Consider the first scene of “Eight Diagram Dragon Punch,” easily the best episode so far of the (still mostly lackluster) Marvel’s Iron Fist. In a lot of ways, this opening scene – which is just a conversation between Danny, Harold, and Ward – is a good showcase for everything that Iron Fist does best, and a whole lot that it does worse.
We open with Danny falling from a ledge, and seeing him fail at something physical is a welcome change of pace. It helps to humanize him (because for the most part, Danny Rand is pretty boring). Then he has a heart-to-heart with Harold and Ward in Harold’s penthouse. In my favorite shot of Iron Fist so far, Harold and Danny embrace, and while there is no pretense on Danny’s part, you can’t help but feel sorry for him, cipher that he is; all he wants is something of a family (he tells Harold, “You’re all I’ve got”), and he is undoubtedly being manipulated for Harold’s own purposes.
Then, in classic Iron Fist fashion, we get some shitty dialogue (Harold, on the Hand: “They’re like the Illuminati, only real”), some clumsy exposition (the Hand did heal Harold’s cancer, but in a nice twist, he had to die first), and Ward being a dick. To be fair, Ward does lead to the scene’s funniest exchange: “Why don’t we give him his dad’s old office while we’re at it?” “Great idea, Ward, make it happen.”
This scene has a lot of promise, which hopefully the show can live up to. (Personally, I’d love it if Danny and Harold had an Amsterdam/Bill the Butcher relationship.) But “Eight Diagram Dragon Palm” slams on the brakes so we can watch the most exciting part of superhero stories: board meetings.
Danny, with is 51% ownership of the company, starts throwing his weight around right away, torpedoing Ward’s plan to sell a drug for $50 a pill, instead forcing the company to sell it at cost. Ward, hilariously, thinks the best retaliation is to get a reporter in his office and tell her that this is evidence that Danny doesn’t know what he’s doing. I repeat: Danny lowered the cost of a life-saving drug, and Ward is so naïve that he thought he could use that action to make Danny look like the bad guy. It’s like if Martin Shkreli got a reporter in his office and complained that people with HIV wanting to live was really bad for business.
Elsewhere, Colleen remains pathologically opposed to making or accepting money. She’s refused offers from both Ward and Danny, and gets mad that footage of her in the fighting ring (where she beat up a guy who looked like Lem from The Shield, in a pretty decent fight scene) has been put online in an attempt to drum up business for the dojo. That’s the most we see out of Colleen in “Dragon Palm,” and it feels like so much filler.
Probably because Iron Fist seems intent on pushing a Danny/Joy romance on us, in spite of the fact that Danny and Colleen are so much more interesting (not to mention the fact that Finn Jones and Jessica Stroup share precious little chemistry). In the best fight scene of the episode – probably of the series so far – Joy is almost kidnapped by Triads, but Danny fends them off. Danny fighting a hallway full of men wielding hatchets calls to mind a similar (but better) scene in Snowpiercer. There’s a nice cap to this when Danny goes to the Triad boss and he agrees to lay off of Joy – even going so far as to apologize to Danny – when he learns that Rand Enterprises is under threat from the Hand. That’s the kind of exposition we should see more of; a shadowy organization should only be hinted at, not something you want to hear monologues about.
“Eight Diagram Dragon Punch” succeeds where other episodes of Iron Fist have failed because it strikes a surer balance of character and action, such as the lovely scene where Harold gets to look at Joy for the first time in years (as a reward for securing the pier), and then gets to kill the man who punched her. The episode isn’t a total triumph, but it’s a step in the right direction. The show needs to remember that there are people behind the fists.
A Few Thoughts
- I know Danny grew up in a monastery, but what the fuck is he wearing? His business suit has no belt, but is complimented by white shoes like he’s Clive Owen in The Knick.
- Ward got a nice humanizing moment as well, when he warned Danny about his father: “The only person Harold cares about is Harold.”
- Another nice touch: Danny, in his father’s old office, seeing the stickers he put under the desk when he was a kid.
- We finally get a shot of the Iron Fist’s trademark chest tattoo. Well, at least it’s not Japanese lettering.
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