Welcome to the Second Union Iron Fist Watchalong Event! Watch along with us for the next several weeks as we check out the next “hero in the making” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage). Iron Fist’s entire first season was made available for viewing on Friday, March 17th on Netflix. Every weekend (Saturday and Sunday) starting Saturday, March 25th we will post overviews and opinion of an episode of the series. WARNING: This article is full of SPOILERS!
If you haven’t already, read the previous article for “Snow Gives Way”.
Welcome to my review for the second episode of Marvel’s Iron Fist! This will follow the same guidelines as my Ep. 1 review: basically, I’ll break down the episode in terms of story, action, and writing. Let’s get started.
STORY
This episode was just a tiny bit of a letdown in terms of story for me. With the first episode setting what I hope will be a great debut season, this episode spent more time developing the character and backstory of Danny Rand. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see any of his past in this episode, but getting to hear a bit about his origins in terms of how he became the titular Marvel hero was good enough. The show also gave me a nice surprise with a reference to The Hand, a group of villains Marvel fans got to see in Daredevil: Season 2. That was a neat little tidbit, and I enjoyed seeing a key part to another show mentioned in this one, especially before Murdock, Jones, Cage, and Rand team up in The Defenders.
ACTION
“Shadow Hawk Takes Flight” was particularly light on action, only featuring a brief scuffle at the end of the episode with some mental hospital guards. As short as it is, it was extremely cool to see Danny actually use the power of the Iron Fist. It was super satisfying seeing Danny’s hand glow and watching him take out a couple of guards, then blasting through the hospital and escaping into the night. We also saw a brief scene with Colleen Wing training some of her students, then insulting them. So, yeah, this episode wasn’t particularly memorable in this category.
WRITING
The writing for “Shadow Hawk Takes Flight” wasn’t really as great as it could’ve been but the “mental hospital” arc wasn’t terrible. It surely offered an interesting way to set up these characters, in a way that uses a weird psychological experience for the main character. The episode also gave us a veeeerrrry blatant M&M’s product placement. I never thought a chocolate candy would be used as a bridge between two main characters, but, never say never. As far as actual good development goes, the show didn’t make much of an effort to continue the development of more major characters like Colleen or Ward. In addition to that, some of the mental hospital stuff just dragged the episode down, starting right off with a “doctor” revealing that he’s actually a patient. The reason? He gets stressed.
Overall, the second episode of Iron Fist built on some aspects of the first episode but dragged in others. I’m going to give “Shadow Hawk Takes Flight” a 7/10.
