 |
| "Wax on..." |
Okay, so I have now finished off season 1 of
the underwhelming Iron Fist and the
fifth and final season of the excellent Person
of Interest.
Danny is brought to Bakuto's frankly cult-flavoured
compound to learn to better cultivate and harness his chi, only to learn from Madame
Gao that Bakuto's happy clappy martial arts cult and scholarship programme is a
sort of progressive wing of the Hand. Not so progressive that they don't deal
heroin or try to, dare I say it, rule the world in some way, but big on affirmative
action and recruiting outside the usual fold. I mean, Colleen tries to convince
Danny that they are the good version of the Hand, but it turns out that Bakuto
has been lying to her all along. It's unclear if he's been lying to anyone
else, or why the Hand hasn't put more energy into recruiting people who can be
converted to its rather nebulous cause without constant deception.
Danny is rescued by throwing star guy, who
turns out to be a Kun Lungian named Davos, Danny's BFF from immortal weapon
training, runner up in 'Who Wants to be an Iron Fist 2014,' and the person most abandoned by Danny's departure, since it leaves him guarding the pass on his own without an Iron Fist to be found. Colleen helps
them to escape the Hand compound and is later driven out by the Hand for
betraying them. Bakuto stabs Danny with a chi blocking spike and Davos
reluctantly agrees to stay in New York, but only until the Hand there can be
destroyed, and gets a huge chip on his shoulder when he finds the Immortal Iron
Fist making out with one of the Hand.
 |
| The eternal union of shared sartorial embarrassment. |
Joy reclaims Rand after Harold murders a
dude (did I review that episode already?) and the Meacham family disintegrates
as Bakuto makes a deal for Ward to deliver Harold to him in exchange for the
cure to Gao's synthetic heroin. Then Bakuto turns on the family and threatens
Joy if Danny doesn't turn himself in. He does, then breaks loose in the lobby
as Colleen and Davos arrive. They fight the Hand, and Colleen defeats her sensei
in single combat, felling him by kicking a broken shard of sword blade at him.
She and Danny agree to hand him over to the authorities, but Davos kills him
and tells them that the Hand must be destroyed.
He and Danny have a fight and Danny kicks his arse, but lets him go, because he and Colleen only talk a good murder (a fact which kind of thins the tension in the next episode.)
Finally, Harold frames Danny as a drug
dealer, alienating Joy and leading to a rooftop confrontation in which Ward
shoots his father off a roof (I have no idea how they covered that up, never
mind Danny blowing out all the windows with a chi burst) and arranges for him to
be cremated before he can resurrect again. Danny may or may not come to some sort
of conclusion as to whom he needs to be as the Iron Fist, has a few flashbacks
to the cave where he faced a dragon (or, just maybe, a dude with a couple of
eye-shaped flashlights) and decides to go back to Kun Lung with Colleen, only
to find the pass closed and full of dead Hand. Ward settles back in at Rand,
while Joy and Davos plot to kill Danny and Madame Gao listens to them.
So, what has been wrong with this series?
 |
| Rain. |
1. Danny Rand. It's not just that he's a
white kung fu saviour, it's that the character is inconsistent in the extreme.
He's a decent, naïve kid, he's a raging cauldron of rage, he's an immortal
weapon, and these disparate parts are never bounced off each other, instead he
goes from one to the other in such a way that Iron Fist Danny is unrecognisable
as nice Buddhist Danny is unrecognisable as angry-at-the-world vengeance Danny.
It would also have helped if he'd been at least a little Asian American.
2. Dull kung fu. Seriously, the show needed either
razor sharp fights, or way more
talking about styles and philosophy, be it ever so cod. The chatty drunken
master was an absolute highlight of the series.
3. Lack of villain focus. Luke Cage threw audiences for a loop by
swapping villains half-way through, but Iron
Fist couldn't really decide who its villain was going to be. Madame Gao
gets jacked by Bakuto's Hand, only for Bakuto to die (probably) and Harold to
finally step up as the nearest thing to a big bad in the series, thanks to his
sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
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| Okay, this moment did not suck |
4. Joy. Joy was more inconsistent than
Danny, bouncing off other (male) characters storylines with neither a clear
redemption arc, nor yet a convincing start of darkness. By the end of the
series she has lost all faith in her brother, is disgusted by her father, yet
seems to be into this whole 'kill Danny' thing, despite the fact that he has
actually done nothing to hurt her, for all his corporation-busting naïve shenanigans.
5. Colleen. Don't get me wrong. Colleen was
mostly brilliant, but for the plot to work, she suddenly has to be completely
blind to Bakuto's shit, since… well, it's just not very well hidden.
Anyway, it's done now, and on to The Defenders, where we can hope that
his Heroes for Hire relationship with Luke Cage will round out some of those
rough edges. Let's talk about Person of
Interest now.
 |
| I am sad that PoI couldn't avoid killing the gay. |
As we ramp up to the series finale, shit
gets real. Harold's cover is blown, and in keeping him safe from the agents of
the Samaritan, both Elias and Root are killed. The Machine opts to replace its
mystery number system with Root's voice and simulated personality, after a
conversation in which Root tells Harold that everyone they have lost is really
still alive in the massive complex of simulated realities. While Root is dying
of a shot she took for him, Harold is taken by the police and then by the FBI
for his treason record, but delivers an epic badass boast during interrogation
as he switches from talking to the agent to the watching Samaritan:
"I
have played by the rules for so long. ... No, not your rules. You work at the
behest of a system so broken that you didn't even notice when it became
corrupted at its core. When I first broke your rules, a sitting President had
authorized assassination squads in Laos, and the head of the FBI had ordered
his men, you, to conduct illegal surveillance on his political rivals. Your
rules have changed every time it was convenient for you. I was talking about my
rules. I have lived by those rules for so long, believed in them for so long,
believed if you played by the right rules eventually you would win. But then I
was wrong, wasn't I? And now all the people I cared about are dead or will be
dead soon enough. And we will be gone without a trace. So now I have to decide.
Decide whether to let my friends die, to let hope die, to let the world be
ground under your heel all because I played by my rules. I'm trying to decide.
I'm going to kill you. But I need to decide how far I'm willing to go. How many
of my own rules I am willing to break... to get it done."
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| nuTeam Machine |
To get it done, he heads for an NSA black
site, while Shaw, Reese and Fusco are called away to Washington to protect a
new number: The President of the United States of America. The potential
assassins turn out to be anti-surveillance activists, and the team has been
activated because Samaritan has decided that an anti-surveillance assassination
would suit its agenda as much as saving the President would. When the team is
almost captured by the Secret Service, former PoIs Logan Pierce, Joey Durban
and Harper Rose show up to save them, having received Reese's number from the
Machine, revealing that they have formed a splinter cell of Team Machine.
Meanwhile, Finch secures a virus called
Ice-9, which will cause chaos, but destroy Samaritan.
 |
| Ghost in the Machine. |
Finch assembles the tools he needs to
disseminate Ice-9 and infiltrates an NSA server at Fort Meade to plant it. Reese
and Shaw receive the number for Greer's alias, and head off to stop Finch
assassinate him, but Finch has already been captured. Reasoning that he would
not have told the Machine the activation code for the virus, Greer has the air
removed from their room to kill both himself and Finch, but the Machine is able
to get Finch out thanks to Shaw and Reese's intervention, and Finch activates
the virus with the Machine's blessing. Meanwhile, the tunnel bodies have been
discovered and Fusco has to defend himself from a Samaritan operative who
uncovers his missing persons investigation.
This episode ('.exe') also features a series
of simulations of the world without the Machine, in which Nathan is alive,
Reese saved the love of his life and got dumped, Fusco is in the doghouse after
the fall of HR and Shaw is working for Samaritan's version of Northern Lights.
 |
| The adventure continues... |
In the series finale, accompanied by a
melancholy voiceover from the Machine, the team hunt down and destroy the last
of Samaritan as the networked world falls into chaos under the onslaught of
Ice-9. Fusco and Shaw evacuate the subway station, but Fusco is injured by the
Samaritan assassin Blackwell. Reese and Finch take out backup servers, and
Samaritan is forced to make one final bid for survival, uploading a copy of
itself to a satellite and then sealing itself off as best it can by destroying
the upload antenna with a hacked cruise missile. Finch tries to upload a final
copy of the Machine to destroy Samaritan, but is duped by the Machine and Reese
so that it is the latter who dies on the roof when the missile hits.
Sometime later, Shaw executes Blackwell for
Root's murder and we see Finch reuniting with Grace. The voice over is revealed
to be a message left by the Machine for the version of itself which, without
armies to back it up, kicked the snot out of Samaritan and returned to Earth.
Armed with its predecessor's knowledge and experience, the Machine 2.0 contacts
Shaw, and I like to think activates a whole bunch of other cells like the
Washington crew, all made up of former PoIs.
 |
| No, you're crying. |
Alas, that was the last of the series, and
somewhat hampered by the conflicts between the network's demands for number of
the week procedurals and the looming threat of cancellation. All in all, it's
not a bad conclusion, although the potential loss of the Machine right after
revealing the existence of the splinter cells was a bit of a downer, as was
bumping off Root and Reese in the closing episodes. Season 5 was less what I
wanted from Person of Interest, and I
don't think it did justice to what it was trying to do, quite possibly because
of those network pressures, but it was still a cut above the average and I'm
glad to have got to see the whole thing.
Now, if only Netflix could get Season 3 of 12 Monkeys, which the Sky Box decided
not to record...
