SOME SPOILERS AHEAD
I haven’t seen more of the season yet and I will need to in order to make a solid determination, but this first episode has been no indication that the series is the terrible pile of garbage that people have been saying that it is. Sure, it’s only one episode and it may well go downhill from here, but at this point it’s not bad. It’s not great either, but reports of it’s awfulness have been grossly exaggerated.
There were several moments in the first half of the episode in which the dialogue, Danny’s especially, felt a little unnatural and his personality took a while to get used to. He didn’t feel like a real person; he was just a little too upbeat and came of like he didn’t take his return seriously. Like just strolling into Rand Enterprises and expecting the receptionist to take him at his word that he was Danny Rand. He was gone for fifteen years, yes, but it didn’t seem like his psychological growth was stunted and he thought like a ten year old.
I also felt like he wasn’t doing enough to convince Joy and Ward of who he was. He didn’t really make any attempts to even just simply tell them something that only he would know. Beyond doing that, I honestly have no idea what more he could have done. He did do that later on in the episode, but Ward outright denied what he said even though for a moment it looked like he believed him. Up until his meeting with his father he was still denying that Danny was Danny.
It felt like Joy and Ward were being far too stubborn in their beliefthat Danny couldn’t be who he said it was. To the point that it seemed like they were doing it deliberately. They were protesting too much for their disbelief to come off as genuine. As if regardless of if he were Danny, they were saying that he was not because they wanted to keep their hands on his parents’ company.
Which looks to be the case considering the fact that Harold – who is supposed to be dead – called it his company and that Joy drugged Danny in a joint plot with her brother and, it looks like, had him committed to a mental hospital. I was so disappointed when she drugged him because I thought that she was the nice one between her and Ward. It may just turn out that Ward is the better of the two since he, at least, doesn’t hide his dickishness behind a facade of niceties.
I thought that Ward would be the big bad of the season, just based on his aforementioned dickishness, but then Harold showed up and he got demoted to a second tier villain. If Joy is, in fact, worse than him then he will be further demoted to third tier. I look forward to finding out why it is that Harold faked his own death. There has to be more to it than simply wanting to take over Rand Enterprises; he doesn’t need to be dead for that. There has to be a greater reason.
Big Al was another character that didn’t feel like a real person to me. He was too nice and too helpful. It wasn’t that, per se, that didn’t make him feel real, it was the way in which that was presented. I didn’t mind him by the second time he appeared in the episode and I didn’t care when he died. In all fairness I don’t care about any of the characters yet – if I ever will. None of them are particularly interesting to me. They’re all of them just bland and that is the perfect word to describe this episode.
It wasn’t boring and I didn’t hate it and I didn’t think it was bad. It was just bland. I will say that the ending piqued my interest, just because I didn’t expect the whole mental hospital bit. I do not remember the trailer at all, so I don’t know if that was in it or not.
So far, not so bad.
Random thoughts:
- This opening is so underwhelming.
- Of course it’s new, Danny. You’ve been “gone a long time.”
- It’s that one girl from 90201.
- Is it just me or does he sound like Leonardo DiCaprio?
- They took his family’s business and their house too?
- No, it does not make sense that this is corporate sabotage because it’d be too much trouble.
- How does she even know those shoes will fit?
- Harold asking the real questions.
All 13 episode of Iron Fist are currently available for streaming on Netflix.
