Week 93: Eight Diagram Dragon Palm, Under Leaf Pluck Lotus

Eight Diagram Dragon Palm: I have forgotten a lot about this series, but if I remember correctly, no explanation is ever given for Colleen Wing's rage as depicted here. Does it feel to anyone else like the show is tossing her a half-assed sub-plot until it's ready for her again?

Danny Rand's corporate takeover is hard to swallow. His return from the dead, and Rand's instant change in management, would be national business news, covered by more than a handful of local NYC reporters who bury it deep in a local paper with a biased take about how he's doing good for giving away the pill at cost. When he insisted in the pricing strategy meeting (would board members attend one of those?) that the company must sell this new drug at cost, I wanted so badly for someone to tell him how many more future life-saving drugs the higher price would allow the company to develop, something that wasn't mentioned until Ward Meachum's interview later. I also wanted the rest of the board to resign immediately upon Danny showing them what a reckless jackass he's going to be in his new job. ("Puppy power!")

As nice as it is to have Madame Gao back -- she's an MCU original character, so this storyline is part of the purpose for which she was created -- the Hand remain a plot device more than real characters we should have feelings about. I liked the scene where Joy Meachum finally witnessed Danny bust out some fight moves as proof of his wild claims about warrior monks, dubstep fight music and all, but it's strange that she never remarked on it afterward, not even his glowing fist! Staging a big fight scene in a narrow hallway is a questionable decision when another series has kind of made that their thing. (4/10)

Under Leaf Pluck Lotus: Where to begin? There's plenty of dumb to go around here. This hour starts with the impeccably polished heroin saleswomen, which I bet that real pharma sales reps found hilarious. Then there are Colleen's sudden signs of romantic interest in Danny, despite his continued throwing of giant red flags as a potential boyfriend. (Buying you dinner without asking is controlling jerk behavior. Buying your building is controlling super-rich jerk behavior that should send you running for the hills.) Then there's the wasted appearance of Claire Temple, who is in a position to add some much-needed levity to this series like Jeri Hogarth; Danny is so stubbornly overconfident, like Matt Murdock, that she really ought to have delivered some zingers while comparing them. Then there's the Meachum subplot, in which a viral video of Danny saying "I'm sorry" to a pollution victim is laughably held up as proof of company liability, which is not at all how the law works nor how viral videos work. Joy also reminds the board that not once has Ward ever made a mistake or failed the company somehow, which, even with "Frank N. Stein" pulling his strings, seems highly unlikely.

Then there's Claire saving Radovan's collapsed lung with a credit card and some surgical tape. I have no idea how realistic that scene was medically, but I'm willing to bet that the credit card could be worth a whole lot more by purchasing a whole suite of supplies on the fly. (Tony Stark would have made one phone call on the drive over and the dojo would have been a fully-stocked private hospital for one by the time he arrived. This show lacks the budget and imagination.) Finally, there's the dramatic reveal of Madame Gao's face, even though she's already been in two episodes. Did the writers forget? What were we supposed to think upon seeing her face? "Oh, that small old woman who walked with a cane like Madame Gao and whose voice sounded like Madame Gao, but whose face we didn't see, actually was Madame Gao? Wild!"

I'm going to give this episode a point for the funny moment when Ward flipped off his entire office, the nice moment when Danny folded a flower for his assistant, Tom Pelphrey's performance as a man who has had it up to here with this bullshit (us too, buddy, and we're only five episodes in), and the perfect casting of Jessica Henwick, since her personal magnetism gets stronger with each passing hour. The rest of this episode is more of a mess than Radovan's sucking chest wound. (2/10)