Week 96: Black Tiger Steals Heart, Lead Horse Back to Stable

Black Tiger Steals Heart: What a mess of an episode. The Hand have been major villains for two seasons of television at this point, and we still know so little about them that the revelation that Colleen Wing and Bakuto are working for them isn't even worthy of a shrug. When writing about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I complain often that S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra have essentially the same values and are only distinguishable as "good guys" and "bad guys" because the screenplay calls them that, but at least they have values! The Hand and the Order of the Crane Mother are adversaries, but all that we know about them is that one is into drugs and reincarnation. At this point in the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe series, complaints were on the rise that the brand had a villain problem; only Loki and Kingpin were considered successful characterizations (though I'd add Kilgrave and Black Mariah), and the Hand are among the very worst in the overall series. Then again, Danny isn't helping on the other side of the equation: Three times (questioning Gao over a Zoom call, arguing with Colleen, and discovering Bakuto's control room) he loses his temper very quickly, and his demands that Colleen explain, while he keeps interrupting her to insist that she's lying, are aggravating. We've all met jerks like him in real life; this show is the rare time that I've been asked to sympathize with one. When the series began, I was glad that it soft-pedaled details about the Order of the Crane Mother so as not to overwhelm us, but now after ten episodes, we really should know more about them and what they stand for.

Miscellaneous thoughts: Bakuto's control room has that hilariously staged-for-television look that so many villainous lairs have; a good old "zoom and enhance" would not have felt out of place. Was the sudden exiting of everyone from the control building not an obvious trap, Danny? There were two beautiful shots at the end, one of Colleen walking in Chinatown, and another of Davos walking into an intersection as the New York skyline (complete with an ironically family-oriented Rand billboard) came into view behind him. I want to know about the makeup process for David Wenham, who sometimes seems slick and other times, like here, has skin resembling sandpaper. Joy Meachum's willingness to leverage Lawrence Wilkins's death to get reinstated by Rand, as long as her undead daddy wasn't in some way behind it, is moral hair-splitting and a reminder that her on-again, off-again conscience doesn't redeem her as a character. As neat as the grainy black-and-white film from the 1940s is, with the comics-appropriate Iron Fist costume and the Agent Carter vibe, did handheld film cameras exist in the 1940s, let alone ones that could be carried into rugged mountains? The courtyard fight at the Hand's monastery is the series' biggest fight scene yet, and it satisfies enough that I won't consider the episode a complete disaster. (2/10)

Lead Horse Back to Stable: At long last, this show gets around to addressing some of its core themes. All of those moments when Danny flew into rages were not a complete waste of time (although they were annoying); they were a flaw deliberately written into his character for him to overcome.

This hour says a lot about rage. We see Harold Meachum become angry while working out and he's turned on by the feeling of power. We see Davos become angry while talking to Claire Temple and he's able to control it through meditation. Danny's rage is more on the surface than both of theirs, and Claire is right to connect it to his childhood, but that's not much of a deductive leap since he's acting like a child. Whether Danny will learn to deal with his feelings of anger and stop being led around by them is one of the central questions of the series, and this episode establishes that he has the capacity to change. I think it's notable that two women show him the way. Women also offer paths to self-improvement to Davos and Harold, but they're too bound to the paths that they've chosen to listen. (The fourth major male character, Bakuto, is strictly here as plot service.)

There's another theme in the episode, about the purpose of men. Each of the three men thinks that he's fulfilling his purpose, but each one is lying to himself: Harold claims to be building an empire for his children but it's clearly for himself; Davos claims to support Danny being the Iron Fist but is clearly consumed with envy; Danny claims a noble purpose to his fight with the Hand but it's really simple vengeance and a working out of his feelings. All three men could be more than destroyers, as Claire says to two of them and Joy implies to her father, but only Danny embraces the idea that he can be more than a warrior. The cheesy dialogue in his final scene here with Colleen doesn't do the show any favors, but it's still a great moment for the character, and a beautifully staged one. This is a pretty good episode, maybe the best of the first season of this series.

Other thoughts: Really, Claire? Dragons aren't real? I'm surprised that after everything she's been through, Claire has only a single chain lock on her apartment door. Why does Danny need to borrow a car? He's still a billionaire even separated from Rand, right? While I agree with Davos that Danny committed a wrong to abandon his guard duty, I can kind of see why he did it; you defeat an immortal dragon in combat and your reward is to spend the rest of your life sitting in a boring pass in the mountains for an enemy that will probably never come? (8/10)