Iron Fist, Season 1
Continuing my "pre-Defenders viewing...
There's a line in the first season of Daredevil where Matt tells Foggy how he was trained in martial arts by an older blind man. Foggy responds, "Isn't that the plot to Kung Fu?" He's not far wrong. That old TV series was just as much an inspiration for creating the character of Iron Fist as those Saturday afternoon martial arts flicks were. Thankfully, Iron Fist only uses the Kung Fu fighting style, not their story line.
First off, after Luke Cage, I was pretty sure that Iron Fist would be a little bit of a letdown. However, I didn't expect it to be the least impressive of the bunch. You have to figure that they had the other series to build upon, right? So I piece of advice would be watch this series before you watch Luke Cage. There's a brief reference that won't really spoil anything, and you'll end on a stronger note.
Iron Fist is the least satisfying and least compelling of the four series. Going into it, I saw Loras Tyrell (from Game of Thrones) with facial hair and an older Faramir (from Lord of the Rings), clean-shaven and with a haircut. It also has Thrones Sand Snake, Nymeria Sand, which I probably wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't checking on something else.
In the series, Danny Rand's backstory is as follows: on a trip with his parents to China, the plane crashes in the Himalayas, leaving him as the only survivor, where he is found by monks and trained in kung fu and becomes "The Iron Fist". To the outside world, the Rand family is dead, but then mysteriously, one day 15 years later, someone claiming to be the long-deceased Danny walks (barefoot) into his father's old company and tells his story to his old friends (now grown). Now this is something that could be considered borderline cliche (I'm being kind) in comics and could be accepted by the fans with a simple hand wave to establish a premise. If this were to happen in the real world, the person claiming to the long lost dead son would locked up in a mental ward.
By the end of the first episode, Danny is locked in a mental ward. Seriously? Spends the entire second episode there as well. Not exactly riveting material.
We get backstory of K'un Lun later on, and I wondered if the series might have been better if it had started at the monastery, where it could have had plenty of action, and then had Danny see the sign that the passage was open. By the end of the first episode, he could have left for New York to get answers about his old life and the audience would have a better understanding of his character. And maybe Danny would have a better feel for it, too. Sure, the world has changed, but he wasn't exactly an infant when he left.
On the other hand, given this approach, none of the villains and potential villains could be introduced Before episode 2, at the earliest. However, that might not have been a bad thing. The entire plot line is muddled, and it jerks back and forth, never quite sure where it's going. In the first episode, you meet two people that I dubbed, at that point, "Big Bad" and "Middle Management Bad", except that he was middle management at the company. Or maybe, as it turns out, he was. Then other forces emerge, but then they fall away. And everyone is doing the mind fake, or thinks they are, at any rate. It's not unwatchable, but I questioned whether or not I would keep watching.
In the recurring character department: Hogarth, from Jessica Jones makes an appearance. She's not part of any storyline and appears specifically to be Danny's corporate lawyer. This is somewhat true to the comics, aka the source material, in establishing a shared set of characters. (FYI, Matt Murdock is a defense attorney and probably would've been too busy at any rate for this case.)
And once again, Rosario Dawson shows up as (former) Nurse Claire. Her character gets more development than any of the others. She's learning how to fight, and she has a pair on what looked like claws that she trained in Kung Fu with. The incident that she mentioned in Luke Cage doesn't happen in this series (as it comes later than Luke), so at this point I'm assuming that it occurred in the second season of Daredevil, which may or may not be the next thing I watch.
Comments
Post a Comment