1x10 Black Tiger Steals Heart

[4.6/10] I don’t know where to begin with this one. “Black Tiger Steals Heart” introduces a new, major antagonist whom we’ve barely seen before. It not only adds in a pretty big twist that doesn’t really fit with much we’ve seen before, but gives Danny kind of the worst possible reaction to it for forced interpersonal drama. And the whole premise of the episode is establishing that this seemingly nice campus is actually home to bad guys when it becomes pretty clear from the getgo that we’re dealing with a villainous cargo cult of sorts, making the slow unraveling of that reveal painful and tedious.

It is just too much too fast and in too nonsensical a fashion. The best representative of the flaws in the episode is Bakuto. First and foremost, it’s a weak performance. I think Ramón Rodríguez is going for a vibe of, if you’ll pardon the expression, the iron fist in a velvet glove -- someone who seems kind and wise on the outside but who is manipulative and self-interested on the inside. The problem is that it’s a pretty broad performance, one where Bakuto seems evil and overly cryptic from the beginning, to where the reveal that he’s an evil person is anticlimactic as hell.

The same goes for his compound as a whole. The episode seems to want to sell us on this place as a paradise, a place where people without families can go to learn to better themselves and have a place that they belong. The opening shot of Danny caressing Colleen in a sunlit room drives that home. The catch is that the place seems a little too Stepford from the very beginning, such that Danny uncovering the surveillance and treatment of Gao and affiliation with The Hand doesn’t come so much as a shock as it does an inevitable lifting of the veil.

And it also seems like a pretty major element to introduce into the show with only four episodes to go. Suddenly, we’re dealing with a different branch of The Hand, one that opposes Gao’s, but is equally ready to use violence and surveil people and do generally bad stuff. Oooookay? It doesn’t feel like Iron Fist built to that at all, so it just seems like a major plot development tacked on to a mostly unrelated story.

Again, Bakuto symbolizes that, with the show positioning him as a major Big Bad when we’ve spent a grand total of three minutes with the dude before now and only a few episodes left in the show’s first season. He seems like the villain equivalent of a Mary Sue -- dropped into a preexisting storyline with little warning, shown to have amazing powers and knowledge, like the ability to teach Danny how to heal people or recharge his chi, and yet he’s also evil enough to use some magic arrow thing to disable Danny’s Iron Fist powers. It’s just too much.

The perfect contrast is the introduction of Davos. I was annoyed by the cryptic start he got off to in the last episode, but I actually really enjoyed him here. Maybe it’s just that he starts out by saying “you’re the worst Iron First ever” to Danny, which is instantly endearing for calling Danny out for his general terribleness. But still, Danny’s spent enough time talking about his friend Davos from the monastery that when the man finally shows up, and the two have a shorthand and bond together that comes through to the audience, it works as a late-season addition in a way that Bakuta material just doesn’t.
Oh yeah, and the episode also drops the bombshell that Colleen is, in fact, part of The Hand, and this is the “school” that her student Daryl got a scholarship to. There have been essentially no hints to this, and rather than making the reveal shocking, it just makes it feel like something the writers pulled out of their asses. That creates two problems.

The first is that it makes Danny’s response to this info seem really petulant. If Colleen has been willing to help him all this time, and committedly so, then him blowing up at her over this feels really ridiculous. There’s something to the idea that he’s been so trained to hate The Hand that he’s prejudiced, but it just makes him seem like an idiot and a dick. There’s an interesting story to be told of broken trust and lack of honesty, but instead we get another instance of Danny seeming like an angry child (I think Bakuto even calls him that) rather than anyone even slightly mature.

The other problem is that it’s supposed to be a dramatic gesture when Colleen witnesses Bakuto stab Danny with his magic arrow, and then chooses to help Danny rather than help The Hand capture him. The issue is that since we just now learned about Colleen’s connection to The Hand, and it’s delivered with a lot of clumsy exposition, that “betrayal” has zero force. Her and Danny’s fight seems contrived, and we know her as an ally of Danny’s, with the whole Hand business seeming silly and out of nowhere, making her big act in this episode pretty weightless at the end of the day.

There’s bright spots on the margins of the episode. Gao gets a little more shading, and it’s interesting how she suggests that she’s one of the few people who don’t want to use Danny but just want to set him free, considering how Harold, Bakuto, pretty much everyone has tried to employ him in some way. Harold gets some more development, showing that while on the one hand he is more sensitive and caring after his most recent resurrection, he’s also more likely to fly of the handle and be quick to anger. And as annoyingly shoehorned in as Bakuto is, the fact that he wants to get Harold back to public life (or at least claims to) and allows him to take out the board member opposing Ward and Joy has some juice to it.

But overall, this episode is a spate of plot-convenient nonsense. The various twists and introduction feel almost wholly unmoored from the rest of the series so far, and even taken apart from the larger storylines, a lot of the writing in the episode is just obvious and dumb. You can get away with some weaker plot machinations if you can make up for it with character work, but this show has stunk at both when it comes to Danny & Co., and this episode is a real nadir for plot, character, writing, and dialogue.

(Oh, and as an aside, the fight scenes were pretty weak too, but it was the least of this episode’s problems.)