TV Roundup - Emerald City, Person of Interest and Iron Fist

Man, I watch a lot of TV. Here's a summary for the shows where I'm not paying that much attention, or don't have much new to say:

"Welp; this seems valid."

'Beautiful Wickedness' was the latest episode of Emerald City, and if it sounds like the sort of title you'd see alongside a shirtless hunk on a barely safe for the underground romance novel, then you might not be too surprised at the content. West ropes Dorothy in to do wet, magic shirtless brain torture on Lucas, because his feelings for her are an anchor, or something. Langwidere sasses everyone, but especially Tip, but then someone kills her dad. West discovers that Glinda is planning rebellion and stockpiling Witches of Mass Destruction, and as Lucas was part of her conspiracy the Wizard offers Dorothy a deal: Go with Lucas to Glinda and assassinate the Witch of the North, and he will send her home. In flashback we learn that he worked with her parents on an energy project, but sabotaged it to create the portal to Oz because he was fed up of being treated as the helper monkey. He also gets Dorothy's gun and gives it to Langwidere to replicate and mass produce for Beast-shooting purposes.

The hazards of tanning.

Person of Interest continues with '6,741', in which Sameen escapes, but betrays the team to Samaritan due to brainwashing, only for it to be revealed that this is the 6,741st iteration of a simulation being run using a sophisticated VR rig and an implant in Sameen's brain to effect that very brainwashing, with each one ending with her blowing her brains out rather than complete the betrayal and kill Root (it's not clear how many times it took for her to kill Reese or Harold, although I note Bear makes it.) No number at all this week, just lots of plotty plotness. The cerebral implants are one of the more outre bits of spec fic in the world of Person of Interest and ultimately, '6,741' comes off as a darker, much less fun version of last season's 'If-Then-Else'.

A Chinese martial artist whose thing is bushido is actually pretty cool.
Having a rich, white asshole explain to her about kung fu, not so much.

And then there's Iron Fist, the final intro-to-Defenders series on Netflix. It comes on the heels of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, and in it we meet the street-level superteam's Scrappy-Doo, irritating jagoff Danny Rand. Okay, he was lost in another dimension for fifteen years after the deaths of his parents in a plane crash which was - four episodes in I'm still confident - orchestrated by his father's business partner and basically beaten with sticks until he got really good at kung fu, but a) that last bit only happened because he insisted he was going to be crystal dragon Jesus, and b) he's still an asshole. The show's breakout character is Coleen 'Daughter of the Dragon' Wing, a Chinese-American martial artist with an Irish name and a specialism in Japanese martial arts and philosophy which in one package is almost enough diversity to make up for keeping Danny Rand as the idiot white saviour of Kun-Lung after the Ancient One debacle(1). It's not devoid of merit then, but damn it's the poor sibling of the bunch (which is ironic as the character could buy and sell the rest of the Defenders a million times over if they weren't all, whether through integrity, stubbornness or principle, basically incorruptible.) I'm four episodes in ('Snow Gives Way', 'Shadow Hawk Takes Flight', 'Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch' and 'Eight Diagram Dragon Punch'; each episode is named for a martial arts move,) and note that I'm already rolling them into a single summary post.

(1) Not that she's perfect. She takes Danny to task for physically assaulting a disrespectful student, which based on her own actions means that she must draw the line just north of brutal verbal abuse.