Iron Fist (Marvel/Netflix)

[theenglish]

Damn - this is awesome so far. Three episodes in, and I really have no idea what the critics were talking about in their reviews. Practically none of it is correct from my viewpoint.

I just finished the second episode. I think the show is absolutely fantastic. I love the supporting cast and can't see why the critics panned this series. Colleen and Joy are both excellent characters, and I can't wait to learn Meachum's connection to The Hand. That said, I don't have time to binge watch so I will drop out of this thread now and skim through it when I'm done (probably about three months from now).

 

[Reverend]

Like the show overall, but there are certainly issues. For me I think the weak link is Joy. Not a knock against the actress, she does a great job with what she's given but unfortunately what she's given makes it really hard to get a handle on what motivates her from one episode to another. her actions seem to be driven by the moment-to-moment needs of the plot and not by organic characterisation. That's very unfortunate.

Also, for a show about supposedly the best martial artists on the planet, the fights just don't seem to be wowing me. Maybe it's because Daredevil set the bar so high but I can't help but notice that a lot of the blows and moves just feel slower and a lot of the blows don't feel like they're connecting.
One possible mitigating circumstance is that Daredevil staged a lot of it's fights in very dark, shadowy rooms that hide a lot of sins, whereas for the most part the fights in Iron Fist are in broad daylight or well lit rooms.
Either way, the end result is what counts and while still good, it's not hitting those high notes I'd hoped it would.

On the positive side, I'm impressed at what they did with Ward. Of all the characters introduced in the first episode, he was the one I was most sure I had pegged and by the end the one about which I was most mistaken. Props to the actor for really selling it.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Episode 4 is where it starts to really pick up for me. The hallway and elevator fight was intense, if a bit shorter than the hallway fights of the previous Netflix shows. More action was sorely needed at this point, and the show begins to deliver.

Nice continuity nods. Hogarth. The shout-out to Karen Page and Ellison from Daredevil. Gao is appropriately menacing as she should be as a big bad. It's fortunate that they had the opportunity to develop the character over the first two seasons of Daredevil before giving her the spotlight here (while keeping her in shadows). It adds to her menace now that we know what she is capable of. We also know, thanks to Daredevil season one, that the symbol found with the mysterious message he received at the end of the episode was used the Steel Serpent heroin that Gao pushes. In the comics, the character of the Steel Serpent is one of Danny's arch foes. I hope we get to see him before season's end.

Not as gripping as Daredevil or Jessica Jones, but it's been fun so far.

 

[FPAlpha]

Few things can top the hallway fight from Daredevil Season 1, they tried to up it in Season 2 but it felt just like an inferior copy (at least from me but S2 Daredevil had other things going for it).

Finished episode 6 now and the Kung Fu is front and center now when Danny engages the Hand in his first confrontation. Glad to see Claire Temple back as the one character who ties all Netflix shows together and i laughed when she went "Sweet Christmas" at one point, that was a nice nod

The fights were quite cool but honestly i much prefer Daredevil fights because he takes a beating like hell and in Season 1 it fucked him up pretty good but he never stopped or gave up showing us what willpower is and how great his desire is to fight and beat the villains. It made for a much more interesting character than a Kung Fu master with a mystical fist.

Don't get me wrong, i like Iron Fist so far and the main characters are good and acted well but so far there is nothing truly special or awe inspiring yet to happen in the show. It is perfectly fine and watchable, just nit the breakout season that S1 Daredevil was.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Just one comment about episode two: I'm disgusted and infuriated by the inhumane way the patients were treated at the psychiatric hospital, particularly the enforced medications.

One of the thematic goals of this show is to talk about the way our society treats the very top and the very bottom. The first episode involved the homeless, the second episode the mentally ill. We also see poverty with Colleen's dojo and the emergency room. We see heroin and we see opiate pills. I suspect your reaction was exactly the one they wanted to get.

Anyway, I thought the show started a little slow and dull, but with clear goals. By the end, I found each episode very entertaining even if I'm not sure why they chose the directions they did.

Mixed bag, but certainly still a positive show.

 

[Venardhi]

10 episodes in:

Finn Jones plays Danny like he was in K'un Lun for maybe a year, not the entirety of his teenage and young adult life. He acts, for the most part, like any other 20-something "spiritual" social drop-out with emotional issues.

Danny's inheritance is murky (clearly Joy got his parents' house and it isn't like billions of dollars would just sit in a bank doing nothing for 15 years if you died without an heir.), and his role as majority shareholder is never clearly defined. If he can make unilateral decisions like selling a drug at cost, how can the board vote him off of it?

The whole premise and handling of Danny fighting the Hand's champions was goofy and trite as fuuuuuuuck. Gao, of course, betrays the honor code supposedly in play here, but doesn't take advantage of having him at her mercy to just rid herself of an ongoing threat? That doesn't square.

David Wenham is fantastic. The confuddled rage monster they turn him into though is so familiar as to make me lose nearly all interest.

Characters are pretty wobbly overall. The Colleen we meet in episode 1 is barely recognizable by mid-season. Danny seems to be about half a dozen separate interpretations of the character grafted together, as if the writers never really nailed him down and just trusted Jones to bring it all together.

Danny is an idiot. Can we just once have a savvy hero in one of these shows?

Colleen's cult and Bakuto are such a trope I had the whole twist pegged from his first appearance.

They don't seem to know what they want The Hand to be. in DD we have zombie ninjas and blood draining and bottomless pits and here we mostly just see a bunch of paramilitary buzzcuts.

Let's hope the finale brings everything together a little better than Luke Cage's did.

 

[Turtletrekker]

There is a mention of Midland Circle in episode 7. That's where Matt and Elektra found the 40-story hole in the Earth in Daredevil season two.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I knew that sounded familar. Thanks.

 

[Venardhi]

Just finished. Meh. They do realize Dr. Strange was only a few months ago right? If you're going to use such a familiar ominous epilogue, at least don't use the same one.

Overall, I'd put it somewhere around Luke Cage for me, which was my least favorite of the Netflix series to date. The highs weren't as high and the lows weren't as low, but Cage's highs weren't much to write home about to begin with.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

The parallels to Doctor Strange were very present, but I wouldn't be surprised if they wrote this before that movie was released.

Also, it's a bit unfair to Iron Fist (just like the Arrow comparisons are unfair). In both cases, it draws directly from Iron Fist's source material. It's Doctor Strange that's ripping them off rather than the other way around.

 

[Tosk]

It's Doctor Strange that's ripping them off rather than the other way around.

Strange pre-dates Iron Fist, but yeah Green Arrow came quite a bit before that. But Batman came before him. ...But The Shadow came before him.

There's a bunch of superheroes who share similar origins.

 

[Venardhi]

Then again, the Davos who became the second Steel Serpent was a very different character in the comics. Pretty much everything in the MCU/MTU is a remix.

So that leaves us with something like 4 potential villains for the next season, depending on who bites it in Defenders.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I'm not talking about origins:

Spoiler: Iron Fist Ending

I'm talking about Davos being Danny's friend and then, due to jealousy and resentment, he turns against him as a villain. Doctor Strange and Baron Mordo were never friends turned enemies even if they studied together. The Davos heel turn mirrors Doctor Strange but only because Doctor Strange radically changed Baron Mordo.

I don't think Davos was radically changed, although he was certainly changed. The only real big difference is he was an ally out in our world first as opposed to already being a rival when he appeared.

As for origins. I know of the Green Arrow's origin story (let's leave aside Batman because he voluntarily left as an adult long after his parents died to train, so that's fairly different). My question is when the Green Arrow origin story of his parents dying while he was on the way to a destination, he was trapped somewhere for years, and trained to become who he was first appeared. Was that before 1974?

 

[Venardhi]

Silver Age, late 50s I think. At least that was when he got the stranded part of it. Not sure about the parents.

 

[The Old Mixer]

In the classic comics, Oliver Queen was actually stranded on an island and trained himself in archery. There was no martial arts training in the East or anything of that nature. And I don't think his parents factored into it one way or another, he was an adult millionaire.

Likewise, Batman traveling the world to learn his skills didn't become a thing until the late '80s, to my knowledge. In the Golden/Silver Ages, he trained himself stateside, which included learning martial arts, apprenticing under a detective, and book learning.

I'm not overly familiar with comics Iron Fist, but I believe those elements of his origins predate similar elements being retconned into either Green Arrow or Batman.

 

[Tosk]

I'm not talking about origins:

You're right, and I should have been paying more attention. Sorry.

 

[jbny67]

Much better than the critics were saying.

The netflix shows are becoming their own universe inside of the bigger MCU.
Not only are characters crossing over on screen, but off screen as well with Joy having hired Jessica Jones as a private detective.

Anyone catch the Stan Lee cameo?

 

[Reverend]

For those that have finished the season: am I imagining things or...

Spoiler

...are they building Claire up to be White Tiger? I mean those claws seem rather specific, no?

 

[Gaith]

One possible mitigating circumstance is that Daredevil staged a lot of it's fights in very dark, shadowy rooms that hide a lot of sins, whereas for the most part the fights in Iron Fist are in broad daylight or well lit rooms.

I've also read it suggested that Daredevil being masked makes swapping in stunt doubles who actually know what they're doing a lot easier.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I'm planning to watch this at a measured pace rather than binge it, but will try to post my thoughts on a per-episode basis, though I may not be able to read a lot of the thread at this point.

_______

Iron Fist, episode 1
"Snow Gives Way"

What fight business there was seemed decent enough. He makes it look a little more effortless than some of his Netflix peers, which is appropriate for the character concept. I like little bits of business like kicking the elevator button in the middle of a fight scene and calming the dog.

Regarding his efforts to convince people who he really is...dramatically, it's not about convincing us, it's about the situations that it's putting him in, and we learn more about him along the way (keeping in mind that not everyone watching is going to be familiar with the comic book character). We also have to understand that he suffers from debilitating origin flashbacks--a superheroic disadvantage worth some extra generation points in an RPG.

When he was trying to convince Joy at her house, he should have mentioned the Monopoly flashback that he'd just had. She may not have remembered that incident...but if she had, bingo.

It makes me feel really old that this guy's been missing for 15 years, since he was a kid, and he has an iPod.

If the dojo scene in this episode was supposed to be the infamous whitesplaining scene, I wasn't seeing it. It was more of a fish out of water thing, showing that he even sounded crazy to an Asian American martial arts instructor. She's from the real world, and he's from K'un-Lun, where he was taught by Lei Kung the Thunderer. That sort of business reminded me of the first Thor film (which I liked).

Hey, why all these complaints about no costume? He wears a mask in the first episode! What, were you looking for something specific?

If there hadn't been another character in the scene, I might have thought that the supposedly dead Daddy Meachum was Ward's head character. Ward's adult behavior isn't as surprising as his sister seems to think it should be, because he was presented as a pure asshole as a kid in the flashback. Hopefully there will be more to him, but he's not very multidimensional so far.