Marvel's Iron Fist: Season 2 - Episodes 1-3 Review
For starters, "The Fury of Iron Fist" (an amazing title for a ho-hum episode) almost instantly places some drama around Rand boardroom logistics with a meeting between Joy, Danny and Ward. While this meeting is about Joy putting everything together for her plans with Davos, there's still a sense of "oh no, not another one of these". Had Metzner ended the meeting with someone storming in and a big action set-piece ensuing, this would have made the scene much more interesting. In fact, even including Davos there would've added an extra level of tension to the scene.
The Joy/Davos scenes themselves are a bizarre mix of ideas. Some scenes feel like the characters just rambling on at each other about business management and buying a pot, and some feel like the show's antagonists discussing their different methods of stopping the Immortal Iron Fist, Protector of Kun Lun, Sworn Enemy of the Hand. We're also saddled with an entire sub-plot surrounding Ward - a character who's fun for a few minutes, but after a whole B-plot in each episode gets quite tiresome. Both Joy and Ward are associated with the worst aspects of Season 1, so I feel like while Metzner is trying to improve on these aspects, perhaps doing everything he could to keep them out of the show or perhaps completely re-working these characters from scratch would've worked better.
Despite being only ten episodes, there's also still a much slower pace to these earlier episodes than I would've liked. Don't get me wrong, they've clearly tried to do what they can with what they have, but the narrative hasn't really developed much over the course of three hours, and what we have had hasn't amounted to much yet.
That all being said, yeah, the fights are a huge improvement on the last season. "The Fury of Iron Fist" opens with a cool action set-piece, ends it's second act with a fight in a restaurant against two separate gangs and has a brief brawl between Danny and Davos near the end. These are very well-choreographed, but I do feel that there are a few too many close-ups to hide the gaps. Close-ups are necessary, but for character reactions, not for hard-to-make-out action beats. Most shows and movies do this though, so it doesn't bother me too much. There's more than enough wide-angles to showcase the fights, and that Kun Lun battle between Danny and Davos was a fantastic achievement. The sets, the lighting, the Iron Fist-inspired costumes, it all looked very ceremonial and interesting. Rachel Talalay handled the sequence very well, even if it took me a little while to work out that they'd been fighting for a whole day.
There's a real sense of grounding to this season of Marvel's Iron Fist, too. The well-choreographed fights are mostly given backdrops of ordinary places: restaurants, back-alleys, streets, etc., making the show feel more like Marvel's Daredevil than Danny Rand's first outing. Sure, I would like to see Danny in a proper super-suit by the end of the season, but I appreciate the efforts made to ground the show on the streets as opposed to in mansions and skyscrapers; it makes it more relatable for an audience.
The new score has been provided by Robert Lydecker, and while I didn't have any huge problems with Trevor Morris' score from the first season, there is an extra something to this season's soundtrack. The main titles theme has been maintained, but the season does lack a consistent theme. There's some nice pieces in there from Lydecker, but nothing memorable enough to hum. He's also dropped Trevor Morris' Iron Fist motifs from Season 1 - or at least, I couldn't hear any.
It's early days for Season 2 of Marvel's Iron Fist, but I'm definitely enjoying this season more than the last, despite it's problems. Given more time, I hope to see the show kick-up the pace and build it's narrative more steadily over the next seven episodes.
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