Following the acclaimed successes of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage, Iron Fist—which premieres on Netflix today—has been widely heralded as the Marvel-Netflix brand's first misstep. Controversy around the show has been simmering since its principal casting was first announced, thanks to the decision not to cast an Asian-American actor in the central role. Instead, the show stays true to the 1970s Iron Fist comics, and to their dubious depiction of Danny Rand (Finn Jones) as a rich white bro who obtains his martial arts superpowers from a mystical Asian realm.
Controversy aside, what is Iron Fist actually about? The simple answer is that it's about the orphaned heir to a vast corporation who returns to New York having been presumed dead for years, and who must fight simultaneously to reclaim his family company and face down a larger evil. So far, so Batman Begins. But what has increasingly set the Marvel-Netflix shows apart is their timely and psychologically rich subtext: Jessica Jones is about the trauma of rape, the ubiquity of toxic masculinity, the dynamics of domestic violence; Luke Cage is about wrongful imprisonment, urban gentrification, the black experience in modern America. Six episodes in, it's not yet clear to me what deeper thematic weight there is to Iron Fist.
I asked Jones and his co-star Jessica Henwick about this when I spoke to them last month. "There's a lot of themes that run throughout the show," Jones mused. "We look at corporate responsibility and corporate corruption, the one-percent of the one-percent. We look at the heroin epidemic in New York, and in the U.S. as a whole. We look at identity, and responsibility to identity. We're trying to tell a more socially progressive story, as well as being a cool superhero show."
When Danny returns to New York after years spent training with monks, disheveled and shoeless and claiming to be the heir to a vast fortune, nobody from his old life recognizes him, and he's dismissed repeatedly as insane. In a twist that risks unfavorable comparison to FX's innovative new comic book adaptation Legion, the second episode of Iron Fist finds Danny in a psychiatric institution, probing the blurred line between superpowers and psychiatric illness. "Danny suffers from deep trauma and PTSD from losing his parents, and from having to live in this brutal world so far away from his own society," said Jones. "But that storyline is more about the perception of mental illness, and how society treats the outsider."
"I'd say a primary theme is addiction," added Jessica Henwick, who is the show's standout by miles as Colleen Wing, a steely martial-arts master who develops a prickly bond with Danny. "Colleen is addicted to fighting, Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) has this running storyline about an addiction to painkillers, and his father Harold Meachum (David Wenham) is addicted to this lifestyle of extreme health, green juices and working out." Henwick acknowledges that Iron Fist isn't the first Marvel show to tackle addiction, but in contrast to Jessica Jones's functioning alcoholism, "our characters are in that earlier phase of addiction. We don't have her self-awareness."
Danny and Colleen's relationship doesn't evolve in quite the ways you expect—despite being descended from a family of samurai and owning her own dojo, Colleen still ends up being schooled in martial arts and spiritualism by Danny. But it's him that really needs her, Jones noted: "Danny needs a strong female figure in his life, Since losing his mother, all he's ever craved is some kind of feminine strength, to kind of nurture him and be by his side whilst he undergoes this transition. I think subconsciously that is what Danny really admires in Colleen, because he see a strength in her and a nurturing quality that can fulfill those needs. He definitely needs her more than the other way around."
Halfway into its season, Iron Fist has not yet found a way to synthesize its disparate elements— identity struggles, spiritual mysticism, the benign evil of corporate America—into a single, compelling arc. It's not unusual for a freshman show to take a while to find its footing, but the stakes are high here thanks to the pressure of the upcoming Defenders team-up. As it is, these last seven episodes will now have a steep uphill battle to justify Danny Rand's place in that line-up alongside Matt Murdock, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Colleen Wing, on the other hand, would fit right in.
