I am aware of that - but several posts have said that the explanation would have provided insufficient reasoning for him to be as good at it as he was. I was suggesting a possible solution to that, not invalidating the reasoning they gave in the show.
Critics are way off base on this one, half way through and I love it. Great performances all round, especially Tom Pelphery as the exec going off the rails. Thought he was a very powerful performer in Banshee and this cements that feeling. Good action, not excessively violent but still very exciting which is refreshing. I hope this goes for more than one season. By the sound of it fan reaction has been very positive compared to critical reaction, so lets hope.
I am so dense. At the second to last episode now and I only now realized the Daddy Meachum is Faramir of Gondor!
One of my geek friends didn't make the connection at all after three episodes until I pointed it out to him. I, on the other hand, knew it was him going in so I guess I cheated.
Just finished watching over the last three days. Let me get the most important thing out of the way first: Ward was by far the best character. He was really getting awesome around episodes 5 and 6, and I was afraid they'd ruin him after what he did to his father, but no, that just tortured him even more. So relieved he made it to the end of the show, he earned it. Now as for Joy on the other hand, that last scene for her made no sense at all. Earlier in the episode she was angry at her father for setting Danny up, but now she wants to kill him? After Ward seems to have been properly readjusted/cured? Nonsense. As for the show as a whole, liked it, but it wasn't Marvel's strongest. As many have pointed out, when your favorite character is Colleen or Ward (or even Harold or Claire or Madame Gao), that's a pretty big weakness right at the center of the show. Danny was good at times, but he was never great. Some of that may have been the actor, but a good deal of it was the writing. Similar to the character himself, the show never had a clear sense of purpose or direction. One thing I think we all hoped we'd get with this show was a martial arts extravaganza. But what we got was fair at best. For a martial arts show, it wasn't as strong as I would have hoped. (Especially from Marvel's Netflix division. Which may be an unfair comparison or expectation, but the fact is, they set the bar high.) For the greatest warrior in the world, Danny Rand sure didn't look it for most of the time. I'll agree with others that Colleen was a good character, but was let down by two things, the blind following of the Hand which made her look clueless, and the lack of followup on her thirst for violence in the cagefights. I am hopeful, however, that we'll see her journey continue in a future series, be it Daughters of the Dragon, Heroes For Hire, or Iron Fist season 2. I would really like to see that latter storypoint continued in her next starring role. Overall, it was a good show, but it could have used more focus. It never got quite as bad as the bad parts of Luke Cage (the final episode or two were infinitely superior to the big showdown between Cage and Diamondback), but it never really hit the fun highpoints that Cage was able to find a few times either. And speaking of which, yeah, I hit the freeze frame to try to read Luke's letter to Claire. He said he looked forward to sparring with her, but said it wouldn't be fair. Because she'd knock him out with a single kiss. Which makes Luke far more charming than anything we got from Danny in 13 episodes.
I finished it. It was good enough that I didn't have to struggle to get to the end of it, so on that level, it was watchable and entertaining enough. I've since seen more reviews. It seems the most common complaints are Finn, the fact that the character is white and the editing is off. I agree that the editing was sometimes odd, it seemed like they would go over the same general plot points several times, and try to repeat the general feeling evoked by them. I also found Danny's family to be extremely schizophrenic, changing allegiances and emotional reactions at the drop of a hat. I have no problems with the character being white for two reasons: 1) He was white in the comics. 2) The whole point was that it was unusual for an American to use the Eastern philosophies for martial arts. Bruce Lee ran into similar prejudices when he went back to Hong Kong. The show suffered from both the bad guys seeming too weak for what we had been told and that the hero wasn't as powerful as we were told. In one scene The Hand is all-pervasive and unknowable, the next, it's a bunch of malcontent kids from the streets that are no match for skilled warriors. Our hero creates an earthquake in one scene on the floor of a building but in the next, he's losing a fight to a non-martial artist twice his age. I'm not a fan of Eastern fantasy philosophies. Chi doesn't exist. I do understand that these people get really caught up in it and take it seriously, but to me it makes Ironfist a magical character rather than a grounded one. Fair enough, I watched Dr Strange and Thor and was entertained. Sometimes though I found myself rolling my eyes. All of these Marvel Netflix shows are gratuitously violent, and all have moments that are worse than others. I might rank Arnold's smashing corpses as one of the worst, however. Incidentally, I did read some of the Powerman and Iron Fist comics when I was a teen. I was disappointed Danny never wore a version of the costume, especially when other Netflix heroes did. Ultimately I'd give the show a C. I'd watch a season 2 to see if it improves. RAMA
I found myself sympathizing more with Ward than Danny. He was more relatable in a way. I didn't like that you needed to see Daredevil to know the danger of the Hand, or how they bring the dead to life. This Hand didn't seem all that particularly dangerous. I would image that if you are not at Danny's level of expertise, he would dispatch you quick, like Steven Segal in his 80s movies. Who Danny could beat with relative ease seemed to vary. A soldier is trained to kill, so shut the hell up Claire. Danny claimed to be a weapon to defeat the Hand, so where did he expect the Hand to most likely be? In NYC, or at the gate of K'un Lan? A better story would have been if he had been tracking the Hand to NYC, not wanting to have anything to do with his father's company because he didn't need it, but being discovered by his old friends and forced into revealing himself, which puts them in danger of the Hand, ratchet up tension and conflict.
I got the impression that Danny didn't actually believe the Hand existed until he physically met them. That he treated them as a kind of bogey man that Kun Lun used to motivate itself, a kind of personification of their fear of the outside world. Or at the least like they were similar to Kun Lun, small, ancient and confined to the parts of the world where they could hide away from the modern world. He seemed as surprised as anyone that they were real, and that their reach extended far enough that they had a major presence in New York. Basically, Danny failed to understand the threat at pretty much every turn.
I think we have to bear in mind that Bakuto was essentially trying to create his own private army under the guise of The Hand - clearly wanted to subvert the supreme authority of Madame Gao. He can't pull troops from the regular Hand as she's got them in her pocket, so he has to use the feeder school students instead and therefore they're not going to be fully trained Hand assassins. Also, in turn, Gao obviously knew that he wouldn't be a formidable opponent for Danny because of this and was using him to remove her own problem, so he did end up working for Gao in a fashion even though he refused to do so earlier during the Contest.
Finished watching last night. Extremely disappointing to say the least. The show reminds me of a mix between 'The Phantom Menace' and 'SHIELD'... Bad writing, direction, and acting, and filled with emo stupidity. A lot of eye rolls throughout. Fight sequences were boring for the most part and poorly choreographed. The Hand was reduced to a little kid squad after being built up like crazy in Daredevil. This is the group Stick is so worried about? The splintered group theory doesn't hold water imo. Terrible writing there and does not jive at all. Danny is an emo bitch and I can't root for the brat at all. I felt bad for Rosario Dawson with all the garbage writing she was given. The person who played Colleen was frickin terrible... as was Davos, Sis Meachum, and emo wannabe Hand leader. The pacing, editing, & direction made this show boring beyond belief. Each episode could have been about 30 minutes with a competent production team, but... it was emo'd. On the positive side, Ward was an excellent character. The drunken boxing sequence was far and away the best part of the show. I did an eye roll when you first see the boxer cause you know what's coming, but it was done extremely well. Pops Meachum was also fun. Madam Gao was badass as usual. I hope 'Defenders' is a return to form for the Netflix shows and I now have no hope for 'Inhumans' since its the same production team.
As a whole, a very uneven season but they really went for broke on the final four episodes. I enjoyed the show and can't wait for Defenders, though I wish Jones' performance wasn't so bobbleheaded, with his head nodding and darting from side-to-side at weird moments. The actress playing Colleen and the actor for Davos were both superb. I would totally watch a Daughters of the Dragon (co-starring Misty Knight from Luke Cage, of course) or a Danny & Davos series. I'll have to watch the 13 episodes again to be sure, but it seemed like entire season had a "Fearful Symmetry" structure to it. The first episode had Danny leaving K'un Lun and the last episode had him returning to the mystical city. Both the first and final episodes had Danny trying to get to the top floor of the Rand building; the first by going up, the last by swinging down. Colleen tries to give Danny money in the first, while Danny tries to give Colleen money (via a scholarship program) in the last. Both the second and penultimate episodes began with someone strapped to a bed in a mental ward -- Danny and Ward, respectively. Again, there may be more mirroring in structure to point out, but I'll have to do a rematch to be certain.
Iron Fist, episode 2 "Shadow Hawk Takes Flight" ("Isn't that cute, he's on episode 2.") Before they established otherwise, I thought that perhaps the shrink was reporting to the Meachums, the way he pressed Danny for information about his parents by name. Whoever wrote this stuff is really obsessed with the fact that Danny was shoeless for most of the first episode...it gets brought up with conspicuous frequency. At this point, I'll be surprised if it doesn't come up more in the future. The writers did do their homework, though...there really are a beer and a clothing line named Iron Fist. Maybe it was the drugs, but Danny really shouldn't have been volunteering info about K'un-Lun and the Iron Fist once the doc believed him. So far, another thing I saw in reviews that I'm not seeing in the show is consistency issues with his use of the Iron Fist, but I guess it's a bit soon to tell. I'm guessing that those people don't understand limited-use powers and think he should just be mashing the same video game button all the time. I'm also not seeing why people here seem to think Ward's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'd say too soon to tell again, but first impressions really are important.
Yeah, Danny is a naive idiot. That's pretty much his go to characterization in the show. He's probably the weakest character in his own series, sadly enough. They are, but here those first impressions are meant to manipulate. Ward probably has the most significant character arc in terms of character transformation and growth in the entire run of the season. If you've ever seen Buffy/Angel, think Wesley. It's not quite that pronounced, given the length they have to work with, but he really does go through the most in terms of emotional transformation.