Friday, January 13, 2023

'Iron Fist' Season 2, Episode 2: 'The City's Not For Burning'

 



This episode does a good job of picking up where the last one left off.  It, naturally, puts the focus on the brewing gang war and Danny's attempts to stop it.

To his credit, he and Colleen actually do a good job of pitching more peaceful resolutions. It helps that the gang leader that they interact with is quite reasonable and the motivation for the conflict is one that is easily resolved (control of a dock to facilitate business dealings.)

Still, outside forces result in it not working out as well as one would have hoped, though the heroes are not aware of this quite yet.

On a similar note, Colleen is able to plead her case when the gang of street kids who she fought before come back for revenge.  Again, the gang leader is pretty reasonable and is willing to let bygones be bygones when he finds out that she actually did have their best interests in mind.  I was a little disappointed that despite his name, there's nothing really "rhino" about him. I head the name and immediately thought that the Spider-man villain was working his way to the MCU, but no dice.  That would have been cool, though.

The episode also manages to substantially elaborate on other sub-plots.  We see Joy and Davos scheming to acquire some sort of artifact that is critical to their plot.  There's some "Young and the Restless" style scheming as the two create a honeypot to blackmail the wife of a congressman.  Ward also deduces that a lot of the rights that Joy acquired in her divestment package were a deliberate smokescreen to mask what she was really after.  We still don't know what that is.

The biggest benefactor is Mary, the young woman who Danny met whilst working.  She's not the main focus, but her screen time does give her arc the biggest boost as we see that she has issues.  The episode hints at the idea of a love triangle, but Danny is upfront about the fact that he's in a relationship and even introduces Colleen as his girlfriend when he brings Mary up to the apartment to get her some water after one of her spells.  

Of course, Colleen has her own friend/potential romantic rival in the form of a fellow volunteer with whom Colleen shares some pretty good banter.  I'm not sure how he didn't get the "forget it, it's Chinatown" reference.  I've never seen the movie, but I still would have known what she was talking about.  If anything, he should have raised an eyebrow at how on the nose it was, but oh well.

A good portion of the episode is focused on a flashback showing the duel between Danny and Davos, where the prior was given the honor of fighting the dragon.  It does allow for the episode to pepper in some action amongst the plot developments.  Having the two wear masks that look like the one that Danny wears in the comics was a nice touch, though it was a detriment at points as it could get hard to tell who was who. 

Eventually, the masks do come off and even the belt that ties the two together gets severed, which results in a more straight forward fight.

Actually seeing the fight, you really have to wonder why Davos is bitter against Danny.  Danny won fair and square.  The one thing that comes close to a grievance is the fact that at one point, Davos has Danny pinned and demands that he yield.  Danny doesn't and is able to get a second wind.  Later on, Danny has Davos pinned and the judges call it. OK, yeah, they don't give him the same window of time, but shouldn't Davos' beef be with the judges?  I'm not sure why he resents Danny for what went down.  Maybe that will get elaborated on, but as of now, it seems like Davos' beef is misplaced.

All in all, this was a solid episode.  It did a good job of juggling a lot of sub-plots and gave multiple characters highlights as well as further development.  It's still early, but it does seem like this season is starting off with some solid momentum.














Click here to open an E-Trade account

Click here to open a RobinHood account

Click here to become a Swagbucks member

Click here to open a FundRise account

No comments:

Post a Comment