The Defenders

The Defenders.

Built as it is to binge, I thought it as apt to do a single, whole-series review of The Defenders as to do a blow-by-blow, especially considering my current rate of writing.

The Defenders, for the sake of internet historians of the far future, was Netflix’s answer to the Avengers, bringing together their corner of the MCU and uniting the four superpowered Defenders of New York who aren’t Spider-Man(1). Mind you, it takes its sweet time doing it, being a couple of episodes in before anyone actually meets up.

Danny Rand and Coleen Wing are chasing the Hand around the world when they get a tip off from a dying man that the real fight is in New York. They track down a weapons shop in New York and find a whole mess of dead martial artists. They confront the team sent to clean the crime scene, but they turn out to be a group of black youths offered the work by a man in a white suit. One of them is the brother of Candace, the hostess who was murdered at the end of Luke Cage, leading to the much anticipated ‘Luke Cage vs. Iron Fist’ event, in which Danny Rand bloodies his knuckles on Luke’s indestructible skin, before finally knocking him down with the Iron Fist. Then they both run from the law.

Now I have a lawyer. Ho-ho-ho.

Elsewhere, Foggy gives Matt some overflow, pro bon cases to help him kick the Daredevil habit. One of these is the case of Jessica Jones, who sort-of takes the case of a missing architect because someone calls to tell her not to. This leads her to an apartment full of explosives, and later brings the architect himself to her office with a gun(2). This particular Mexican standoff is interrupted when Elektra shows up, all Black Sky, to knock Jessica about and kill the architect. Matt shows up as her attorney, but she gives him the slip and is able to see him doing some ninja parkour shit(3).

Then there’s an earthquake.

Luke gives Danny an earful about privilege, and the four each make their way towards Midland Circle, an upscale newly built corporate headquarters full of evil and built on top of the big hole from Daredevil Season 2. Danny goes in all corporate to declare war on the Hand, only for their leader, the mysterious Alexandra, to order him captured. There follows a massive fight, with first Luke, then Matt and Jessica showing up to help, and the four of them finally being driven off by Elektra.

This restaurant scene has been a focus of the hype, and it was pretty cute.

Our totally not a superteam repair to a Chinese restaurant to regroup, with Matt and Danny explaining to Jessica and Luke who the Hand are(4) and that they will go after their loved ones. Stick then pops up to let us know that the Chaste – who were formed by the Elders of K’un-Lun, incidentally – have, other than him, been wiped out, give some deep background and name the five fingers of the Hand – Alexandra, Madame Gao, Sowande – the man in the white suit – Bakuto and angry Japanese challenge-seeker(5) Murakami. These five were booted out of K’un-Lun for trying to live forever and have been at it ever since. From scenes of the Hand, however, we learn that Alexandra blew the last of their stores of ‘the substance’ to resurrect Elektra. Jessica leaves, Alexandra catches up with them, but Jessica returns and hits the Black Sky with a car before another big brawl, in which Matt stuffs it by going after Elektra alone and trying to get through to her.

Our heroes get police protection for their friends, but play it coy with Misty for the sake of tension. Luke is able to capture Sowande, and from Alexandra’s actions and his taunting they realise that the Hand wants Danny. Stick kills Sowande after he tries to escape with Danny, and the rest of the team decide that Danny needs to be kept off the front line until they know what the Hand want with him. Danny isn’t having it, because he’s the Immortal Iron Fist, damnit, so they have to tie him to a chair. He and Luke bond a little, but then Stick uses drugged incense to incapacitate Luke and tries to kill Danny. Unfortunately, he drags it out too long, Matt and Jessica get back from finding the architect’s plans to blow up Midland Circle and bury whatever the hole leads to, and in the end Elektra clashes the party, kills her father figure and kidnaps Danny, before murdering Alexandra and declaring herself the new boss of the Hand.

Punchy punchy kick kick.

 Jessica, Luke and Matt are picked up by the cops in suspicious proximity to one stabbed guy and one decapitated corpse. They eventually break out of the precinct and go to Midland Circle, where they fight the remaining fingers of the Hand to an inconclusive result. Colleen meets them with a stack of explosives, which she and Clare go to set up while the others go down to rescue Danny, who has let himself be gulled into fighting Elektra, allowing her to redirect the Iron Fist and open the dome structure buried deep beneath the city, which turns out to be a vault covering a dragon’s skeleton. Because why the fuck not.

Gao explains that the Subtance is basically ground up dragon, and that removing the bones from beneath New York will basically fuck the city’s foundations, because never mind rock and roll, they built this city(6) on dragon’s bones. The others arrive and a battle royale ensues, while Coleen and Clare set charges and battle Bakuto and some goons. Misty shows up with the assist, and gets her arm sliced off before Coleen decapitates Bakuto, who inconsiderately falls on the detonator controls, starting an unstoppable countdown.

Matt gets the others to evacuate, while he tries once more to get through to Elektra, despite the fact that she was a dangerous, thrill-seeking egoist at her best. Murakami gets thrown off the lift, Gao gets fatalistic, Jessica catches the falling lift by its cables and Luke persuades the police to evacuate before the building comes down on top of Matt, Elektra, Murakami and Gao.

Nuns!

The police drop the matter. Jessica reopens Alias Investigations. Luke goes home to Harlem. Danny offers to pay for Misty’s treatment at a state of the art hospital (presumably doing great work with robot arms,) then crouches on a roof like he’s Daredevil. And Matt wakes up in what appears to be the Budapest convent hospital from Dracula.

So, that was The Defenders, a perfectly serviceable series which takes the uniqueness of the four Netflix Marvel series and combines them into something kind of generic. The best stuff stylistically is when they’re operating apart and cutting from the visual style of one series to another between scenes – perpetual darkness for Matt Murdock, seventies sepia-toned for Luke Cage, washed out noir for Jessica Jones, entirely bland television colours for Danny Rand(7) – but that only carries the story so far, and when they unite the series proves to share Iron Fist’s lack of a distinct visual language. Sadly, it also shares the lacklustre martial arts work, although having the other three means that you get their distinctive styles, and say what you will about Charlie Cox’s Daredevil, but there’s a thesp who put the hours in on his fight training.

Name dropping historical events liek s

The story is decent enough, but suffers somewhat from being basically what the League of Shadows/Assassins is all about in Batman/Arrow – take one city, add ninjas, stir until well and truly done – but with less ruthless Utopianism and more dragons. Elodie Yung does her best with what she’s given, but Elektra is just too much of a cypher and the Black Sky prophecy too vague for the show to paint a compelling picture of the Hand’s internal power struggles. It is also unclear how using up the last of the Substance makes them vulnerable when Bakuto has come back from the dead and can still shrug off bullet wounds in the chestal area. They still seem to have little to fear save decapitation and massive organ failure, putting them just one down on Connor MacLeod.

The Fingers of the Hand are a mixed bag, with Sigourney Weaver a menacing presence, but never a physical threat because of the characters frailty. Murakami has quirks, more than character – only speaks in Japanese, seeks a challenge(8) – and while Sowande has some personality, Bakuto is as bland as everything else coming out of Iron Fist, leaving Madame Gao to do most of the heavy lifting. It was also frankly disappointing that, after Stick warns Luke that Sowande can mess with the functions of his body and kill him without physical trauma, Luke turns out to be as impervious to the old pressure point deal as he is to blades, bullets and harsh language. 

And watching Danny try to kung fu Luke is priceless.

Truth to tell, Luke Cage is a bit of a problem here all around, his power set being basically a massive fuck you to all martial artists. One on one he could have a good fight against someone agile enough to make him wear himself out, but it never happens. Occasionally he gets slapped around by Danny or Elektra, but he really just gets up again. Danny, meanwhile, once more demands the question ‘how did you become the Iron Fist?’ I know he plunged his hand into the molten heart of Shao Lao, but how was this yoyo the greatest martial artist in K’un-Lun when he gets his arse kicked so much? He’s really got nothing but the Fist going for him a lot of the time, and not even that when he’s trying to charge off despite knowing that’s what the Hand wants, or getting suckered into shattering the vault created by a former Iron Fist. Never has a character so ably converted a strength into a liability.

Despite this, some of my favourite character moments in the series are between Luke and Danny, and I confess I’m broshipping them more than a little, and that at least is something that they’ve got right. Luke Cage might have another solo series in him, but I’d definitely take a Heroes for Hire show over Iron Fist season 2.

Speaking of characters, let’s talk about journeys.

Welcome to the Jungle.

Jessica Jones begins the long walk back to humanity, and probably has the best arc of any of the leads. Now in part this is because she appears at the start of the series slightly regressed from the end of her first season, still refusing to take on the cases being thrown at her since she became famous, and by the finale is seen opening up the office again. Luke Cage has a lot to do with that, of course, giving her the chance to cauterise one old wound for reals, but working with a team, be it ever so dysfunctional, brings her out of the darkness. It’s a shame not to see Trish and Malcolm play more of a part in that, but so it goes. We’ve got a lot of characters knocking around and some of them are going to miss out. I did like that they acknowledge her turning this particular corner by greeting Malcolm with something other than an angry insistence that he stop trying to get her to act like a human being.

Luke Cage and Danny Rand do their best work playing off each other. Danny is a big picture guy, while Luke looks after his own. They help each other see things from another perspective, with Luke knocking a sliver of sense into Danny, and Danny showing Luke that he can’t always protect his own by being insular. It’s disappointing that Danny doesn’t grow more significantly during the course of the series, but he is at least forced to confront the fact that he has issues, even if he doesn’t really do anything about them.

The big problem with Elektra is that she is less a character and more Matt
Murdock's issues.

And finally, Matt Murdock, who… Well, if he had died in this series, it would have been no more than he deserved, and actually an apt ending to the arc established in Daredevil. Unfortunately, they kind of take a weird direction with him. He is pitched as the team’s natural leader, but besides his reflexive secrecy, he repeatedly prioritises saving Elektra, even after she proves herself to have utterly embraced her dark side, leaving the team to their own devices because of this. One of my friends was pondering to what degree Jessica Jones gets a pass for being a bitch because she’s pretty, but Matt at least is willing overlook frankly a lot of murder, purely because he really fancies Elektra. I get it; she’s his dark reflection, and saving her means he is not damned, but this is an arc which does not sit well with this ‘natural leader’ thing, an informed trait if ever there was one.

So anyway, that’s The Defenders, which if nothing else provides strong evidence that secret ninja magic crime cults may be over as a thing. Compared to their appearances in Daredevil, the Hand just don’t seem all that mysterious. The Five Fingers are near-immortals with thousands of years behind them, but only Madame Gao has the right sort of unearthly feel to her. Sigourney Weaver does fine work with what she has, but lacks the time to get properly established. They just come off as regular – if highly successful – criminals, and even the dragon bones that they are digging for don’t really feel as epic as they ought.

In fact, ‘not as epic as they ought’ is pretty much the watchword of the series. Like the Avengers movies, it has a lot to fit in, and in doing so doesn’t reliably do any of it much beyond ‘quite good.’

(1) The fact that Spider-Man is a thing in the MCU does sting The Defenders’ cred a little. I mean, even if Iron Man has moved upstate, the friendly neighbourhood wall-crawler is only in Queens. Does spider sense not work on ninjas? Does MCU Spidey even have spider sense?

(2) The second of many times I thought Malcolm was going to get fridged.

(3) Not sure how she manages this, since she’s a good PI but he’s supposed to be able to track a heartbeat at half a mile.

(4) A spiel which goes down like a cockroach sandwich.

(5) That is literally his character: He’s angry, he’s Japanese, and he seeks for something to challenge him.

(6) And by implication, given how much time they spend talking about this being ‘just a city’ and that Elektra can expect to see many cities fall, many, if not all cities.

(7) Seriously, the sin of Iron Fist – well, one of them – is not really having a style to back up its lack of substance. It’s almost unique in being a series that needed its foreign language scenes to be dubbed instead of subtitled.

(8) And yet is not determined to pit himself one on one against the Iron Fist (which would probably be disappointing) or even the Black Sky.

TV Roundup: Iron Fist - 'Black Tiger Steals Heart', 'Lead Horse Back to Stable', 'Bar the Big Boss' and 'Dragon Plays with Fire'; Person of Interest - 'The Day the World Went Away', 'Synecdoche', '.exe' and 'return 0'

"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.

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."

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...

Iron Fist - 'Felling Tree with Roots', 'The Blessing of Many Fractures' and 'The Mistress of All Agonies'

"It'll be fine, he said. We'll ask the Yakuza for help, he said..."

A short binge on Iron Fist while I was washing up (it was a lot of washing up, okay) took me through episodes 7-9 of the weakest of the Defenders pre-sequels. Since I've not watched anything else to round up, let's just call this an Iron Fist review rather than a TV Roundup.

After the hot mess of the Tournament of Death, Danny interrupts Harold assuring the Hand's lackeys that he has no idea what's up with Danny, and lackey-death ensues. Danny is all shocked about this, because his attitude to death is all over the shop. Harold has Ward help him hide the bodies, which together with emptying his secret embezzled pension fund account tips Ward from regular filial disgruntlement to actual patricide. Harold fails to stay dead, but is tipped a little more to the dark (from his fairly murky starting point,) by the experience, later murdering hapless aide Kyle over the finer choice of ice cream(1).

Zhou Cheng; a visitor from a more interesting show.

Danny teams up with the Triads to take out the Hand's factory, but Gao has got the synthetic heroine formula and left. She heads for China, with Danny, Colleen and for some reason Claire in hot pursuit. There, Danny faces off with drunken master Zhou Cheng, who is easily the most interesting character to have appeared in the course of the series. Danny flips out and almost beats Cheng to death, then captures Gao after he and Colleen defeat her remaining goons. They somehow bring a captive, elderly Asian woman back to New York and tie her up in the dojo to find out how she knew his parents. On sodium pentathol she claims that his mother introduced her to his father, and she had him killed because he found out that she was moving drugs using Rand infrastructure and assisted by Harold, but it turns out that she's immune to sodium pentathol, so who knows.

Goons attack and are repelled, but Colleen starts dying of a poisoned wound. She asks Danny to call her Sensei, Bakuto, who turns up and teaches Danny to use the Iron Fist to heal. This, however, causes him to black out from over-exerting his chi and Bakuto and Colleen bundle him into a van for reasons as yet unexplored.

"I still own you."

In the almost entirely divorced corporate shenanigans, Joy tries to get him to back off on the poisoning, only for Danny to go all crusader (incredibly, Danny is more interesting as a corporate nice guy than as a martial arts hero,) after which the Board fires Danny and both Meachams and Joy begins planning to blackmail the entire Board, because she's the baller. Honestly, this subplot would be better off in Daredevil, or even Jessica Jones (who may in fact be the PI providing Joy with her dirt.) Oh, and Danny and Colleen have first aid sex, I almost forgot for caring so much(2).

My good friend James defines the problem of Iron Fist as a failure to embrace its own genre, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. Faced with the issues of whitewashing and cultural appropriation in the original comics, which were essentially based on exported, Hong Kong chop socky movies, the makers of the series would appear to have decided that Something Has to Be Done, and to have decided that that something is to keep the white saviour (albeit in this case failed white saviour) narrative and uncomfortable appropriation, while dropping all of the far out elements that make 1970s and 80s Hong Kong martial arts movies so much fun. The result is still burdened with all the original issues – my solution to this, while still keeping the essential narrative? Cast Danny Rand as a Chinese-American rich boy whose wealthy family were heavily distanced from their original cultural roots. Bam! Job done(3) – and  is painfully dull to boot.

This guy shows up this week, knocks out a food cart vendor and sits, watching
the Rand building and making throwing stars out of tin foil. That's way more
cool than Danny rabbiting on about the Iron Fist.

I picked out Zhou Cheng as a highlight of the series so far because he has a distinctive, flamboyant style – so, so important in a martial arts heavy piece – that makes him more interesting to watch than the other fights. The Tournament of Death should have had this, and did a little bit, but squandered it with low-key differences in style and turning the Bride of Nine Spiders – one of the Immortal Weapons, incidentally, just like the Iron Fist – into a lame sexy spider seductress. During the fight, Zhou Cheng goads Danny by reminding him that they both swore oaths to protect; he the Hand and Danny Kun-Lun, but that only one of them is still at his post. Danny retorts that he who fights with words has weak fists, but seriously, I could do with a lot more talking in these fight scenes.

Every fight in a king fu movie or series is a form of dialogue, and in the absence of an eloquent style a little more philosophy might not go amiss. Danny has never been more interesting than in his opening scenes, when he wove through the Rand security like a ghost, never striking and barely blocking, just evading every attack. That's what I mean by an eloquent style, telling us both that he was skilled and that he didn't want to hurt anyone. Colleen on the other hand has been more brutal from the get-go. Unfortunately, Danny's style in particular is as uneven as his characterisation. I could understand contrasting his soft-style with the shattering power of the Iron Fist, but he pretty much goes in hard most of the time, even without the Fist. Similarly, he's all shocked when Harold kills people, then talks about executing Gao and how the Iron Fist is supposed to annihilate the Hand a lot; his motives and morals are all over the place. Sure, maybe he's just talking a good – or bad – fight, but it all adds up to a character with no focus, no centre. It's hard to imagine how this guy gets his shit together enough to summon the Iron Fist when he can't even seem to decide who he is.

(1) Also a sick burn on Ward and Joy, since when Hand resurrection makes you crazy, you're supposed to kill those closest to you first.

(2) Seriously; it's like his shirt is off and there's some weird magnetism going on. Magnetism in the sense that you can see the effects, but the force itself is invisible and intangible and no-one can really say on a fundamental level how it works.

(3) Almost. I mean, also hire some Asian or Asian-American scriptwriters. And more people who understand kung fu movies.

TV Roundup: Agents of SHIELD - 'Laws of Inferno Dynamics', Emerald City - 'They Came First', Timeless - 'The World's Columbia Exposition', 'The Murder of Jesse James', 'Karma Chameleon', 'The Lost Generation' and 'Public Enemy No. 1', and Iron Fist - 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and 'Immortal Emerges From Cave'

Vengeance!

'The Laws of Inferno Dynamics'(1) brings us to the end of the Ghost Rider subset of Agents of SHIELD's fourth season. With Eli rapidly growing in power, Coulson persuades Mace to bring in the big guns: Yo-Yo, Robbie and, of course, Daisy. Eli sets a trap for them by coating the walls of a passage with caesium, but Robbie strolls through the fire to find that he has managed to create a plutonium replica of the Los Alamos 'demon core'; an atomic bomb, in other words. Also, each time he uses his powers, the world gets a little wonkier. Coulson leads a bravura assault while Daisy struggles to contain the quakes. Although badly wounded, Robbie unleashes the Rider on Eli after it becomes clear that he plans to scrub the world clean and create life anew. Aida(2) uses her Darkhold knowledge to open a gate which Eli, the bomb and the Rider drop through, and Quake is exposed to the public, obliging Mace to undisavow her and claim she's been working undercover against the Watchdogs on behalf of SHIELD. Mace also brings the LMD programme in house, but PR guy discovers that Aida has knocked out Agent May and replaced her with a duplicate, and gets his neck snapped for his trouble, which can't be a good sign.

Also, d'aww.

The Ghost Rider weirdly muddies the waters of Agents of SHIELD, because suddenly they know magic exists and Coulson has even heard of the Rider before, yet they roundly rejected Clairvoyance a season before it turned out that there was a clairvoyant Inhuman. The story has been okay, and if Eli was a little low key for a major villain, I can't help but approve of them wrapping an arc in a quarter season, given how overstretched the season-long plots have traditionally become. It's an approach that worked well for Teen Wolf's third year, and would probably have been a stronger pitch for its fourth and fifth. Similarly, it did great favours for Gotham's sophomore year, if only by ditching some of the more irritating villains (by which I mean Theo Galavan) halfway through.

Ana Ularu is okay, but I am constantly disappointed by her failure to be 12
Monkeys' Emily Hampshire.

In 'They Came First', Dorothy and Lucas travel to Glinda's fortress while the Wizard tries to root out witchery in the Emerald City and now-Queen Langwidere is a dick to Jack, who is apparently into that. The last of these is purely fluff so far, featuring a sexed up version of the classic 'oil can' scene, because we totally needed that. West tries to save a young witch from a mob, but shit goes down, buildings asplode and to keep order the Wizard decides it is necessary to set fire to the entire High Council of nuns, because heaven forefend we get through an episode without some institutional violence against women. It is suggested that witches are themselves the Beast Forever. Oh, and someone realises that the knife Jack nicked from Momba when Tip was rescued suggests that she is Ozma, Princess of Oz, which was either obvious AF or means nothing to you.

In the A-plot, Dorothy busts out her inner witch to save young Sylvie from wolves. Sylvie has been fitted with earplugs for… reasons, and Dorothy removes them as part of a bonding process. She also gets it on with Lucas, and suggests that they should both come back to Kansas and join her in a land which welcomes the poor, the hungry, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; especially those with violent tendencies, magical powers and no documentation. All she needs to do now is prevent Glinda's war against the Wizard, by hook or by crook. Unfortunately, as soon as they reach her fortress she's all 'memory returned' and next thing we know she's got her tongue down Lucas/Roan's throat and Dorothy is all kinds of betrayed because – title quote! – 'they came first.'

I predict that this happy domestic scenario will in no way implode.

Emerald City continues to struggle hard with, among other things, its sexual politics. I think that the idea is that women have the power in Oz and men like the Wizard fear this, but nevertheless, it is principally men who domineer and women who machinate. The transfer from a relatively children's novel to sprawling adventure epic also has the effect of leaving the protagonists – Dorothy and Lucas – unusually short on agency, with one essentially willing to uncritically undertake any course that will enable her to get home, and the other completely at the whim of his unreliable memory. They are, hands down, the least interesting characters in the show, surpassing even Jack and Langwidere, whose deeply unhealthy relationship at least has something of the grim fascination of a car crash.

Next we come to a bit of a Timeless marathon, although actually I watched them over an extended period intending to do an end-of-series review until I realised I could put them in my newly inaugurated roundup.

When you go back to the wild west and people are like 'dude, have some
respect for human life,' you should know you took a wrong turn somewhere.

'The World's Columbia Exposition' sees the show pin its colours to the mast in the War of the Currents, labelling Edison and Henry Ford as key Rittenhouse members whom Flynn sets out to murder. In order to prevent interference he decoys Team Lifeboat to a hotel transformed into a serial killer's death maze (true story) and captures Lucy, who manages to recruit assistance in the form of Harry Houdini to prevent the assassination and rescue Rufus and Wyatt. Then in 'The Murder of Jesse James', the crew travel back in time to stop Flynn saving the life of Jesse James by assisting legendary lawman Bass 'The Real Lone Ranger, but he's black' Reeves and his native American partner Grant Johnson. They discover that Flynn has no intention of letting James live; he is just using him to find someone in Indian territory; former timeship pilot and Rittenhouse oppose Emma Whitmore.

"A soldier, a scientist and a stewardess(3) walk into a bar..."

With Flynn having given Wyatt the identity of his wife's killer, Wyatt persuades Rufus to help him steal the lifeboat and prevent the killer's conception in 'Karma Chameleon'. He promises no harm, but ends up accidentally killing the man's father during a storm, only to learn that the killer was lying: He killed two other women, but not Wyatt's wife. Anthony contacts Lucy and offers to destroy the mothership if she does the same to the lifeboat, in order to keep time travel out of the grasp of Rittenhouse, but Flynn rumbles him and Anthony is killed. Lucy and Rufus realise that the man who threatened Rufus was Lucy's biodad.

Rufus is all flustered about meeting Baker, and asks Lucy not to tell his sort-
of-girlfriend Jiya, which a) is kind of tacky, and b) raises the issues of how
time travel affects a 'three for free' policy.

In 'The Lost Generation', Wyatt is arrested and replaced with the super decent Dave Baumgartner, who is killed by one of Flynn's goons as the team try to rescue Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh turns out to be a Rittenhouse legacy – like Lucy – who has been charged with becoming famous and then being a big old racist douche. With the help of Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rufus and Lucy rescue Lindbergh, who plans to ditch Rittenhouse but turns out to have stuck to that for only a short time. As Rittenhouse-controlled NSA agents take over the time machine project, Agent Christopher busts Wyatt out of chokey and together with Lucy and Rufus they undertake to continue the fight against Rittenhouse by any means necessary.

The big joke this week is that they have the wrong costumes.

Finally, in 'Public Enemy No. 1', Flynn helps Al Capone to evade his tax charges and kill Eliot Ness in exchange for abducting the Mayor of Chicago to learn when Rittenhouse will next meet up en masse. Dispatched to assassinate Flynn's mother, Lucy and Rufus tranquilise their new muscle and steal the Lifeboat, leaving a worm in the project computers. Jiya is arrested after receiving a call from Rufus, but is able to cobble together a computer with parts while in custody to ensure her friends aren't tracked. Although at first intending to save Lucy's sister, the team determine that they can't let Flynn mess with Capone's history. After Ness's death, Lucy suggests that they work with Richard Hart, a prohibition agent and secretly Capone's big brother Jimmy (true story) to gain access to Capone, who shoots Rufus before being killed by Hart. Mason asks the NSA for access to the same data the Machine uses in Person of Interest. As the team jumps out, Rufus collapses at the controls.

Timeless has done the needful and changed up its game, although the jump of the week structure was already a bit stale. Wyatt's hair-trigger temper and failure to make and execute a simple plan – there are many better ways to prevent conception via time machine than trying to cock block the future father; I came up with several during the course of the episode, some of which didn't even involve fire – prevent his failure being all that sympathetic, especially given that it involved the death of a guy who seemed pretty decent. Similarly, Rufus has not only left Jiya in the lurch, by then calling her he has dumped her right in it, so a bullet in the collar seems little more than karma. Flynn may be a monster, but he's still in the top three for most sympathetic character in the series (number one is Lucy's unrealised sister.)

Not doing yourself any favours, Danny boy.

Iron Fist struggles gamely on with 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and the inevitable Claire Temple cameo. A group of posh-slutty saleswomen introduce an exciting new line in synthetic heroin to the city, and Danny determines that it is being imported via the pier the Hand wanted Rand(4) to buy. With Ward refusing to act without proof, Danny goes to Colleen for backup, bringing takeaway, which for him means ordering from his dad's favourite restaurant and paying for them to bring the food, tables and chairs to the dojo, because he's rich and clueless and so hilariously endearing, right?(5) This is where he meets Claire, who is taking private lessons from Colleen because of course she is. Danny and Colleen spy on the Hand shipment, but it turns out that they are not bringing in drugs, but the chemist who makes them. Danny 'rescues' the chemist, and I use sarcastic quote marks because this rescue involves the man being stabbed in the chest and hauled back to the dojo to be treated by Claire.

"Basically, Danny, you're just not as interesting as I am."

Moving on to 'Immortal Emerges from Cave', the Meachams move to deal with a viral video of Danny apologising for not-technically-illegal pollution from one of the company's factories and Ward is suddenly pitifully addicted to prescription-strength painkillers. One of the better scenes of the series comes when Danny basically hijacks Ward to trawl around warehouses looking for the chemist's daughter, who is being held hostage, but they find the body of the chemist's guard and an invitation to a duel. While Claire and Colleen take the chemist to hospital and the Hand swipe him from under their noses, Danny fights three battles under the watchful eye of Madame Gao. The first is against a pair of brothers,  the second an entomologist who fights using poison needles and high school seduction moves(6), and the third a psychopathic blade fetishist and karaoke enthusiast. Gao ultimately calls a halt by reminding Danny that the Hand doesn't do honour, but reveals a) that she was born in Kun Lung and b) that she is a way more ultimate a weapon than he is.

Iron Fist is struggling, and not because no-one likes a billionaire post-Trump. It's because the show fails to make Danny likeable, fails to overcome its inherent cultural appropriation (seriously, Marvel; it's cool having Method Man weigh in to Luke Cage, but if RZA is your authority on the history of Chinese martial arts, then you're in trouble,) and fails to make the conflict interesting. Danny Rand's wealth takes the fight off the streets. With Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage we saw the street-level struggle, but Iron Fist lifts us right up to the level where Elektra briefly and tediously took Daredevil and the result lacks emotional punch. We don't not care about Danny Rand because he's a billionaire, so much as because we only see him fighting for abstracts – his name, his company, Kun Lung – and not for people.

Straight up the fuck is this shit?

Also… we need to have words about the entomologist assassin, because damn that was some nineties shit right there. An Asian American ninja poisoner in a black corset and fucking chopstick buns vamping her way in close to deploy her needles o'death? The only thing more disappointing than that particular portrayal is the fact that Danny fell for it. Sweet Christmas, Rand; if a pouty chick in black shows up for a duel to the death and suggests you could just make out instead, you say no. How hard is that one to wrap your head around? And how is it that you were trained to be the destroyer of the Hand but without any preparation for the fact that some of your opponents might be women? What the hell?

Iron Fist. It's disappointing.

(1) Points for trying on the title, at least.

(2) It is apparently Aida, not Ada, which makes me a little sad.

(3) They do make the point that in the 1980s they were still called stewardesses.

(4) At this point, I kind of expect to learn that the Hand are using Rand because when they take over they only need to change one letter.

(5) Wrong.

(6) Fortunately for her, Danny has the emotional maturity of a high school freshman.