1x11 Lead Horse Back to Stable

[7.7/10] Given the dearth of LGBTQ characters in major mainstream works, I feel like there’s a tendency for fans to ship any two people of the same sex who shows the slightest bit of friendship or affection for one another. That makes me hesitant to suggest what I’m about to suggest for fear of falling into that trap, but here goes anyway -- Danny has better chemistry with Davos than he’s ever had with Colleen.

In fact, I think there’s a fair read of the final scene of this episode, where Davos sees Danny embracing Colleen in the rain like in so many romcoms, as Davos walking away upset that his crush is with someone else. But whether you consider it a bug or a feature (and I consider it the latter), what’s interesting is that the episode works equally well with and without that subtext.

If you choose to read it without that element, Davos still has one of the better motivated (and better-acted) presences in this show in just a couple of quick episodes. He is pulled in two directions, because he is clearly fiercely loyal to Danny (his “I won’t leave you” while Danny’s getting stitched up by Claire evidences that), but he’s also jealous and resentful of him. That makes his reactions to Danny and to the new life he’s scratched out for himself in New York layered in a way that really only Ward Meachum’s have been on the show so far.

On the one hand, Davos admits that he feels a little usurped by Danny, that he believed becoming the iron fist was his birthright and the fact that the monks chose Danny instead of him still eats at him. And, to add insult to injury, Danny abandoned his post, and set his duties aside. Danny has the thing Davos wanted most in the world, a thing that was denied him, and seems to be walking away from it, shirking his responsibilities. It’s the sort of thing that would bother anyone, and Sacha Dhawan conveys the restrained frustrations of his character well.

But on the other hand, Davos feels betrayed at a more personal level. When he tells Claire that he treated Danny like a brother and that he nevertheless just left without saying a word, you can see it emanating from a more personal sort of hurt, the type that believed they had a friendship that could not be disregarded so easily. That friendship is given texture by all of Danny’s previous fond recollections of the hijinx the pair would go together, and that adds depth to the conflict between the two friends when Davos questions Danny leaving Kunlun and asks what appeal this world holds for him.

And yet, it can also be taken a step further, that Davos is not simply hurt as a friend and brother in arms, but as someone who has romantic feelings for Danny that may not have been reciprocated or ever even acknowledged. I’ll admit this may be a stretch on my part, and perhaps I’m taking the completely dead romance the show has tried to sell between Danny and Colleen, in this episode especially, seeing Finn Jones have a modicum of chemistry with someone on this otherwise anodyne show, and concluding that by comparison, his concordance with Davos must be love. But either way, there’s clear affection, whether filial or something more, between the two of them, that creates interesting and conflicting motivations for the pair.

I’m as shocked to say it as anyone, but this also gives a really interesting answer to the question of why Danny left Kunlun. For a while, the assumed answer was a pragmatic one -- to find out what happened to his parents, but we also get an emotional one here. Danny, understandably, felt “empty” after what happened to him and his parents, and he thought that becoming the iron fist, reaching the pinnacle of the cultural collective he was brought into, would fill that in his life.

Only he finds that when he achieves what he set out to do that it isn’t as fulfilling as he’d hoped. He sits around at the gates of Kunlun stacking rocks and seeming like his duty is a tedious and hollow one. Seeing the bird flying free as a sign is kind of cheesy, but it still speaks to a relatable notion of having done what you set out to do, and yet it not fixing the deeper-seeded problems within. It adds a human dimension to Danny’s struggle that’s been lost in the usual orphan backstory and generic kung fu material.

We also get more hints that the Monks of Kunlun are not exactly sterling examples. It’s appropriate that Danny is expected to go into a cave to face trials to reach the next level of his training, because there’s a real Jedi vibe to all of his. Danny and Davos have been trained to suppress their anger and other strong emotions – such sentiment is not appropriate for a weapon – and yet it’s still there, haunting Danny and blocking his chi.

There is a sense, brought forward in an occasionally dull but generally good conversation with Claire, that Danny never really processed what happened with him and his parents, and those difficult emotions are still affecting him, even if he doesn’t acknowledge it. There are connections he has to this world that he just can’t shake using his Kunlun discipline.

Unfortunately, one of those connections is Colleen. The whole tortured “how could you lie to me?” angst between them is pretty awful, especially because we know they’ll inevitably overcome it and team up to help one another. Without good performances or writing in the overwrought scenes between the two of them, it just feels like a perfunctory bit of squabbling without any emotional punch.

And to add insult to injury, we get more Bakuto here, who plays the angry cult leader with all the charisma of worn hockey puck. There’s a common theme to this episode, with both Danny and Colleen realizing that the organizations that trained them may be less than noble, but since we just got introduced to this sect of The Hand and Colleen’s connection to it, her half of the proceedings have no weight.

The only bit of real intrigue is that we learn Bakuto’s sect is doing the same blood draining stuff that The Hand was doing in Daredevil Season 2. Otherwise, it’s more nonsensical, shoehorned in antagonist stuff that detracts from the better-than-usual things “Lead” pulls off here (including giving Claire more to do and showing off her sarcastic edge).

Much of that comes down to Danny and Davos, and whether you’d like to think of them as symbolizing an unrealized crush or simply brothers in arms, their connection has a force that’s been missing on the Danny side of this show (the Meachum side continues apace with some good if brief and kind of creepy, Joy-Harold material), and instantly adds a new dimension to Danny’s return to New York City.