that's so hideously unhealthy. It's not just the verbal and physical abuse either, because Harold basically fucks over Ward's attempts to run away by draining all the money from his account. He employs Ward to dump bodies in the river, without really telling Ward just how those bodies get there, and continues to berate Ward for being a weak piece of shit who can't follow instructions. It's a horrible, horrible kind of abuse and it's at least one part in Iron Fist that really comes through as well done. And it's no surprise to anyone that Ward snaps. He's angry at his father on so many levels, and he snaps at the end of the episode after one too many abuses, murdering his father in cold blood with knife to the gut.

Side-note: Ward murdering Harold, while not identical, is kind of similar to how Mariah murdered Cottonmouth during the halfway point of Luke Cage, isn't it? How the more passive of a family villain duo murders the card-carrying villain after one too many personal insults? Harold's a far more terrible father than Cottonmouth ever was to Mariah, though.

Yes, Ward is a huge douchebag especially with the revelation that his escape vacation money was embezzled from pension funds. But he also really didn't deserve literally have his choices be absolutely cut off by his father. Between his addiction, dealing with Danny, having his escape ruthlessly cut off, having had to dispose of bodies gruesomely hacked up by his father... no wonder he cut off. And, well, the episode opens and ends with Ward disposing of a body in the park lake, which is sorta cool, I guess.

It's a pretty good moment even if Harold's absence from several episodes has made him feel like, well, a pretty generic mastermind villain, whose position of interest is pitting people against each other and his shtick as a bad dad. And it does throw a huge wrench into the plans of everyone. He's playing Danny against the Hand, taking Danny into the company to earn his loyalty so Danny will deal with the Hand for him, while assuring the Hand that, fuck, he had no idea what's going on with all this Iron Fist nonsense. "That sounds like a sex toy" indeed. And Harold being absolutely nice to Danny means that Danny believes his act because, well, Harold has been the most (selectively) open to Danny so far, and the dude's kind of a naive fool so it's definitely believable.

Danny, meanwhile, is kind of broken out of his flunk by Harold promising that they're going to fight the Hand together, and he totally get to bang Colleen Wing and get some comforting words from her. Coleen herself continues to be somewhat interesting, with the added wrinkle that her... old boyfriend? Current boyfriend? Bakuto shows up, and the two of them are revealed to actually know about the Iron Fist. I'm not familiar enough with the source material to say whether these are allies (maybe from the Chaste?) or enemies, but either way would make their cryptic conversation make sense.

Joy is running ragged trying to fix Danny's cock-up. And, yes, from the eyes of the boyish billionaire, what he's doing is the right thing. The plant's maybe making people sick? Shut it down! Oh, and pay the employees, too, 'cause I'm a nice guy and doing the right thing. The thing is, the dude handles it in such a hugely assholish manner to the board of directors and Joy that the Meachums and Danny's position in the company is basically evicted. Danny's passion for doing the right thing is definitely admirable, but his impulsiveness and bullheadedness in refusing to compromise is also absolutely cringe-inducing.

You really can't envy Joy's position here. She tries her best to smooth things over, to get Danny to apologize to the board of directors while simultaneously trying to find a middle ground to all this, but not only does Danny throw away the gesture of goodwill, he stamps his foot down and demands that the plant be shut down -- and not only that, he goes behind everyone's back to already make a statement to the news. It's not being the head of a company, it's being a dictator. And you know what? That's exactly what happens when you get someone with the mentality and black-and-white heroism of a ten-year old in charge of a huge company. Meetings? Profit? What's that? Of course, this is television land so obviously Lawrence is the evil one, and naive, bullheaded Danny and Joy will end up teaming up to retake the company. Which is going to be a drag.

And, well, Danny's troubles in the company isn't just that he's now missing Harold and his job, but discovering that his company has been infiltrated by Madame Gao for far longer than he knew. Gao's apparently even conducting her business inside the Rand building itself. Madame Gao shows up in Danny's office without fear, commenting on feng shui and whatnot, and reveals something that's foreshadowed in the previous episode -- that Danny left K'un Lun because he wants to be Danny Rand more than he wants to be Iron Fist, Protector of K'un Lun and Destroyer of the Hand. Gao's proposition is simple. Stay out of each other's business. Of course, Danny can't do that, and he infiltrates Madame Gao's office in the 13th floor -- because not only Harold has a secret floor in the Rand building.

Danny's brief stint at clue-finding seemed to be a bit too easy since Gao actually seems to suspect something both in the elevator and during the guard-less meeting. It's also a bit odd that she's talking about every single operation in New York and her secretary (who doesn't leave with Gao and her two bodyguards) has all the data Danny needs. But hey, it could all be a plan, and as both Harold and the Bride of Nine Spiders showed, Danny's quite easy to fool.

Danny and Colleen get their own army in the Yang Triads (a.k.a. the Hatchet Men, as the show's begun calling them) who murder everyone in a heroin factory to get Radovan, who proceeds to immediately die of his wounds, and he's already told Gao the formula. Also the fact that Gao's gone to Hangzhou, which was Danny's original destination on that fateful plane.

So yeah, the Hand plotline is proceeding quickly even if I still don't really get where they are going with the heroin mass production. Is it literally just for money? The board meeting stuff is easily the least interesting parts of the story, too. But this episode has some really good parts especially in regards to Ward, and introducing new layers of mystery about Colleen Wing, Madame Gao and Danny's history is pretty awesome.


Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• When talking about how the world's gone crazy, Gao references Daredevil and Luke Cage. Pity we didn't a Jessica Jones reference there to get all three of the other Defenders mentioned, but then Jessica's been keeping all her vigilantism secret. 
• Karen Page is referenced again, and Danny apparently went to her to get his story out. 
• Harold briefly mentions the long-running evil organizaion in the MCU, Roxxon Corporation, whose complicity with the Hand was shown in Daredevil's second season.
• The Dogs of Hell, a street gang that was featured in Daredevil's second season as well as briefly in Agents of SHIELD, was briefly mentioned during Gao's discussion.