1x07 Felling Tree with Roots

[7.2/10] I sometimes forget that that Iron Fist showrunner Scott Buck presided over four seasons of Dexter. When I think of him, I tend to think of the nadirs the show hit under his tenure, particularly in its last season, with bad dialogue, worse characters, and horrible twists around every corner. But good or bad, that gave Buck enough time to immerse himself in the blood, guts, and parental issues that were part and parcel with the series.

“Felling Tree with Roots” feels like a shout out to Buck’s old gig in many respects. Maybe that’s just me grasping at the surface-level details of this one. It’s not difficult to draw a line between the two series when you see, for example, Harold Meachum putting a pair of cadavers on plastic wrap in an effort to keep their viscera off his floor. It feels evident when Ward is taking bodies out to the swamp to dump them under the water in his father’s neat little bags. It seems particularly relevant when Ward is having conversations with people who aren’t there.

More to the point, Dexter Morgan had a complicated relationship with his father. Harry Morgan was the man who taught Dexter how to channel his serial killer urges, but the show often toyed around with the idea of whether that was truly a good thing, and found wrinkles in Harry’s past that made Dexter question how great or helpful Harry’s guidance had been. The show was always a bit skittish, sometimes incoherent about these point, but there was still an undercurrent of such issues in the background.

That is the firmest place where “Felling Tree with Roots” seems to draw from its showrunner’s former work. We see Ward pushed to the limit here -- having to haul bodies out to swamps with a busted hand. We see his bank accounts drained, his attempt to escape from his father’s clutches and the demands of his corporate life dashed in the process. And most of all, we see the way that Harold still patronizes him, still treats him like a child, pushing his son to the edge, either in the hopes that a great leader will be forged in that crucible or because it’s self-serving manipulation.

Either way, Harold pays the price for it, and in one of the most visceral and emotionally charged scenes this series has been able to muster, Ward kills his father. In hindsight, while Ward didn’t necessarily start out as my favorite character on the show, the way that it’s done a reasonably slow burn on him feeling the pressure and gradually unraveling at his father’s machinations is quite nice. The stabbing could easily feel like too much, but instead it feels like the appropriate and earned culmination of all that Ward has been through.

Would it that the same could be said for the Danny-Colleen story here. Don’t get me wrong, for once the show actually seemed to dig into the craft of filmmaking in their romance, and while the chemistry between the actors wasn’t crackling exactly, there was a certain sweetness to the two of them moving their relationship in a physical direction here. While I don’t know that we really needed a sex scene, tasteful far shots of the two of them as silhouettes, or merely enjoying one another’s closeness, did a better job of showing a connection between the two of them than horrid weapons-based flirting could hope to manage.

The big problem is that it’s entirely unearned. The show hasn’t done a good job at developing why Colleen would go from looking upon this guy as a creep to wanting so desperately for him to spend the night. That speaks to a bigger problem with Iron Fist generally. It’s not as though these first seven episodes are entirely devoid of good material; it’s just that the way the characters and, more to the point, their relationships come off on the screen seems to differ from how they’re written and intended, which leaves even well-done scenes like Danny and Colleen’s night together here feeling hollow as a followup to the pairing we’ve seen thus far.

A much better, non-romantic pairing is Madame Gao and Danny. They haven’t had much face-to-face time thus far, but there is a nice contrast between Danny’s fieriness, moral certitude, and naivete as compared to Gao’s calm, deliberateness, and wizened experience. That makes her compelling and more importantly threatening as an antagonist here. The fact that she has her own keycard to Rand and makes reference to Wendell Rand adds a little intrigue that comes from the notion that she’s more powerful and connected that Danny even realized, as he slowly discovers how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Of course, this being the halfway mark of the season, the episode includes plenty of teases like that. We learn that the chemist gave Gao the formula, that Ward and Joy and Danny are being ousted from Rand, and that Colleen runs into some douchey-looking guy that she has some sort of unspecified history with. The business with Ward is the most compelling of any of it, but it’s clear that the show is trying to throw out enough hooks to get the viewer to stick through the back half of the series.

And, as usual, the episode tries to draw certain parallels between Ward and Danny here. The most interesting thing about Gao’s run-in with Danny is that she talks to him about a single-minded focus that the monks who made him the Iron First instilled in him, an unbending devotion. It’s the same sort of thing that Harold talks to him about in a different way, about loyalty to Rand and to their family. Even as she makes thinly veiled (and frankly kind of unnerving) threats, Gao makes a point that that philosophy doesn’t seem to cohere with who Danny is, that he believes in saving individual lives and not just fulfilling his mission.

That single-minded focus doesn’t seem to fit Ward either (or Joy for that matter) as they get wrapped up in plenty of “it’s right for the business” dilemmas and find themselves crumpling, each in their own way, from the strain of that. Ward’s frustrations emerge in a pretty bloody fashion; it remains to be seen if Danny’s and Joy’s will do the same.