The New Legends of Monkey

That was then... (Shiro Kishibe, Masaaki Sakai, Masako Natsume and either Toshiyuki Nishida or Tonpei Hidari(1))

The New Legends of Monkey is a left-field reimagining of Chinese literary classic The Journey to the West-cum-remake of the Japanese series Monkey! (aka Monkey Magic.) Instead of mytho-historic China it's set in a fantastical land, populated by a multi-racial population with mostly Australian or New Zealand accents. Instead of the Buddhist texts, the quest is for a set of sacred scrolls hidden by Monkey right before the gods were overthrown by hordes of demons. Instead of the Buddha punishing him for arrogance, Monkey was buried under a mountain by the gods for a crime he did not commit (which is not to say that he isn't arrogant.) Instead of a young Buddhist monk played by a woman, Tripitaka is an orphan girl disguised as a monk and adopting a sacred name given by her foster father, a wise scholar. Sandy is a rather baffled god, and a woman, and Pigsy is just gluttonous rather than a serial sex pest.

And I'm basically okay with this. Like... all of it.

...this is now. (Josh Thomson, Chai Hansen, Luciane Buchanan and Emilie Cocquerel)

In the pilot episode, our hero witnesses the demon-murder of her mentor and the monk chosen to take on the name Tripitaka and take up the quest to wake Monkey and recover the sacred scrolls. She stumbles across Monkey and wakes him, only to find that he has little interest in helping the world. In a nearby town, she stumbles across down-and-out gods Pigsy and Sandy, and together the four of them defeat the local demon overlord to free the town. After this opening, and with Monkey controlled by a sutra which causes his crown to contract and inflict crippling pain, the group head out to seek the scrolls.

They... don't find them.

They encounter a group of Monkey worshippers who have been guarding one of the scrolls, but discover that their leader sold it to a demon long ago. They are captured by a demonic shaman who is using captive gods to translate the scroll and Monkey almost gets trapped in his own brain, then escape through a forest full of faceless horrors. Tripitaka gets all self-doubty and tries to find her birth mother, but falls into a demon trap. Monkey and Pigsy manage to sneak into the demon stronghold on Jade Mountain, while Sandy follows Tripitaka's captors and they all join up to thwart the demon lord's plot to become immortal and thus ascend to the status of the gods.

Admittedly, the demons are pretty much just dudes in make-up.

Now, I'm not going to claim that this is a good show, and certainly not that it will stand the test of time like Monkey! has done (especially given what a bizarre fluke that success was,) but I enjoyed the hell out of it. Was it whitewashed? Well, the leads are Australian-Thai and New Zealand-Tongan, and only one of the core cast - Emily Cocquerel, playing the gender-flipped Sandy - is (probably(2)) white white. It is stripped of most of the aspects of Chinese culture embedded within the original nodded, leaving only a few names and some okay martial arts. The mysticism is entirely genericised, and the complex interactions of Taoist deities and Buddhism removed in favour of a bunch of fairly generic gods who shot themselves in the foot by imprisoning their best demon-puncher, leaving the rest of them to be murdered by demons.

But, I really enjoyed it. It was fun and undemanding, with quirky, likeable characters and decent performances. It is very slight, and I'm actually sad that there isn't any sign of any further episodes, because I think it had places it could have gone.

(1) I'm not sure what series this is from and they changed over.
(2) I mean, I don't know for sure. 'Australian' is as varied an origin as 'British'.

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.

Into the Badlands - 'The Fort' and 'Fist Like a Bullet'

Left to Right: The Baron (Marton Csokas), The Baroness (Orla Bady), The Idiot Son (Oliver Stark), The Teenage Weapon (Aramis Knight), Sunny (Daniel Wu), The Doctor (Madeleine Mantock) and the Widow (Emily Beecham).

"The wars were so long ago nobody even remembers. Darkness and fear ruled until the time of the barons, seven men and women who forged order out of chaos. People flocked to them for protection. That protection became servitude. They banished guns and trained armies of lethal fighters they called Clippers. This world is built on blood. Nobody is innocent here. Welcome to the Badlands."

Into the Badlands is an ambitious action series, loosely (and I mean, really loosely) based on the Chinese classic Into the West (better known to Western audiences as the source for dubiously dubbed Japanese TV series Monkey!/Monkey Magic.) It is set in a post-apocalyptic future which blends the ethos of bushido with elements of Mad Max and a mix of pseudo-Oriental and almost Zoroesque Spanish-American visual styles. The Badlands - constituting the majority of the known world for most of the characters - is a vast expanse of territory controlled by the Barons and their Clippers. Baronial estates are worked by 'cogs' and supported by dependent townships, with nomad gangs travelling between territories and working for the highest bidder.

Sunny's on-screen body count reaches double figures by the end
of episode one, and probably the fifties in episode two. For
some reason, forty-five careers kills was earlier touted as
something impressive.

Sunny is the regent (chief clipper) of Baron Quinn's opium-producing estate, a ma of some principles, but ultimately loyal first and foremost to the hash code of the Clippers and to his Baron. Quinn is the most powerful of the Barons, but a paranoid and terminally ill despot who fears to turn over control to his son Ryder. He is supported by his wife Lydia and by Sunny's strength and counsel, but on the point of war with the Widow, a woman who murdered her husband to become Baron and who controls the oil industry. The contention between them is a little odd, seemingly arising from the Baron's dismissal of a woman in authority, despite the fact that we are told in the narration that some of the original barons were women. Similarly, it seems odd that society would regress to 19th century gender roles in the wake of war and disaster, but outside of the Widow's estate it seems all women are wives or chattels, and all the clippers are men.

Into this arena comes MK, a young orphan with a mysterious past. Seemingly hailing from outside the Badlands, he claims to know the way back, and possesses some strange power which turns him into a lethal engine of destruction when his blood is spilled. The Widow wants him for the latter, but Sunny sees a chance to send his lover, a young doctor named Veil, and the unborn child they aren't supposed to have to safety as the Baron grows more and more ruthless (including murdering Veil's parents, his long-trusted physicians, simply for knowing how sick he is.) He briefly escapes from the Baron, with Sunny's help, but after a run in with the Widow and her daughter Tilda (Ally Ioannides) interrupts an attempt on the lives of Sunny and Rider, allowing Sunny to take him on as his apprentice, to teach him enough to protect Veil.

Young love is, apparently, unavoidable, even in a show base on a book which
really doesn't feature any romance.

As of the end of episode 2, 'Fist Like a Bullet', the Widow is planning to move on the Baron, MK and Tilda have a little Romeo and Juliet action going on, and Sunny is laying plans for his family's escape. The Baron is also planning to marry a young woman named Jade (Emily Bolger, apparently he really goes for Irish women), his eighth wife, but we've not seen much of her yet.

The plot of Into the Badlands is nothing much to write home about, and the alleged parallel with Journey to the West not immediately obvious. I mean, I guess Sunny is Sun Wu Kong, but MK appears to be the Xuanzhang/Tripitaka analogue, which makes his depiction as a romantic lead and engine of unholy destruction especially weird, and does that mean the Baron is the Celestial Emperor? Buddha? It's also not clear who we're supposed to be rooting for, if anyone, as the Baron is clearly a dick and, although the aggressor, the Widow is at least pushing for some sort of gender equality, albeit by forcing her daughters to become killers.

Clearly not the most practical of shit-kicking outfits.

Where it scores far more highly, however, is in the action stakes. Sunny gets the lion's share of the action scenes, I'm guessing because Daniel Wu has martial arts chops (I don't know for sure, but he's done action roles for Jackie Chan and that doesn't usually suggest stunt doubles.) The other combat headliner is the Widow, but she does a lot of her killing shot from behind, so I suspect that much of that may be done by a stunt player who knows how to murder in heels. Each of the two episodes has two major set pieces: In 'The Fort' a roadside battle against a nomad gang, then an atmospheric, rain swept smackdown against a group of the Widow's clippers. In 'Fist Like a Bullet' we open with the Widow proving her chops against half a dozen nomad assassins, but the big number features Sunny taking on thirty-to-forty nomads in a multi-level warehouse fight. This series seriously loves its martial arts action, and so far, so do I.

It's not just punchy though. There are some dramatic stakes and an inventive take on the post-apocalyptic premise. The acting is all pretty good - MK and Tilda are a weak point, but in part because they've not been given much to do yet - and the aesthetics of the piece are gorgeous. I also like the juxtaposition of the grim setting with the bright, colonial palette.