1x13 Dragon Plays with Fire

[4.8/10] I could live a long and happy life without ever having to hear another superhero agonize over whether it’s okay to kill the obviously evil, dangerous bad guy who is confronting them. There is an inherent tension between the hero of the story taking this rigidly moral stance with the fact that if they’re out there punching and kicking and blasting their way through goons, they’re invariable causing untold human suffering regardless of whether they actually extinguish a life or not. Can it be done well? Yes, but it’s been done to death, even among the Marvel Netflix shows, and Iron Fist is absolutely not equipped to find new wrinkles in that venerable theme.

That means that when “Dragon Plays with Fire” chooses to center the show’s entire finale, and by extension, the crux of the series, on the question of whether Danny should or should not kill Harold Meachum, it drags most of the proceedings, and by extension much an underwhelming show, into the muck with it.

And, as always, a big part of the problem stems from the fact that Finn Jones is a pretty lousy conduit through which to explore Danny’s dilemma here. The whole premise of the finale is that Danny is initially reserved enough, but upon learning that it was Harold who killed his parents, he flies into a rage and determines to kill Harold not out of a sense of righteousness but out of a sense of unholy vengeance. The big knock against that tack is that Jones is pretty awful at playing enraged.

In some ways, Jones’s boyishness has played to his advantage on the show. While I’ve still found Danny insufferable through much of Iron Fist, if there’s one way that Jones has succeeded in his portrayal, it’s that Danny does seem like someone who still has a childlike view of the modern world. But the downside to that is that his “raging anger” at Harold after learning the truth about his parents comes off more like a toddler’s temper tantrum than the emotional results of stomach-wrenching vendetta. Much of “Dragon” calls on Jones to play a man who’s dealing with the fire within, but when that fire comes off as more of a sparkler causing mild irritation, the whole episode suffers.

(As an aside, Gao was one of the few highlights in this episode and Iron Fist as a whole. Her calm and honest but manipulative bent made more out of her scenes than the sum of their parts.)

It also doesn’t help that the whole todo culminates in a series of fight sequences out of a third-rate 90s action movie. The episode dutifully moves all its players into place -- Joy learning the truth about her father, Ward helping his new allies take him down, Colleen cautious but ready for battle, and Claire as the doubting thomas -- to lead into an inevitable, underwhelming showdown between Danny and Harold.

While certain aspects of this confrontation are silly, but fall well enough into the category of pulpy fun to tolerate -- like Danny swinging through the glass of Harold’s office or using his iron fist to punch an incapacitating shock wave across the room -- many of them just come off as stupid. Why, for the love of god, did we need a scene of Danny and Harold playing American Gladiators with a very fake-looking pair of steel beams?

The whole roof sequence is a gigantic helping of stupidity and cheese. Harold taunting Danny about how long he’s wanted to kill Wendell Rand, or doing the usual scenery-chewing villain monologuing, was entirely unnecessary and belied the attempts at serious and profundity the episode made. At the same time, Danny was just an idiot. Even if he didn’t want to kill Harold which, given what we know about him, makes little sense, why didn’t he do more to, as Bakuto (god help me) said, at least subdue Harold? The hits he takes and submissive response to Harold’s attacks were imbecilic.

Nevermind the bevy of conveniences and contrivances that follow. The whole imagery of Harold as the dragon with the two construction lights behind Danny was weird and cornball. Danny turning his back on an impaled Harold was dumb to begin with, but then having zero awareness to get rid of Harold’s gun, which inevitably Harold tries to use, was one of those “we need something plot-convenient to happen here, so the characters have to be blind fools” moments. By the same token, Ward stepping in to shoot his father was the worst sort of cop outs to these “Can I take a life?” stories, where the hero gets to preserve their moral purity, but the bad guy gets disposed of anyway.

What follows are scores of teases and hints and ending character beats, most of which are just as underwhelming or rushed. While Ward, who has been the secret MVP of this show, still getting emotional over his father’s death and renewing his friendship with Danny (while Hogarth amusingly takes the stuffing out of them), was a nice moment, the rest of it was Iron Fist’s usual on-the-nose philosophizing and loud character work. Claire telling Danny and Colleen they were messed up was an especially odd little moment that seemed to be aiming for profundity and coming up with clichés. And the late tease with Joy, Davos, and Gao had super rushed developments for nearly all the characters.

“Dragon” continues a long string of less-than-satisfying finishes to these Marvel Netflix shows, where even the better ones have trouble sticking the landing. While the show at least had the good sense to center its finale on the show’s central characters rather than fixating more on Bakuto or larger concerns from The Hand, the macguffinism, the generic action movie bad guy confrontation on the roof, and the stupidity of the way the show addressed its characters’ actions and the moral code of its themes leave this finale as a weak ending to a weak series.

When I heard that Scott Buck, the showrunner who ran Dexter into the ground was doing a Netflix series, one with complicated racial politics at play no less, I was hoping that it might at least be the entertaining type of bad. Instead, Iron Fist was just competent to be passable, but just dull and mishandled enough to be thoroughly meh throughout. There are certainly bright spots -- the Meachum family drama turned out to be unexpectedly compelling, and Colleen shined before she got sucked into Danny’s romantic orbit -- but on the whole, Buck and company couldn’t figure out how to tell an interesting story about its main character, couldn’t find a way to make the show fun even if it couldn’t be capital-G Great, and couldn’t find a lead to breathe life into the show’s weaker moments and scenes and thereby elevate the series as a whole.

In the final tally, Iron Fist feels like an inferior rehash of themes and archetypes that many other superhero stories, including those featuring Danny Rand’s soon-to-be Defenders teammates, have already dramatized in a much more interesting, entertaining fashion. Next time, stay in K’un-Lun, Danny.