I loved the battle at the tower ❤️
Honestly I'd much prefer if everyone accepted Lucifer is the devil and started treating him like that
So... 4 of them are replaced by LMDs, even Daisy. Sounds a bit silly. The jig will be up as soon as she tries to use her powers
I like your thinking, Turk. Getting beat down by Daredevil in Hell's Kitchen is insanely better than fall of a building in Harlem.
"You look like a damn fool"
It has had a good run. A bit sad they didn't give the show the dignity to just die after 2 decent seasons. It's just going to keep going downhill from here. Just gonna pretend i didn't see that dumb cliffhanger at the end.
Really, I never thought that the end will be migrated to a SCI-FI TV-Show ??, let's see maybe in those two years a lot happened, I need a good damn explanation to stay watching it.
[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.
[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.
My favorite thing about this episode was recognizing locations from lost.
The interactions the Inhumans have with pretty much every normal person they encounter is like. "I know we just met, but did we just become best friends ?" It's like the people they meet take a blood oath to help them, when they just met.
Everything wrong with Iron Fist is pretty much what's wrong with this show. I mean every character is too open, like Danny is about being the Iron Fist and chi.
Which is why Black Bolt is the best character because.... he doesn't talk. The action I think is at least fun. So that isn't the problem. Everything just feels rushed.
The best relationship in the show is of Crystal and Lock Jaw. Which is sad since he's a CGI giant dog.
The whole Bob situation was so obvious. I saw that coming from a mile away.
Bob! I kind of figured he would die, but I hoped he wouldn't. I had started to like him.
Iain De Caestecker deserves all the awards.
Good episode as usual but with a few logical mistakes. So they vented the Zephyr because they needed the cold to kill the shriek but Yoyo and the other agent didn't freeze at all?
(imagine Oprah): You get an Iron Fist! You get an Iron Fist! Everybody gets an Iron Fist!
EDDIE MUNSON PLAYING MASTER OF PUPPETS IN THE UPSIDE DOWN WAS LEGENDARY!
"Chrissy, this is for you."
Eddie should have got a spin-off but based on the Dungeons and Dragons 80’s cartoon series lol.
Pretty fun episode - unfortunately the Harley and Ivy dynamic seems to be more of detriment to the show, as the show is at it's best when it's off those two. Lots of Joker DC nods, ranging from Batman 89 / The Dark Knight and even Joker (couldn't see any Leto ones - though I'm not sure). Even a potential node to Sean Murphy's White Knight run.
That being said, something was still missing for me overall. Previous seasons were pushing for my top 3 - top 5 of the year. This year I don't know if this will be top 10. Admittedly, we've had a lot of great TV but something is just off overall.
i cant believe one of the best eps (so far) this season is where joker gets to be wholesome and the damn mayor of gotham :sob:
Black Mirror used to be about technology and its impact on society.
This was just a horror story with a nice twist at the end. More Twilight Zone than Black Mirror.
The story was fine but it didn't seem like a Black Mirror episode at all. No new tech/sci-fi element. More of a typical thriller.
Probably the best episode of the series. That fight scene was fucking amazing.
Does anyone else still find Ivar unbearably annoying?
That was a really great episode that tied everything off nicely... & then we had that ridiculous epilogue, which might as well have been replaced by a scene where they actually jump over a shark, because WHAT. Two characters get together purely because they're the main characters, even though they don't belong together. Then suddenly it's 2 years later she's hanging out in Asia, & then he shows up (& I guess they were married or something cos she mentions a ring?) saying their whole team got kidnapped & a box got left behind, & they both have to touch it to open it, & then they both touch the item inside it & a picture just appears on metal, & then they hold it next to the tattoo it depicts & ALL HER TATTOOS START GLOWING like WTF.
I don't know what's worse, the ridiculous sci-fi tech on display (I know they pull a lot of shit that isn't possible on this show, but this is just stupid), or the fact that the setup is that most of the interesting characters are out of the picture & we're left with just two characters, only one of which is interesting. Seriously, Kurt is by far the least interesting character, probably because the whole plot is based around things from his past, so the writers didn't bother developing his character beyond 'angry guy who shouts a lot', & this would be fine (plenty of other interesting characters after all, & if that's his thing then hey that's his thing) were it not for the fact that the bloody show keeps presenting him as if he was anything other than dull. I'd much rather have him be the one who got kidnapped & everyone else had to get together to find him.
Unless that whole bit turns out to be a dream sequence or something...
Apparently they didn't think they'd get renewed themselves after this hilariously crappy season, so they pretty much ended it, huh?
At least they had the guts to close the (main) storyline - sort of at least.
Yet they make the continuation of this tattoo thing even more ridicolous as it seems.
I'm out. The end is satisfying enough to close this show for me and the "cliffhanger" is giving me an outlook on how far they are willing to go with the stupid tattoos. Early on I said in the long run the show's downfall will be the "mysterious tattoos".
It gives a too strict frame to work in...aaaand that's exactly the reason why we got glowing tattoos now. Great.
Very well done, writers.
Edit Nov 2022:
Years later I let it stream on Amazon on the second monitor and wow. Wow.
First two seasons and Blindspot was around 5/10 with a weaker end but the 4th and 5th season bring it down to a 2/10 easily. It's that shitty. Not just bad but really, really shitty. Crazy they got to 5 seasons.
I've never been more heartbroken over a character's death like Eddie's last words were the saddest and proudest words he's ever said and yeah i sat there screaming crying sobbing throwing up
Great episode.
Like before, this show is at its best whenever they move away from Harley & Ivy. This deconstructed version of Gotham is so deep and interesting that it's always fun exploring these alternate versions of established characters.
Props to Conner Shin for writing this amazing episode and he's not even credited on IMDb yet.
smart concept, very dull and boring execution
