Iron Fist S02E06 Review: Sibling Arguments

Iron Fist, Season 2, Episode 6: The Dragon Dies At Dawn

Oh man, I tried watching this episode a couple of times but kept stopping short of sitting through it in a single sitting. I'm genuinely not sure why -- the episode isn't that horrible, honestly. (And I've watched season one, I know what horrible looks like) but it's just so... formulaic? Boring? Procedural? I don't think I particularly hate anything about this episode specifically, but I found it kind of hard to get through with this episode. Honestly, the only real thing I took out of this episode is that I really, really do want to see a proper Daughters of the Dragon series, since Colleen and Misty's little detective run throughout the city is so, so much more fun than practically anything going on in this episode.

Colleen and Misty's fight against the Crane sisters, who are... tattoo artists that are able to do the ritual that Davos needs to transfer the Iron Fist. I'm not quite sure what to make out of them, to be honest -- they present themselves as these tattoo artists who are in something that's way too big for them to understand, but at the same time, they knew enough kung-fu to give Colleen pause. It's weird.

The actual Misty/Colleen conversation is at least well-done, for what little we have of the two of them that doesn't involve exposition. "What are you going to do with your life" is a neat topic to explore, and Misty asks some hard-hitting questions about Colleen's wishy-washy stance on pacifism, while Colleen asks Misty what she's going to do with that police captain offer.

Meanwhile, after a brief bit of interrogation on Misty's part, and the Colleen/Misty duo going off to hunt down the Crane Sisters, their solution to Walker and Joy is to... leave them tied up in a room? Not even with Danny or Ward watching them? Of course Walker escapes in the very first scene she is able to do so, Joy decides to cooperate with Walker's idea to permanently remove Davos... and then Danny, the ever-gullible dupe, immediately goes with Walker's plan because she's so trustworthy. It's honestly getting a bit silly at this point, although at least Danny sounds more desperate this time around as opposed to trying to throw his "I'm always right" weight around.

We get a Joy/Ward conversation which is... which is definitely overdue, and the two actors are clearly competent. I can't help but feel that it's definitely too little too late, though, and while Ward has consistently been self-absorbed, self-loathing and destructive, Joy's character was all over the place within this season-and-a-half that I can't understand her motivations all that well. Kudos for both actors for truly selling the scene of two supremely fucked-up siblings who are self-absorbed in their own way, and care for the other in their own way. Do like Joy's clarification that she needed someone to lash out against, and she picked Danny over Ward.

Meanwhile, Davos and his new eyepatched buddy Chen has been going around, killing everyone in a mixture of Punisher and Arrow, using extreme prejudice while striking names off of a list. It's brutal, and definitely immoral... but honestly, I definitely can appreciate just why Davos is feeling like he's doing some real good (murderous, bloody good) with the Iron Fist powers. Especially commpared to how the show has been handling characters like the Punisher or Luke Cage, and I'm genuinely not sure if Davos's slightly-more-brutal takedowns of drug dealers and triad goons is any worse than "good" vigilantes.

Danny and Walker go off to take Davos down, with Danny... reverting back to form and insisting that Walker not kill Davos and merely take him down. Walker also shares her "triggers" that cause her to revert back and forth from Mary to Walker, and it's... it's weird? Even if Danny notes (a rare clever moment from Danny!) that sharing her backstory is a tactic to make Danny let his guard down, it's also kind of weirdly shoehorned in.

As much as I have a problem with Danny, that scene between Danny and Davos is actually well-done, far better than the awkward-sibling bit of Joy and Ward earlier in the episode. Danny genuinely feels horrified that Davos is perverting the power of the Iron Fist, and that as much as Davos felt wronged by Danny getting the Fist, stealing the damn thing isn't any more honourable than Danny abandoning his post in K'un-Lun. Davos's grievances are all too familiar with us as well. I do like that there wasn't a point in their conversation that Davos was going to back off (unless Danny actually does want to become Davos's student, something I don't see happening either), and Walker jumping in and stabbing Davos with the tranquilizer cocktail isn't just needless prolonging of a conflict. Davos, even drugged, manages to break Danny's leg and knock Walker out, before presumably escaping? That's a neat action scene.

And to throw in another wrench in the plans, the incoming ambulance sirens turn Walker back into Mary... who is just confused about everything that's going on, but when Danny tells Mary to turn back into Walker (with typical Danny Rand tact) Mary just runs away because she doesn't want Walker to "hide out" in the woods and run away.

Overall, though, it's... it's an okay episode? We've got a deeper focus on our characters and that focus is definitely interesting enough, but the actual things that happen in this show is just kind of haphazard and only barely being kept afloat by the supreme performances by the actors. Alice Eve, Sasha Dhawan, Finn Jones, Jessica Henwick, Tom Pelphrey and Simone Missick are all amazingly entertaining and deliver their (less-than-stellar) scenes and lines very well. And kudos where kudos are due, the martial art scenes are definitely well-done. It's just that, well, from a pacing and storytelling standpoint, the show's honestly a bit of a mess.