SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
I am so very disappointed in Joy. I thought that she was coming to realise exactly how Harold was and that he was using her. I suppose her happiness that her father is back and her desire to form a relationship with him is clouding her judgement. I wish she’d listened to Ward, but his stay in a psychiatric hospital did him no favours there. And he was so close to getting her out! Then Bakuto showed up.
I knew he was going to screw over Ward when he made him the deal. It was contradictory to the one that he made with Harold; he entered into a partnership with Harold but was offering Ward a way to kill him. He was giving them both what they wanted in order to get them to do his bidding. The man was duplicitous.
I’m not surprised that his body disappeared after Davos killed him. Who’s to say that he doesn’t have the same gift that Harold does and can come back to life. It wouldn’t have worked so immediately, however, so Colleen’s guess that his men collected his body is more plausible. His death was a little too easy for me, given that Colleen struggled a bit in her fight with him, even with an injury from a sword shard to the leg.
I’m not glad that Davos killed him but I’m not mad at him for doing it either. I would have liked for Colleen to do it, but I guess she still saw him as her sensei and couldn’t bring herself to. She may have been right that they had enough on him to have him arrested, but I don’ t think that he would have ever made it to trial, if so far. He was the leader of The Hand and he had former students everywhere. He would have gotten off or out of jail.
And has everyone forgotten Madame Gao? Now that Bakuto is dead she’ll just take back control of The Hand.
If only Danny had shown up a few more seconds later, Harold would be dead. Unfortunately Bakuto gave him the opportunity to say a few last words. Not only did that delay Harold’s death, his little speech poisoned Joy against Ward. Why couldn’t Bakuto have decapitated Harold first instead of shooting Joy?
Now Harold is gearing up to take over Rand Enterprises and as expected, he’s trying to get rid of Danny now that he’s outlived his usefulness. The greatest twist in this entire series was that Ward, of all people, tried to help Danny. Given that Danny and Colleen were raided by DEA agents, I’m assuming that Harold is framing Danny for Madame Gao’s drug operation. Maybe even Bakuto’s taking the funds out of the Rand accounts.
Random thoughts:
- There’s Ward! Why is he strapped down?
- Leave Ward along Bakuto!
- Screw you Bakuto.
- You cannot be this blind to Harold’s evilness Joy!
- Danny, Davos and Colleen are having a hard time defeating these guys.
- What’s going to happen to Madame Gao?
All 13 episode of Iron Fist are currently available for streaming on Netflix.
In this episode we learned why it was that Danny left K’un Lun and abandoned, at least part of, his duties as the Iron Fist. He wanted the mantle because he thought that it would fill the void left after the plane crash and his parents’ deaths. Once he earned it, however, it did not fulfill him as he had hoped.
Speaking of training, Claire’s observation of Danny’s anger issues – and Davos’ – revealed a huge flaw in how they were raised and perhaps the reason why Danny can’t embrace his role as the Iron Fist. They were taught to bury their emotions and thus, Danny never dealt with his pain, anger, sadness and other feelings concerning his parents’ deaths. He never got closure. Until he deals with that he can’t truly become the Iron Fist and return to K’un Lun.
Was Colleen the only one of Bakuto’s followers who didn’t know that he and his faction of The Hand were just as evil as Madame Gao’s? Her own students seemed to know the real nature of the faction better than she did.
To say that I didn’t see that coming would be an understatement. I didn’t trust Bakuto – or Colleen – from episode seven, even less so after the last episode and ever decreasingly as this episode progressed. But I would never have thought that Bakuto and Colleen were a part of The Hand. Not until Madame Gao suggested it.
From the moment that he told Danny that they don’t use people and in the next breath tried to convince Danny to partner with him so that he could use his powers as the Iron Fist, his duplicitous nature was obvious. I’d say he’s far worse than Madame Gao. She at least doesn’t hide behind a facade.
Harold wasted no time at all and killed Lawrence Wilkins; the irritating board member who delivered the severance agreement to Joy and Ward. Now Joy has reclaimed her position at Rand, which I wish she’d gained through her own effort and not because Harold killed for it. She can’t really believe him when he said that he didn’t kill Lawrence. She’s not stupid.
The second that I saw the opening shot of this episode I knew that Harold was coming back. I knew that he wouldn’t stay dead and that The Hand’s cure made him functionally immortal. I didn’t expect him to come back already, I figured that that would happen closer to the end of this season and he’d be saved for the next season.
I was taken aback by the fact that Harold didn’t at least try to kill Ward and instead apologised to him and told him that he loved him. He even granted him his freedom (which I thought that Ward would give up when Harold said that he’d reveal himself to Joy). That freedom was a lie, however, because he planted heroin in Ward’s car and had him arrested and committed to the same psychiatric hospital he’d sent Danny to and with the same psychiatrist; a better revenge than killing him, I suppose. And Ward is still trying to kill Harold.
Team Iron Fist took Madame Gao back to Colleen’s dojo and she spent most of her time trying to worm her way into their psyches and mess with their heads. I knew that the truth serum wouldn’t work on her and did a figurative double take when she said that she spent the 17th century being interrogated. I knew that she was old, but not that old.
This week we learned the true identity of The Devil With The Yellow Eyes and where it came from. It’s real name is Amahl Farouk a.k.a the Shadow King and it was once defeated in a battle on the astral plane by David’s father, who has been confirmed to be Charles Xavier. Weakened, it found and possessed baby David after Charles had given him up for adoption for his safety.
Meanwhile, Syd rounded up Kerry and Rudy as Melanie, Cary and Oliver worked on getting Cary’s head band on David so that he could pull them out of the astral plane, without them all getting shot and killed once time unfroze.
The final showdown between David and the Shadow King is yet to come. The battle will take place entirely in David’s head, I imagine, since it does not have a body. It did demonstrate a couple of episodes ago that it can manifest itself in the real world. Whether or not that form is tangible remains to be seen. Doing so left David a mess in the real world, however, so I don’t think that that will happen unless the Shadow King has gotten very powerful.
As expected, Joy is fighting to keep her position at Rand Enterprises and Ward is ready to pack up and leave. The two of them could get what they want, if only the board hadn’t tied together their severance agreements.
The irony of her praising Ward for everything he’d done and achieved as a business man is that that was all Harold; someone whose shadow he’d wanted to get out of and that he had just killed. It’s a good thing that his conscience kicked in and forced him to leave the tower before he could tell Joy everything. The fact that that happened – that Joy hasn’t found out yet – makes me feel a little more strongly that Harold will come back.
As to the dilemma of whether or not to kill Madame Gao, I sided with Colleen. I don’t think that there’s any law enforcement they can hand her over to that The Hand can’t get her from. That being said, I don’t think that killing her will get rid of The Hand. In my mind they’re like Hydra; you get rid of one leader and another one just takes over. Danny ended up doing the right thing by not killing her, despite finding out that she was responsible for the deaths of his parents.
I knew it! I knew that as soon as Danny made himself known to The Hand as the Iron Fist that they’d go after Harold. Really, he should have worn a mask or something when he did the challenge. Did he not think that they would put two and two together and suspect Harold in some way? Making his real identity known to them was irresponsible.
He’d said in a previous episode that he didn’t think that The Hand was real. Maybe if he had, he never would have left K’un Lun. The Hand was just a distant concept to him. Now The Hand is very real, especially since he’s discovered that their leader, Madame Gao, heads her operations from Rand Enterprises, only a few floors beneath him. The Hand had been in the same building as him this entire time; he didn’t need to go far at all to find them.
One person who apparently doesn’t need to worry about Madame Gao and The Hand anymore is Harold. Because Ward killed him. I don’t that he’s dead though. I think that whatever The Hand did to cure his cancer has made him functionally immortal.
I actually kind of care about Ward and I felt sorry for him. I even cheered him on not to go into the clinic, thinking that the reason he was taking so long to get out of the car was because he was conflicted. He was just gearing up to smash his hand in the door. He never asked for any of this and yet still, albeit briefly, got caught up in something that he obviously cannot handle.
Either the fights in this episode were more kinetic than others have been thus far, or I’ve gotten used to how sluggish they are. From Colleen’s beat down of the nurse in the hospital to Danny’s fights in the challenge, none of them felt as slow as they usually do. Danny’s fight with Sycthe, especially, felt a lot faster and like it had more energy.
I knew the second that Claire and Colleen took Randovan to the hospital, and the one that she used to work at no less, that The Hand would get him. They’d infiltrated it before and there was no reason to believe that they weren’t still there, or at least could infiltrate it again. They didn’t have much of a choice, though; he was deteriorating and needed help beyond what Claire could do for him at Colleen’s.
This episode was really weird…and ridiculous…but mostly weird. Not ridiculous in a bad way, just in the sense that I couldn’t take it seriously (I know I’m not meant to) and I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it. It was like AU fan-fiction, but canon. And I’m pretty sure that the pairing of Iris and Mon-El and Joe and Martin had to come from some slash fiction that’s floating around somewhere on the internet.
It was funny seeing Martin and Joe as gangsters and so out of left field that they were a couple. I liked that even AU Joe has the same kind of relationship with AU Iris that Earth-1 Joe has with Earth-1 Iris. That at least stayed the same.
I knew that was the direction this episode was going in – that Kara and Barry’s experiences in the musical world would heal their broken love lives – when they made their respective speeches to Martin and Joe and to Malcolm. I didn’t that that was the entire point of this episode or what Music Meister had been planning for them all along; to teach them a lesson about love. It was so cheap and corny and unnecessary. I don’t like that that is what this episode was for. It’s supposed to be a fun, lighthearted, cheeky episode and yet they dragged their B.S. CW relationship drama into it. The musical part of the episode was fun until that was thrown in.