The Immortal Iron Fist

I have a Marvel Unlimited subscription. There was really no question that I was going to watch the Netflix/Marvel Iron Fist for reasons of completeness if nothing else.

Marvel's Defenders: Gotta catch 'em all.

You have questions. I have answers. Mild spoilers for this show (and Daredevil as it builds on that) below.

1) What's this show about?

It's the story of Danny Rand (Finn Jones), a billionaire orphan who ended up stranded at a trans-dimensional Tibetan monastery and learned how to turn his fist into a steel-door denting weapon. Now he's back in New York, and vigilantism will occur. 

No, it's really not more complicated than that. To reiterate: billionaire orphan rescued from fateful plane crash by monks, develops magic martial arts punching power, comes back to New York, fights ninja-themed crime. 

2) How ethnically insensitive is Iron Fist?

There's been a lot of controversy about this issue, so I thought I might get this one out of the way early. The portrayal of Asian ethnicity and culture in Iron Fist is, I feel, what would count as "really good for 1987." There's a notable lack of East Asian folks behind the camera (maybe one director, and I'm not including the RZA, who did direct an episode, but yes, I am aware the Wu-Tang Clan are not, in fact, from Asia) which comes out in the treatment of settings, characters, etc., even though there's a definite effort not to be completely stereotypical.

What I mean by the above is that the show is clearly "Asian through non-Asian people's eyes." That's not the worst crime against humanity, but with a big budget product with years of development, it's not a great look, and I hope Marvel tries harder in the future. 

One thing that tweaks me just a little, though, is that Iron Fist gets so much flak because the main character learns martial arts in a trans-dimensional Tibetan monastery but is not Asian, whereas Daredevil hits all of the same major plot points in a more insensitive manner, but we give it more of a pass, possibly because it's so much worse at cultural sensitivity we don't even see the appropriation. Here's a chart:

Plot point	Daredevil treatment	Iron Fist treatment
Young white boy who develops special powers is orphaned at an early age and gets martial arts training from an Asian-themed organization...	Of mostly white guys, run by an old white guy with a John Wayne-y accent	Of Buddhist monks, mostly played by Asian actors
The hero’s main antagonist is The Hand, a ninja death cult best described as...	A weird Asian magic ninja group straight out of a Sax Rohmer (author of The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu and many, many other racist pulps) novel.	An Asian-themed Hydra with magic, but clearly including a lot of normal people with normal-ish motivations and not just a weird death cult of zombie ninjas all the way down.
The hero’s martial-arty love interest played by an Asian actress is...	Elektra, a one-woman killing machine. One of three women with more than a couple speaking lines in the entire season;  An antagonist with severe impulse control issues, leading to Daredevil basically trying to "fix" her; and As the only notable Asian member of the Asian-themed martial-arty organization that trained Daredevil, clearly also a [mild spoiler] Macguffin for The Hand, because you know, that had to be the Asian character.	Colleen Wing, a down-on-her-luck martial arts instructor. A complex, but fundamentally good, character who is treated by the Iron Fist as an equal. For the record, not the only non-pushover woman on the show, unlike, say, Daredevil.
The character of Madame Gao, played by Wai Ching Ho, can be summarized as…	“Inscrutable” dragon lady combined with evil grandma.	A complicated and clever adversary to the Iron Fist, less rooted in an Asian-ness than from a wisdom that comes from being super-old.
Asian organized crime in the show is...	Run by Madame Gao in a weird magic way or by Hand ninja in an often weirder magic way.	Partly the Hand, but also some Chinese Goodfellas types who, while they do martial arts, aren’t treated as some sort of different type of criminal like “the Triads” or “the Yakuza” are in other shows; they’re an ethnically-homogenous organized crime group that happens to be Chinese.

This is not to absolve Iron Fist of its sins, but to say that, if we call out Iron Fist but just sort of let Daredevil slide, we're basically just reserving sensitivity to Asian culture for explicitly Asian-branded shows.

Now, on top of this, Iron Fist's treatment of women is a significant improvement over Daredevil. Most notable is that the Iron Fist for much of the show rolls in a team of three, that three usually being Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) and Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson). Much of the time, the Iron Fist is planning to do something impulsive and stupid, and Claire and Colleen tell him, "no Danny, that's impulsive and stupid," and guess what? That's treated by the show as good advice, and half the time the Iron Fist actually listens. That's right, a superhero show where the white guy superhero doesn't just blow off or become emotionally unavailable to the women in his life when they tell him not to do something dumb! Also he doesn't lie to them all the time!

3) Does that mean Iron Fist passes the "Bechdel Test"?

Sort of! 

The problem is that, often, two women are talking about a man in a non-romantic way. For example, there's a long scene where Colleen and Claire are looking after an unconscious man with a sucking chest wound, and arguing over whether it's safe to bring him to the hospital. For the Bechdel Test, does that count as a conversation "about a man"? Other examples of where this is complicated:

• Claire and Colleen talking with Danny over whether or not to kill a particular man
• Colleen and Jeri discuss some legal trouble that Colleen and Danny have gotten themselves into
• Two members of the Hand, both women, where one is upbraiding the other for being disloyal to the organization due to not following the orders of a male superior.

So, yes, women are far more visible in Iron Fist than in Daredevil; they're clearly half of society and in a wide variety of roles. But, as we've established, being better than Daredevil is kind of a low bar.

Average number of actresses with lines in a scene with Joy Meachum (Jessica Stroup).

If neither Claire or Colleen are in the scene, the likelihood of two women having more than a line in a scene drops logarithmically. Joy Meachum (a childhood friend of Danny's and major corporate power player) operates in a world where the only other women, except very occasionally Jeri Hogarth, are assistants or less senior board members with few if any lines. If it's not to Claire or Colleen, I don't think Madame Gao ever speaks directly to a woman in this show. 

4) So, apart from that, how's the show?

Perfectly acceptable. If you are willing to watch Marvel's Agents of SHIELD for an entire 26-episode season without shutting it off mid-way through saying that it's "too comic-booky," then you'll find Iron Fist perfectly diverting. 

Shirtless Finn Jones. You're welcome.

The big problem with Iron Fist is that Jessica Jones and Luke Cage were bigger than just a comic book punchy-punchy story; they dealt with being a comic book character in a world with sexism or racism; a world where punching through doors and not worrying too much about being shot wasn't sufficient to protect someone from man's inhumanity to his fellow man. Iron Fist is not that deep, and doesn't mean to be. He's a guy who makes his fist glow and punches ninjas with it. I mean, if you want it to be a story about white privilege, he basically buys his way out of being arrested at least once on the show. But that's so not the point Iron Fist is trying to make. 

Pacing is decent, acting is pretty good (great performance from Carrie-Ann Moss reprising her Jessica Jones role as attorney Jeri Hogarth). 

Characterization is a little spotty. Danny Rand has some PTSD and anger issues, but they don't manifest consistently or always plausibly. The Meachum sibilings Joy and Ward (Tom Pelphry) -- the chief corporate officers of Rand Enterprises, the company that gives the Iron Fist his billionaire fortune -- keep switching sides between "good," "self-interested," and "evil" in ways that seem to fit the plot more than any sort of organic development. 

The martial arts scenes are some of the best I've seen. One of my complaints about a lot of shows (CW shows like Arrow especially) is that the fight choreography does not distinguish between when a superhero takes on a ninja master and when he/she takes on a guy who has no training at all except in the duration of the fight. Iron Fist does. When the Iron Fist takes on less-well-trained people, he moves like water through them. It's only on the better adversaries that it even looks like it's hard for him. 

The martial arts scenes are also entertaining when they're set up to pay homage to various Hong Kong action films. Keep an eye out!

Also, one of the better comic show depictions of a functional drug addict, surprisingly. 

5) Does there happen to be a minor plot point that depends on a legal controversy that makes you dumber about the law?

Why yes, there is! 

Midway through the season, there's a plot point about whether a Rand Enterprises plant on Staten Island is causing cancer. 15 people in a half-mile radius around the plant have gotten cancer. And there's a legal action by the cancer sufferers against Rand.

I won't tell you how the plot point is resolved, but the big problem with this plot point is that key facts as to whether this case is meritorious are left vague so the main characters can have a moral dilemma about it. The writers wanted some characters to say "no money for you!" without seeming totally heartless, but also didn't want to go so far as to actually show that the plaintiffs didn't have a case.

The problem is, it's really mostly one way or another depending on the science.

I used to do toxic torts, so I know these cases and the way they're litigated pretty well. In order for a plaintiff to actually have a chance of winning in court, the plaintiffs need more or less three things:

1. biological plausibility - science that shows that the Rand plant emissions could cause the cancer in question. For example, I worked with estrogenic chemicals alleged to cause breast and reproductive cancers. Those same chemicals weren't linked to, say, lung cancer or leukemia. Benzene is linked to blood cancers but not, say, prostate cancer.
2. science showing level of risk - If I increase your risk of cancer by .0001%, should I be liable if you get cancer? Courts in America basically have said that I have to at least double your risk of cancer before there's liability. So the Rand plant emissions would have to be scientifically shown to double or more the risk of whatever cancers they cause.
3. elimination of other causes - plaintiffs can't have been exposed to large amounts of other carcinogens, have bad family histories of cancer, etc. and expect to prove that the Rand plant caused their cancer. This is super-problematic for the linked Marvel universe as we know at least the following fictional environmental issues:
• New York suffered an attack by alien robots that probably were made of toxic metal and almost certainly released a crap-ton of ionizing radiation. 
• And do you know where NYC dumps debris from stuff like "the Incident"? The Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, probably somewhere near the Rand plant given zoning laws. That's where all the toxic metal shards and radioactive monster corpses went if they were too mangled for SHIELD, the U.S. government, or Tony Stark to grab for study.
• We know from Agents of SHIELD that a teratogenic substance -- Terrigen -- has been introduced into the American food supply through contaminated fish.  

Now, if we actually knew how close plaintiffs were to proving any of the above, the moral dilemma becomes less fuzzy, it's either, "they probably were poisoned by the plant, but we have better-paid and better-sounding experts so we can roll the dice and bury them with endless litigation" or "these plaintiffs have bad luck but they almost certainly didn't get cancer from the Rand plant any more than they got it from vaccines." 

Daredevil, Season 2

So, I've watched the new season of Daredevil, the original "Marvel comic book show on Netflix."

It's not much of a spoiler to say this season has more ninjas.

I reviewed the first season some time back, so I thought I'd take first crack at Season 2. However, my thoughts have become long and nitpicky, so I've provided some TL;DR versions up front.

Short review: If you liked the first season, you will continue to like Daredevil. There is a lot of awesome in the show.

Slightly longer review: This is a very entertaining second season that, due to not having the novelty of introducing the character, has to work harder to be as awesome, and it doesn't quite make it. It's good, but not mind-blowing.

The long, rambling review you read this blog for:

Season Two opens some months after Season One; the Kingpin is in prison. Blind but blessed with super-sensory powers -- like the ability to know without actually being able to see how much facial stubble he should have before he stops being sexy and starts being a guy clearly too lazy to shave -- Matt Murdoch continues to prowl the streets at night as Daredevil. During the day, at his law firm of Nelson & Murdoch, Murdoch is flirted with by his office manager, Karen Page. She apparently went for the mysterious hot lawyer in the partnership (Murdoch) instead of the funny, dependable husky one with the pageboy haircut (Frederick "Foggy" Nelson) who was clearly trying to make a connection with her all of Season One, and was perfectly charming doing so, but does not have Charlie Cox's biceps or abs.

(An aside: Mike Colter's Luke Cage still has the best-defined chest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)

I so want to like the second season of Daredevil more than I do. The acting remains solid, with notable performances by Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle ("The Punisher") and Vincent D'onofrio reprising his role as Wilson Fisk ("The Kingpin").

Jon Bernthal in a scene that does not require a particularly large acting range

Just as everything seems to be going all right -- except for the fact that no one actually pays Nelson & Murdoch except in foodstuffs -- former Marine Frank Castle starts avenging his murdered family by shooting his way through half the organized crime in New York, showing all the restraint of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Murdoch, who (and this is a theme of the season) takes his Catholicism seriously and believes the power to take a life is God's alone (beating them into a brain-damaged concussion is totally within God's plan, though, as I'll mention later), is compelled to intervene.

Simultaneously, there's some business with a ninja-themed magical death cult which brings Matt's super-assassin ex-girlfriend Elektra back into his life. With all the super-tsuris, Murdoch finds it harder and harder to be the Daredevil and be a lawyer, much less a decent boyfriend.

Let me reiterate before I nitpick the hell out of it: I found it decent. It was diverting. Best points:

• Wilson Fisk's fight choreography is amazing. The Kingpin fights with his weight and strength and it's fascinating to watch. Frankly, the Kingpin episodes in this series were the most interesting to me.
• There's a scene where the Punisher has to murder his way through a gauntlet of angry men armed only with his fists, and, as grotesque as it is, it demonstrates how Frank Castle's will to survive just keeps him going (unlike some other fight scenes pointed out below).
• Madam Gao is still (briefly) in the show. She's still amazing as evil tiny grandma. 

The plot moves along at an agreeable pace, and there's lots that's still good, but there are some significant weaknesses:

1) TOO MANY VILLAINS

Last season, we had just the Kingpin. There were some subsidiary baddies, but it was just one plot.

Now, while Matt Murdoch having way too much on his plate is a plot point, there's more more villains than needed for that:

A) The Punisher (an antagonist if not a "villain") is murdering everyone in NYC on his long if ill-defined hit list.

B) The Hand, the aforementioned magical death cult, is doing something apocalyptic in a vaguely Asian way which involves Japanese people and ninja and makes me feel a little bit racist for watching it.

It was a much more sensitive treatment when the Tick and Oedipus faced "The Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas."

C) The Kingpin is rebuilding his empire of crime.

D) There's also a mystery drug dealer who is the proximate cause of the Punisher's family being killed and whose identity is revealed only in the last few episodes at which point you don't care.

You cannot do justice to all of these plots while having four separate antagonists, at least not in 13 episodes (maybe 26, but Agents of Shield continues to show us how to waste a lot of episodes on fanboy references and not enough Clark Gregg). Each villain has associated characters; the Hand brings in Elektra, as well as my least-favorite Daredevil-universe character, Stick (least favorite partly because "blind guy who can hit people accurately with a crossbow" means he isn't "blind" as most people understand the term, but mostly because his plot entwined with the Hand and if you can't tell, I find vaguely-Asian apocalyptic death cults tiresome).

2) LACK OF WOMEN TALKING TO EACH OTHER EASILY INVITES NEGATIVE COMPARISONS TO JESSICA JONES

So, remember last time, when I said Daredevil failed the famous "Bechdel test"? 

Still does, and in a crazy blatant manner.

Seriously, there are only a handful of scenes where two women have lines, and in those scenes, the number of times that women speak to each other is even lower. There are only two substantive conversations between women that I counted; both are between Night Nurse and a hospital administrator and, frankly, are irrelevant to the plot.

Let's not get confused and think I'm saying a story must be include the conversations of women to have merit. They don't. It doesn't even mean the stories are sexist, although they often are. 

Here, failing the Bechdel test makes the story weird. Let me give you an example: watching the scenes with Karen Page in them, it feels like Karen Page exists in a world where there are strangely almost no women. 

Typical number of non-Deborah Ann Woll actresses in the same scene with her.

Karen works at a law firm where both lawyers and all the clients who have anything of importance to say are men. All but one of the law enforcement officers she speaks to are men; all of the police officers assigned to protect her in various scenes are men. The journalist she has regular conversations with is a man. When she digs up a source to speak to, that person is always a man. 

Furthermore, there are two other major female characters in this season. Karen Page doesn't speak to either of them. She's in one scene with Elektra where Karen speaks four lines directly to Matt Murdoch, then leaves. Foggy gets to have a long conversation with Claire ("the Night Nurse"), but Karen doesn't even meet her. 

Claire and Elektra are never in the same scene together. 

Remember: this story takes place in modern New York City. Not a North Dakota oil field or on an Alaskan fishing boat. Statistically, there are women in nearly equal proportion to men in NYC.

Now, we get back to Jessica Jones. Even in a show where there weren't that many male characters, it was clear that men existed in New York. Just because Jessica's boss, BFF, craziest next-door-neighbor, doomed client, etc. were women, that didn't mean that she didn't also have conversations with men who were cops, bar owners, drug addicts, crazy mind-controlling sociopaths, etc. It was a New York that seemed, well, not a weird alternate universe version of itself.

3) YES, I KNOW THAT IT TAKES A LOT OF EFFORT TO KNOCK A PERSON UNCONSCIOUS BY PUNCHING HIM IN THE FACE REPEATEDLY, BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO SHOW ME EVERY TIME

I am not kidding when I say that basically all of the Punisher's facial bruising in this scene can be attributed to Daredevil or someone else punching him in the face repeatedly to try to knock him unconscious.

Daredevil's fights are brutal. In small doses, this is "realism." In large doses, it's tiresome. 

Culture blog The Mary Sue loves a five minute fight scene that takes place down a flight of stairs, calling it an iteration of the "hallway fight" from Season One. I hate it and think it's all that's self-indulgent about the violence and fight choreography of Season Two.

If you don't remember Season One, early on in the season Daredevil has to rescue a child from some criminals. He breaks into their place and fights three rooms full of them in a scene that takes place mostly in the confines of a claustrophobic hallway. It was pretty badass.

It also was early in the show, establishing Daredevil's facility with hand-to-hand combat. Also, in that scene, he's basically wearing black exercise clothes as his superhero outfit, which you can see is torn in places from violence. And even in that scene, there are times where Daredevil pops into a room with a bad guy and the exact method of his dispatch is left to your and the foley artist's imagination.

So, in this new fight scene, Daredevil has, for reasons too spoilery to explain, to fight his way through an entire biker gang down about twelve flights of stairs with an object duct-taped into one hand and holding a chain in the other. No surprise: he does so.

Unlike the scene in Season One, it's now been pretty well established that Daredevil, even injured, can mop the floor with anyone who isn't a Navy SEAL or trained by ninja or something similar. Remember at the end of Season One, where a dirty cop who was about to get shot in the head closed his eyes and then, without the camera leaving his face, there were a bunch of punching noises so that when he opened his eyes Daredevil was standing there and all the people who wanted to kill him were beat down? I don't know how else to say it -- it is not a surprise that Daredevil can beat up a building full of "mere mortal" criminals. There's really no tension to this scene; you know he's going to plow through all of these guys because it's been done on- and off-camera for a season and a half. 

Furthermore, as of the end of Season One, Daredevil wears bullet- and knife-resistant armor, so the risk he takes in fighting an entire biker gang is significantly diminished. Not only do we know that he's going to go like a weed-whacker through these guys, we know that, unless one of them is super-lucky, they can't really even hurt him much. 

And on top of the lack of dramatic tension, there are no rooms where Daredevil can fall in with a guy and you not have to watch him "realistically" beat a person into unconsciousness. Look, I appreciate that Daredevil is a show where, often, it's clear that you usually can't knock a person unconscious with a single blow to the head, but watching a fight where Daredevil delivers "I know your concussed, but now stay down" blows to people's heads is just not that much fun. I sat through it saying to myself, "okay, so when do we get to the bottom of the stairs?"

The excruciatingly long stairway fight is only the apex of watching Daredevil cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy to nearly every baddie he encounters. We see lots of fight scenes that go on for a long time because they have to literally beat the bad guys into submission. It gets old and I just don't enjoy it. 

Separately, I counted at least three separate stabbings in the eye with a sharp object, one of which was waaaaay more drawn out than it had to be. If your fight choreography go to is "stab him in the eye," you need to work on your creativity. 

BULLET POINTS OF NITPICKINESS

If you're going to have Daredevil fight a weird supervillain, the Spot is way more interesting than a mystical Asian death cult.

• New York criminal procedure doesn't work that way.
• Small law office finances, especially dealing with New York City rents, don't work that way. 
• That thing with the sorta-zombies was never adequately explained.
• I'm still not sure how the ninjas are so silent that they mask all the things that Daredevil might be able to hear, but still need to breathe audibly. In the quiet places where Daredevil more than occasionally fights them, shouldn't Daredevil be able to hear the synovial fluid squirting back and forth in their joints? If they can silence that, why's breathing a problem? 
• Daredevil's mask is really unattractive and distracting. It's like a mutant Captain America mask.

CONCLUSION

Daredevil's fine. It's diverting and well-acted. You won't regret watching it. It's just doesn't rise to hoped-for greatness.