Iron Fist, Season 1, Episode 9: The Mistress of All Agonies
Good lord, this episode. Last episode was kind of messy and poorly written, but at least we have a couple of cool fight scenes to make up for it, and a solid goal that we're pursuing. So far Iron Fist has been various shades of 'this is interesting', but even at its worst (i.e. the first three episodes) it's never been completely bad. I don't think there's any part of this episode that I really liked.
Where to begin? There's the old-and-tried "villain lets herself be captured to mess with our heroes' head" with Madame Gao trying to play mind-games with Danny, Claire and Wing, but that honestly just feels like something so we have some padding between Danny and Harold scenes. Mostly, because as much stupid zen sayings as Danny repeats over and over, he's not a very enlightened or intelligent person. He doesn't want to kill Madame Gao, but he wants to end the Hand? He wants to interrogate Madame Gao, but doesn't want to resort to violence? He wants to find out about his parents, but not about the Hand's plans now? And when Claire and Colleen call Danny out on this, his answer is an absolutely irritating and petulant "so you guys are ganging up on me now?" Well of fucking course, Danny, because you're being an idiot. He runs into Joy, who tells him that he's been ousted of the company, and his answer is a very indignant "so that's my fault?" Joy's a lot sterner than Colleen and Claire and her flat "yes" is easily one of the few redeeming parts of this episode.
It's one thing to make Danny impulsive, naive and out of touch with the world. It's one thing to make Danny have a mysterious past and we still have no fucking idea what went down in K'un Lun. It's another to make him do absolutely moronic decisions and get rewarded for it.
Like, imprisoning Madame Gao with nothing more than a chair and ropes? The fuck? And the whole problem of him being super-convinced it's Madame Gao who killed daddy and mommy because the poison coincidentally happened to be the same is still insipidly moronic writing. And after the truth serum nonsense, it's left ambiguous whether it's even real with Gao's talk about how she's immune to poisons.
Also how the utter fuck did they get Gao from China back to New York? That makes the FakeChina bit from last episode even more stupid.
Ward, meanwhile, continues to unravel and apparently his father set him up to be framed for using drugs. Which, mind you, he was totally doing. Or maybe he actually did leave those drug packets out and being careless and his double-fuck-you-fingers deal was actually him being paranoid that everything bad in his life is his daddy's fault.
Speaking of which, Harold comes back to life. Which, as much as the actor is entertaining... isn't a very compelling plot point. Okay, yes, there's the huge revelation that the people modified by the Hand (Nobu from Daredevil, implied to be Madame Gao since she mentions having been alive since the 17th century) will revive themselves after dying. But did we need the long, drawn-out moments of Harold wandering around town like an idiot? Or the unnecessarily and uncomfortably long scene of him murdering Kyle? The show tries to have an emotional moment between Harold and Ward but while the show's probably going for a more "I can't believe it" kind of tone, Ward's deadpan and emotionless reaction was more hilarious than emotional. Yes, Harold meeting Joy at the end is something that's just waiting to drop, and I suppose that's still a somewhat interesting moment.
The mystery around Colleen is also very... whatever. How the fuck did the poison instantly kill Gao's bodyguards, but with her it creates this beautifully intricate network of black arteries on her shoulder? That plotline was boring, there's no real tension there because we immediately get an out with Colleen's sensei, who turns out to be Bakuto and teaches Danny a Chi-healing technique thing.
Some military dudes show up for some reason.
Some random dude bumps into Harold and beats up a random hot dog stand owner for some reason.
Colleen and Bakuto take Danny to... wherever they're working for, likely the Chaste or maybe something more sinister considering they're not letting Claire come with. So many weird questions are raised -- is Gao telling the truth? Who are the military dudes? Who's the ninja star dude? Whose side is Bakuto and Colleen really on? What's Harold going to do? What's Joy going to do? What happened in Danny's past? What's the Hand's endgame? But none of it really feels engaging enough, and to make it worse, despite the slow agonizing job that the show has done in making Danny Rand likable, it backtracks on a lot of it, and turns out that he's honestly just kind of unlikable and petulant.
Overall, yeah. I really hope the show does something more in its last four episodes, because, holy crap, what a boring ass episode.
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