Originally published March 18, 2017. Updated April 11, 2018.
Shaun Munro reviews the second episode of Iron Fist…
It’s certainly a bold strategy for a superhero TV show to confine its protagonist to a prison in its mere second episode, and in this case it’s a gamble that ultimately fails to pay off.
At this point in Iron Fist, viewers probably want to see Danny kicking ass, taking names and making progress towards living up to that title, but instead he spends almost the entire episode strapped to a hospital bed or talking to doctors inside a mental hospital, courtesy of Ward Meachum. It’s an utterly bemusing creative decision at such an early stage in the series when viewers are still getting acquainted with these characters and this world.
While the hospital setting flirts with being interesting thanks to several of the personalities Danny interacts with while inside, it quickly stagnates as it defers to tedious shot-reverse-shot exposition dumps. At least writer-showrunner Scott Buck didn’t end up having Danny’s pal inside turn out to be imaginary, as some may have expected.
Brief flashbacks also continue to be too piecemeal and poorly slotted into the rest of the plot, while the Meachums don’t prove themselves to be much interesting beyond the cracks beginning to show in Joy’s icy facade. The episode is also sure to be ridiculed by some for its howlingly unsubtle M&Ms product placement, awkwardly shoehorned into a subplot as Joy attempts to figure out if Danny is indeed who he says he is. The payoff is a marvel (pun intended) of unintentional comedy.
This narrative strand, like so many in this episode, goes around in circles begging a question that the audience already knows the answer to, which at this point in the series simply isn’t very interesting. Is Danny really Danny? Will Colleen accept a bribe from Ward to declare that Danny’s dangerous? Even the least attentive viewers know the answers to these questions, so seeing them play out so sluggishly makes this episode feel like a soporific slog for long portions, especially as it clocks in at a beefy 62 minutes.
Even Colleen, easily the highlight of the first episode, can’t liven things up much; she’s mostly resigned to rote breadcrumb-following, while her brief stint of action is sloppily directed. The episode as a whole is rather low on the fisticuffs front, with only a brief burst at the tail-end mustering any intrigue at all (but again, the choreography and shot framing are pure amateur hour).
Iron Fist‘s second installment has the unmistakable whiff of a bottle episode – that’s one episode out of a season made cheaply to compensate for other, bigger-budget ones – which is extremely odd so early on in a show’s life. This only compounds the prevailing feeling so far that Marvel‘s latest is struggling to find its feet, and while it certainly concludes with the promise of bigger, better action to come, the focal drama remains depressingly limp so far.
With a change-up in writer and director for episode three, though, perhaps Iron Fist will finally start to take flight.
Shaun Munro
