6 problems that make Iron Fist so frustrating

Marvel’s Iron Fist premiered on Netflix on March 17th, giving fans the chance to finally join the conversation critics have already been having for weeks. A weekend of binge-watching later, the consensus on the show could not be more divided. Critics are still tearing into the show, while many Marvel devotees are singing the series’s praises.

As a critic and fan of Marvel’s work (because it’s still possible to be both), I can tell you that the show does improve relative to my assessment of the preview episodes. But not by much. Even when it does one or two things right, it manages to follow them up with something very wrong. Let’s break down how that happens.

Significant Iron Fist spoilers ahead.

The first and most basic criticism of Iron Fist is that Marvel’s magical martial arts show has a stunning lack of magical martial arts. In its entire 13-episode run, the series struggles to offer up a single memorable fight scene. Marvel’s Daredevil series set a high bar back in 2015 by featuring some of the most bruising, heart palpitation-inducing fight choreography featured on television. Even though Iron Fist is about a superhero whose power is punching things really hard, the show consistently fails to reach those heights. That’s a huge problem for this character and his story. Marvel’s other Netflix shows, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, don’t have many over-the-top combat scenes, but then again, their characters aren’t billed as expert fighters. With their superstrength, they can afford to be bulldozers. But when your show is about one of the finest martial artists on the planet, it’s inexcusable when his fight scenes are so tame.

Case in point: in one mid-season episode, Danny Rand (Finn Jones) must fight Zhou Cheng (Lewis Tan), one of the best warriors the evil Hand organization has on its roster. Cheng is a drunk, and, because Danny needs to fight someone with a gimmick, a master of drunken boxing. But even though Tan brings a great deal of personality to the character, the fight never feels like anything more than a staged homage to Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master. Tan is clearly a far better martial artist than Jones, so the action periodically seems to slow down to accommodate Jones’ limited skill set. At one point, Cheng punches Danny repeatedly in the chest, making him cough up blood, but there’s no sense of actual physical impact in the staging. This may be the most visually interesting fight in the series, since at least one of the participants has skill and training, but that doesn’t make its combat convincing.

Let me say up front that Iron Fist would still be poorly written and staged, no matter who played the lead. That said, the racial politics that have troubled comics fans since before the show was even cast continue to be pain points for Iron Fist in its back half.

The show already struggled with how it depicted Danny’s treatment of other people. He mansplains kung-fu to Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), a skilled martial artist with her own dojo. And the issue only gets worse when it turns out the Hand, Danny’s primary foe, includes most of the show’s people of color.

When Iron Fist introduces Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez), Colleen Wing’s sensei, he’s initially treated as an enlightened mentor figure. But soon, we learn he’s actually a Hand leader. And worse, it turns out that Colleen’s lower Manhattan dojo isn’t a sanctuary for at-risk youth, it’s a proving ground for Bakuto’s personal army of Hand fighters. The idea that underprivileged young men and women are being preyed upon by a cabal of evil non-white people is deeply uncomfortable, and it’s amazing the writers didn’t see this problem.

Iron Fist is riddled with crummy writing. Too frequently, major characters say ridiculous things or make illogical decisions to move the plot forward, even when they stretch the limits of believable human behavior. Like when Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) goes to China with Danny because she wants to fight the Hand, then almost immediately regrets it, because she’s nowhere near trained enough to fight ninjas. Or when Colleen embraces cage-fighting, then gives it up for no reason except that the plot needs her to be an occasionally kickass love interest. More significantly, Joy is an endlessly problematic character. She drugs and institutionalizes Danny, then learns his true identity because of, this is not a joke, a plot point involving M&Ms. Later, she’s more or less fine after discovering that her father Harold (David Wenham) has been alive and in seclusion for 13 years, even though she watched his illness slowly kill him. And even after Bakuto shoots her, she still teams up with the Hand. It’s next to impossible to make sense of her character arc.

Even though characters do and say nonsensical things throughout the series, it’s even more frustrating when they do and say things that would be better shown than expressed with leaden expository dialogue. It’s the classic “show, don’t tell” problem, and it hurts Danny’s story most of all.

As the series wears on, we’re told that Danny fought hard to earn the Iron Fist title. But he suffers inner conflict because the title has left him empty and unmoored, when he hoped it would give him purpose in life. That’s his explanation for why he abandoned his post in K’un-Lun and returned to New York. It still feels absurd that a man can train for years to fight a dragon and attain magical punching powers, but still feel self-doubt.

However, Danny’s conflict about his role and what it means to him is compelling on paper. We know that K’un-Lun is one of the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, because Danny says so. We know that his role there is important, because several characters say so. The trouble is, the series never shows what life is like there, what it impressed upon him, and how, in his unique circumstances, he earned his self-doubt. Beyond a few scenes on snowy cliffs and outside a cave, we never really see K’un-Lun, so Danny’s formative choice to leave never feels significant. It’s all just talk about a vague and unreal past. If the entire point of his story is that he’s a fish out of water in America, having a sense of where he does somehow belong is crucial.

The problem gets worse when Davos, Danny’s best friend and rival from K’un-Lun, is introduced. Davos should be an interesting character. In the comics, he’s the son of Lei Kung the Thunderer, who personally trained Danny to be a living weapon. He’s the show’s one concrete link to Danny’s past. But the series never delves into the particulars of their relationship, except for one flashback and a throwaway line about how much Danny loves donkey meat. Even though their entire dynamic is defined by their mutual love being strained by Davos coveting the Iron Fist’s powers, he feels shoved into the narrative, because the show doesn’t spend much time on their shared story.

So far, Netflix’s Marvel series have been defined by their villains. Daredevil has Wilson Fisk, Jessica Jones has Killgrave, and Luke Cage has Cottonmouth. All three Big Bads are complex and compelling, achieving a balance between sympathetic and truly scary. Iron Fist, on the other hand, seriously lacks in the villain department. David Wenham’s Harold Meachum never becomes a worthy antagonist for Danny, and the Hand never really becomes anything more than a mystical drug cartel.

The way the show undercuts Wenham as a villain is another writing problem. He’s presented as having sold his soul to the Hand in order to have Danny and his family killed, all so he can be installed as the head of Danny’s familial corporation, Rand Enterprises. But, despite all his mustache twirling, that Faustian deal requires immense sacrifices that leave him as much a victim of the Hand’s machinations as any of the other characters.

As for the Hand, the show makes misstep after misstep with its depiction. First, there’s the fact that the series is fairly reluctant about leaning into Marvel’s magical underpinnings. The Hand should be scary. It’s a shadowy organization that installs the resurrected dead into positions of power. Its presence alone should send chills up viewers’ spines. But Iron Fist seems more concerned with the Hand as an idea to build on before The Defenders debuts, instead of as a menace Danny must fight hard to defeat right now. Crafting a mythology around the Hand is a solid idea for the future, but just as Daredevil’s second season overused ninjas until they became boring, the Hand’s story in this show is similarly sleepy.

And that’s when things actually make sense.

Consider Colleen, who is introduced as a tough-as-nails dojo owner who only barely puts up with Danny’s nonsense. Then she swings the other direction, signing up to fight alongside Danny against the Hand, even going with him to China to face his enemy. But then it turns out she’s been a member of the Hand all along. She just didn’t say anything about it. And then, she quits the Hand because she’s in love with Danny and willing to turn her back on her students.

It’s confusing, makes her seem illogical, and further undermines the show’s main threat.

I’m still struggling with why Danny Rand’s story needed 13 episodes, if all it amounts to is setting the stakes for The Defenders. Don’t get me wrong: every one of Netflix’s Marvel series is overlong by about three episodes, sagging in the middle before getting to the climax. But at least those shows had stories that felt distinct and worth telling, even when they featured elements that tie into this year’s team-up event. Since Iron Fist mainly focuses on Danny getting his company back from an enemy he’s not prepared to fight yet, it only features about six episodes of story that matters. And it still feels like prologue. The entire show is a long excuse for him to meet Marvel-series crossover characters like Claire and Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), who’ll both give him a reason to meet his future comrades before taking on the Hand. Everything else we know about him and the people core to his character is either underwritten, or poorly written.

Bottom line: Iron Fist is a lousy show and a squandered opportunity. It would be one thing if the race controversy were just one aspect of a series that otherwise coasted along on its own merits. It could still be a problematic fave for fans, tiding them over until the next Marvel series debuts. But the fact that it fails on so many levels makes it both disappointing for fans looking to stick it to the critics for not “getting it,” and utterly bewildering for anyone uninterested in the larger fandom, simply looking for a good show. As the newest show in Marvel’s stable, Iron Fist is unquestionably the weakest as well. As a standalone story, it’s erratic, awkward, and incomplete. And as a stepping stone for The Defenders, it’s exhausting. Unfortunately, shooting for that series has already wrapped up, so it’s too late for the creators to learn from Iron Fist’s mistakes, or its poor reception. We can only hope the next show is a return to form for Marvel TV, not another step further down this unprofitable path.

Correction 3/22 9:45am ET: A previous version of this article stated that Danny Rand breaks into Joy Meachum’s home. That was inaccurate, as he breaks into the home not knowing that she lived there.