Oh, Danny Boy ... oh, boy ...
Full spoilers for Iron Fist's thirteenth and final episode of the season follow.
Iron Fist’s horribly contrived season finale was a lousy end to a 13-episode season, clinching the show’s place as the absolute worst of the Marvel-Netflix series. (This article will focus solely on the season finale, but you can expect my review of the full season in the days ahead.)
All of this show’s biggest problems, as made painfully clear here, came down to its writing. The reason why Im giving the finale a much lower score than the other episodes is that it was the most important one — the episode that everything had built towards, where the characters and plot had to pay off in the most satisfying way so viewers didn’t feel like they’d wasted thirteen hours of their lives. This finale failed at that. After so many episodes of filler, the finale rushed through major beats as if the creators couldn’t wait any longer for it to just finally be over.
In this episode, Danny learned Harold was the true killer of his parents in the biggest “no s**t, Sherlock” moment imaginable. Danny wasn’t merely naive; he was stupid. That it took Madame Gao for him to even ponder who stood to immediately gain from Wendall Rand’s murder shows his fist is a lot brighter than he is.
Danny’s character, both in the writing and in Finn Jones’ performance, was all over the place, especially in this episode. No sooner had Danny decided not to return to K’un-Lun in Episode 12 than he decides, at the very end here, to return there … just so he can be there long enough to learn via a literal cliffhanger that the city has disappeared. (Now he can trade in one form of guilt for another.) Looks like we’ll discover K’un-Lun’s fate in The Defenders, a series which I’m now far less excited for thanks to Iron Fist.
They say a hero is only as good as his villain so, fittingly, Harold Meachum was also poorly executed. The villains of Marvel movies may generally be their weakest part, but none have ever been as badly done as what the small screen MCU did with Harold Meachum. He was a grotesque, absurd and wildly erratic character to the bitter end, which came courtesy of his own despised son Ward and — yes, that number one cause of death for supervillains — a death fall.
Harold’s frame-up of Danny for drug dealing and money laundering strained credulity, even in a show about a resurrected tycoon and a hipster with a magic hand. The DEA takes years to build cases, let alone against a billionaire public figure, but they received a stash of digital data — which we are reminded can be doctored — and within days had moved in to arrest Danny. The only thing quicker than how rapidly the DEA went after Danny was how quickly they then dropped everything. (The only silver lining to this whole hackneyed frame-up subplot was that we got to see Carrie-Anne Moss’ Jeri Hogarth again for a few snarky scenes.)
And we’re to believe that no one in the media or law enforcement batted an eye when Harold Meachum just so happened to return from the dead to regain control of Rand Enterprises at the exact same time as Danny became a wanted man? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDIN’ ME? Even by comic book and soap opera standards that is well beyond the suspension of disbelief.
That Marvel’s Iron Fist ended up being a redemption story for Ward Meachum and the start of a turn toward evil for his sister Joy would be a lot more exciting to discuss had the two of them not been such bland characters. As for Joy’s final scene, why would she even entertain Davos’ offer to kill Danny now that she knows Danny didn’t kill her father and that Harold had framed him? It makes no sense. Ah, but Madame Gao was there so she’s probably really behind this, too, and — oh, God, please just stop.
While some comic book fans likely enjoyed Danny’s big Iron Fist moments here — smashing through Harold’s window, deflecting a bullet, taking everyone out with a punch to the floor —everything about the climactic rooftop battle was cliche and a rehashing of been there/done that moments from countless movies. Plus, the dialogue between Danny and Harold in that sequence was among some of the worst this season, and that’s really saying something.
The Verdict
The season finale of Marvel’s Iron Fist epitomized everything wrong with the series itself. You weren’t invested in either its hero or villain so thus you didn’t care when they finally squared off. The writing let these characters down — there’s only so much actors can do if the material isn’t there— and no amount of fan-service can make up for the multitude of things that don’t work on a show.
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