1x12 Bar the Big Boss

[6.4/10] One of the biggest things in my evolution as a critic has been learning to understand and appreciate a movie or show’s visuals as a distinct and equally important part of the presentation. While I could appreciate a cool scene here or there, what drew me to movies and television growing up were the stories, the characters, and the performances. It took time and, if I’m honest, more maturity than I could muster at the time to think of the visual aspects of shows as more than hollow eye candy.

That doesn’t mean I’m ready to hand an award to the latest bit of Michael Bay spectacle, but over time, I’ve learned more and more about how much establishing mood and setting a scene and telling the story of a film comes from cinematography and other aesthetic choices behind the scenes.

The only issue is that makes it really hard for me to parse out how I feel about an episode of television like “Bar the Big Boss.” It is an episode with tons of really poor and/or convenient plot decisions, some bad acting, and heaps of especially bad dialogue. But it had one thing has been sorely lacking for most of Iron Fist -- style.

Sure, the fight in the lobby of Harold’s building was a little disorienting and hard to follow some of the time, but between the brief split screen that served as an homage to the kung fu movies Iron Fist is aping, to the tight little sequence where Davos reaches for his dagger whist choking his adversary, to the impressively fluid and graceful parkour of the otherwise completely dire Bakuto, there was a sense of grace, beauty, and force to the confrontation that’s been in short supply in the series thus far.

That extends to the fight between Colleen and Bakuto in the rain. Sure, it’s a bit of cliché, but there was a visual effectiveness to the confrontation, one still steeped in a few tropes, but which nevertheless worked in the images it used to tell the story. Central park made for a visually arresting setting in and of itself, but choices like choosing to drop the music and let the movements of the characters convey the emotion, indulging in a small bit of wire fu with Colleen, or using the symbolism of Bakuto slicing off the end of Colleen’s blade only for her to kick it into his torso give the sequence and potency missing from elsewhere in the episode.

That works well if you’re watching these scenes on mute. The problem is that the dialogue, the story choices, and the lines are almost uniformly bad apart from that. Bakuto is still a black hole of charisma, trying to affably evil and coming off like a monologuing stooge. The very fact that Danny and Davos are willing to just stand back and let this one-on-one battle happen because “it’s her fight” is such an absurd plot contrivance that made my retinas detach from the force of my eyeroll. The “you’re only as good as your weapon” exchange is generic action movie dialogue of the worst sort.

What’s worse is, as I’ve mentioned before, the whole “if we kill him, we’re no better than him” is something that Daredevil S2 already wallowed in for a whole dumb season, with no better results. It’s so stupid that they don’t immediately doubletap Davos after all the death and destruction he’s caused, and it makes our heroes look like idiots, not noble crusaders. Nevermind the fact that nobody in that scene can sell the moral conflict to save their lives, and you have a bundle of issues that brings down an otherwise rollicking action scene.

The same is true for the ensuing fight between Davos and Danny. At least that one is steeped in a more believable conflict, with Davos’s connection to Danny having been established much better than the one between Bakuto and Colleen. And their fight beneath the passageway uses the lighting to create an epic feel for the confrontation. But, of course, it ends with Danny giving a cheesy speech about how everyone wants him to choose one life or another but he’s “Danny Rand and the Iron Fist.” For a show that’s been partly about Danny finding his identity, that’s a fine beat to end on, but the show executes it in such a hokey fashion that it can’t land the dismount.

But the episode’s superb visual elements don’t stop there. As cornball as most of Danny and Colleen’s flirting has been, the two of them doing martial arts forms together to a hip hop song worked surprisingly well. There’s something sensual about the two of them moving gracefully in sync with one another, and the way the camera swirls around them, as the song creates a playful atmosphere, sells the connection between the two of them better than any dialogue has been able to.

Still, “Bar the Big Boss” can’t leave well enough alone, and it’s preceded by a heavy-handed exchange about how the two of them have always been looking for family -- The Hand, the monks, the Meachums -- and instead found it with one another. The show could hardly have been more blunt or obvious about it if it inserted a title card that just read “and then they were family.”

The only place in the episode that doesn’t really benefit from the episode’s visual panache is the early standoff with the Meachums, which leans hard on Bakuto’s generic villainism and draws out an overwrought family conflict that could and should be much tighter. Harold telling Ward that choosing his son was his greatest disappointment was harsh as all hell, and it’s pretty gripping as last words go, but otherwise the whole thing felt like trying to meld the show’s sensibilities with the tone of Reservoir Dogs and not being able to come close.

So on the whole, this is an episode that fails on character, fails on plot, fails on dialogue, and yet turns over most of its runtime to pretty much the most inspired action the show has been able to offer. I don’t know how to balance all of that out, when the things that draw me most into a work are lacking but the elements that are unintuitive but still vital parts of what makes a film or television show great are better than they’ve ever been. Maybe the answer is to just watch this on mute.

Ward turns out much more interesting than expected. Of course he's being played, but he's a recovering addict, just out of a mental hospital, and the situation with his father is quite special, so contrary to others his actions are believable outside of extreme stupidity. Even more interesting if he's really the one warning Danny at the end.

Most of the episode is saved by the fights, fun and visually very nice.

But why would they let Colleen fight Bakuto and stand by ? He's her teacher. He knows more than Danny about the Iron Fist, a technique he never had any access to.He's probably even more versed in hundreds of other techniques. She should not be a match for him with both his hands tied.

"If we kill him we're no better". Sure. Then what is the plan ? He's unknown to the police, they actually have no evidence of anything (and he probably has a lot of Hand members in the police and justice system anyway). They have absolutely no clue of what to do with him. So he just conveniently disappears.Lazy writing. Law enforcement have been blatantly absent of the whole show, despite lots of fights and killings going on.

The Danny/Davos conflict is one of the most concretely developed situation in the show. Hope it leads to a little more than that (like Davos becoming another Iron Fist and fighting Danny for supremacy ?). Danny's anger issues could have been a cliche but interesting plot, it's just cliche and superficial.