Week 97: Bar the Big Boss, Dragon Plays with Fire

Bar the Big Boss: This episode felt a lot like a comic book, and not just because it dabbled briefly with a split screen. Bakuto is dead, killed in a beautiful and rain-soaked fight with Colleen Wing, but he's gone and almost certainly due to return alive because we know what genre this is. Davos and Danny Rand argue until a fistfight emerges, and their unresolved conflict is almost certainly due to come up again. Everything seems serene and settled at the end, until Harold Meachum's inevitable betrayal sets up yet another frantic adventure for next time. If I had paid a few bucks to read this in print form, maybe with a Bullpen Bulletins page at the end, I'd call that a satisfying issue.

The episode is even more of a success for capping Colleen and Danny's moral arcs through the series, as she fully overcomes the Hand's conditioning and he accepts the necessity of mercy. I love how Davos embodies everything that Danny was trained to be and that their conflict rests on Danny rejecting that training because he sees through it. Davos is his own person with intriguing quirks (I liked his reaction to pizza last episode), but he's perfect as a symbolic foil for Danny, especially because half of the things that he says are right.

I liked the long take in the elevator, slowly zooming in on Danny as he focuses his mind on what he has to do while Bakuto taunts him from behind. And while I love Anderson.Paak's "Come Down" and appreciate the lyrical appropriateness, if I were the music supervisor, I probably wouldn't have chosen it for the peaceful moment near the end of this episode if it meant repeatedly censoring a certain word so noticeably and distractingly. (7/10)

Dragon Plays with Fire: Meh. Even by the standards of this genre, in which crises are always soon resolved and the status quo always inevitably restored, the reset of Danny's fugitive status is especially rapid. I don't believe that the DEA would act so quickly to arrest Danny on some digital evidence alone, nor be so quick to give up the case, but that's what kind of show I'm watching. (Frustratingly, there's no mention of Colleen's case being dropped too. It's not that we can't assume that she's free now; it's that she matters as well.) I don't care for a bribe being the way to solve the problem, but in the interest of concluding the story expediently in time for the season to end, I can accept it. As for the final battle with Harold, it's nice to get confirmation of what long seemed likely (that he was behind the fatal plane crash), it's nice to see his fight training finally pay off, and it's nice to get confirmation that he's dead for good this time, because I was getting tired of him. Joy seems likely to follow in his footsteps if the epilogue is any indication, but she needs a new direction herself. I also really liked the big hero shot of the episode, when Danny punches the floor and sends everyone flying. I do not understand how a major corporation who must employ thousands of people in its headquarters could get away with armed mercenaries guarding its lobbies and elevators, but whatever. (4/10)

Early in the series, Danny experienced flashes where the screen would seem to shake and develop white scratches. They disappeared for a while, and returned here. How do you interpret those? In the beginning I thought they were just PTSD, but now I think they're a cinematic representation of his chi being out of alignment when he's doing something that he believes deep down that he shouldn't do, which in this case is his angry decision to kill Harold. Then again, I'm probably wrong, because he's able to use the Iron Fist before giving up on his vengeance. And he's able to use it again to deflect a bullet, which is cool but weird in that nobody remarks on him using it again so soon.

Now that the season's over, I have to be honest that I enjoyed it more the second time. It's still a big mess with a lot of tedious time-wasting, but Danny's obnoxiously short temper was less grating when I knew that it was part of an arc for his character, and I appreciated the seemingly endless twists in the story of Harold and Madame Gao and Ward Meachum when I no longer felt any need to care about the outcome. The gap between the parallel stories of Danny/Colleen and Harold/Ward was too wide for too long, but ultimately everything connected. The series (so far) is deeper and smarter than I gave it credit for the first time, although I still think it's the weakest of the four main Defenders series by a significant margin. What did you think? I look forward to watching the second and final season, which I have not seen, as part of this project.

season rating: 4/10 (It was ok.)
best of season: "Lead Horse Back to Stable"
worst of season: "The Blessing of Many Fractures"

Bar the Big Boss: I've been assuming up until this point that the titles of each episode are some reference to a Kung Fu move or form or something, but damn it, this one is just getting to the point where I feel like they're using a random name generator. You've seen that episode of South Park where they make fun of Family Guy and how they come up with their jokes with manatees in a tank pushing balls with random words on them? That's kinda how I feel about the names of these episodes sometimes.

Bakuto is most definitely still alive. There was that bit of foreshadowing earlier on, where he mentioned that few people have been given that gift of immortality, with Harold Meachum being one of them. I'm pretty sure that Bakuto has somehow gained that as well. It's just too simple and too obvious at this point. This most definitely isn't the end of Madam Gao. We haven't seen her in a while, but I am sure that she will turn up again. Hell, she might be in the next episode.

The DEA setup bit, I guess I can accept that from Harold. He is a conniving asshole, after all, but I would really like for us to have a superhero that's not on the run from the law. Can we just have a superhero that is fighting the bad guys and doesn't have to worry about being a vigilante that is avoiding the cops while also helping the cops? Or is that just part of what being a not-so-friendly neighborhood superhero is starting to become when we're looking at people like the Iron Fist here or Daredevil?

I rather liked the split-screen fighting sequence, and I really wish they would have done more of it. It was well done, in my opinion, and it drove the action a little more because you were seeing more than one thing happening at a time. When I was watching the later fight between Danny and Davos, it just felt too drawn-out and cliché at that point. I recognize, though, that when Danny and Davos were fighting, there wasn't another fight going on, so the split screen wouldn't necessarily have worked. In that (yet another) hallway fight scene, it worked really well.

On the note of Davos, I'm a little confused. I don't think it was this episode; it might have been the last one. He mentioned that he was in the monastery and so was his father. Did they both join later, after Davos was born, or did his father break his vow of celibacy, which brought Davos into the world?

Dragon Plays with Fire: Props to Jeri for pointing out that Harold's hare-brained idea is just fraud. Further props to Ward for also calling him out for how ridiculous of an idea it is. However, I have zero hope that the writers are going to listen to their own characters and somehow Harold is actually going to get away with this and is going to continue being a pain-in-the-ass prick in season two.

Madam Gao is right that even at ten years old, Danny was smart enough to know that airplanes don't drop out of the sky for no reason, or at least that's not an unreasonable assumption that she could make. Just because they don't drop out of the sky for no reason doesn't mean that they are always murrrrderrrr (said in my best Alan Cumming voice). I appreciate Madam Gao. She is undoubtedly an evil person, but to her credit and to her own admission, she's honest. She'll tell you what's going on, and if she was responsible for it, you'll know because she'll fess up!

As Danny sits there and says that he used to think that his mom was still alive out there trying to find him, I cannot help but think that this is foreshadowing. I seem to remember an earlier episode that mentioned that it was Danny's mom who was the bigger concern, not his dad.

I'd love to reiterate my love of Clare Temple with, "Is there a version of this where we don't kill someone?"

Ward: "I'm an asshole and a liar, and I don't dispute that" is giving Danny Ocean vibes. "I only lied about being a thief."

I, for one, can't wait for Iron Fist 2: K'un-Lun Boogaoloo.

I love it! Great write-ups. Thank you for the smiles and laughs. :-)

One facet of the broad criticism about the inherent racism in Iron Fist is that he gets to cheat both ways: The white character gets to excel at Asian culture while the white writer gets off the hook for any inauthenticity about Asian culture. That's kind of how I perceive the episode titles: They pretend to interpret kung-fu stances thematically for the show, but "Bar the Big Boss" sounds so phony that it gives away the ruse; they're all just made-up nonsense. The show can't afford to spend one measly hour browsing actual names of stances to pick out 13 of them to be episode titles?

I remember that Davos's father was also Danny's teacher, furthering their sense of brotherhood, and that Davos was born in K'un-Lun. But I don't remember enough about the monastery's expectations of celibacy to say whether this is in violation of them.