1x08 The Blessing of Many Fractures

[7.0/10] There’s a weird thing that’s happened with almost every season of the Marvel Netflix shows, where I end up liking and caring about the side characters way more than the hero (the exception being Jessica Jones, both for having a better hero and some weaker side characters). If you’d told me at the beginning of the series that here, a little ways past the halfway mark, I’d be most interested in the two generic children of privilege and their family issues, I would have laughed you out of the building.

But here we are. In one half of the episode, you have a trio of good guys flying to China to try to take out one of the most intriguing villains in this whole subuniverse, and I could hardly care less. And on the other, you have a pair of well-heeled American Psycho wannabes struggling with the legacy of their father and their name, and it’s the most engrossing thing the show has ever done. TV shows are funny sometimes.

Suffice it to say, the development of the Meachum kids is the best thing Iron Fist has to offer. The conflict between the two of them, where Ward wants to run away and is willing to take quite a haircut to do it (not literally of course), whereas Joy wants to fight so badly that she’ll turn the offer down for the both of them, prompts a very intriguing confrontation for the two of them.

The bit where they sit down on a park bench and let some truths spill out is one of the best scenes in the show thus far. For one thing, it adds more to the internal contradictions that we’ve seen in both characters for a while now. Despite the fact that Joy seems to be the more sensitive and empathetic Meachum sibling, she is willing to do things like have a P.I. (implied to be Jessica Jones) follow her fellow board members for blackmail purposes, that suggest she has a more ruthless side herself.

She confesses, however, that it comes from a place of admiring Ward, of wanting to be like him, with the dramatic irony that Ward doesn’t even want to be like him. The actor who plays Ward does some tremendous work in this episode. The sense that he’s being praised for enacting his father’s plans, that his sister admires him for living a life he wants to escape, for feeling a connection to his flesh and blood that he has to constantly lie to, creates a true sense of comprehensible turmoil for the character that the actor delivers nicely.

There’s little to no music in that scene, just two people spilling their guts, admitting their hurt, and being unwilling or unable to fix it. Ward tries though, and the fake out of him legitimately meaning to show her Harold’s apartment and then having the scene of the crime turn out to be too much for him was very well done. I’m not sure I ever expected Iron Fist to take a page out of The Shining’s playbook, but Ward seeing blood rush from the elevator’s various orifices was a nicely disturbing image and an effective way to dramatize his growing trauma at witnessing and eventually participating in death and dismemberment.

Of course, what’s even more intriguing is that Ward, true to form, does not come clean to Joy about what’s bothering him, even a little, instead spurning her and projecting his frustrations onto her. His rejecting her earnest pleas for understanding and sibling friendship are sad in that they not only break down this relationship that seemed to be heading to a new place of trust, but speak to the way in which Ward is already too damages by what he’s been through and the father that raised him to make it out of this quagmire. It’s hard to make a character both tragic and kind of an asshole, but Iron Fist pulls it off.

And then there’s a much duller story being told with Danny, Colleen, and Claire on the other side of the world. It’s hard to put my finger on why this one was so much worse than the Meachums’ story, but if I had to drive at something in particular, it would be the fact that most of the episode borrows a page from The Walking Dead’s least enjoyable quality – a propensity to have tons of scenes where characters debate Important Things™ in really dumb and obvious ways, with the utmost seriousness.

We get it on the plane where Danny and Claire discuss liking people and choosing destiny and all the usual dross. We get it between Danny and Colleen where they talk about losing their parents. Hell, we even get it between Danny and drunken master guy with the whole “wearing your oath like a mask” exchange that lays it on thicker than chunky peanut butter out of the freezer.

That speaks to the other weakness of the Danny half of the episode – underwhelming fight stuff. Contrary to some other critics, I’ve found the fight choreography on this show generally serviceable, if at times somewhat generic. But the drunken master fight was pretty crappy, with no real sense of combat or flow despite the obvious gimmick. Drunken Master guy was annoying, which didn’t help, but the mix of styles didn’t really tell the story the episode was going far.

To the same end, Colleen’s sword fight was pretty interesting, but then just sort of fell apart. The initial back and forth had some nice shades of Kill Bill and the works it paid homage to, but eventually the demands of TV drama caught up to it.
The rest of the episode, with Danny losing control and confronting Gao and the gang getting into another uninspired scrap with her local goons just sort of petered out. Not to beat a dead horse, but much of that falls on Finn Jones, who has a tough time convincingly selling Danny’s frustrations and breaking point here (even if the way his pummeling the drunken master is shot and edited was pretty well done).

Maybe that’s the difference. Ward and Joy are not the best performed characters ever on television, but they have humanity to them as they struggle with something somewhat implausible but that has roots in real human emotions of inner conflict and family problems that the actors are able to convey. Danny has to do much more fantastical stuff, and the show tries to ground it in a human struggle, but Jones can’t keep up his end of the bargain. The upshot is that in a show with kung fu and ninjas and magic powers, the most interesting part is, oddly enough, the two rich kids dealing with getting kicked out of their father’s company.