Episode Title: The Mistress of All Agonies
Originally Aired: March 17th 2017
The ninth episode of Iron fist may not be action packed, with only one brief action scene, but that doesn’t mean there is not a lot going on. Danny learns he has been ousted from Rand, Ward is arrested Colleen has been poisoned and oh yeah, Harold is back from the dead, again.
Harold is back, and this time he didn’t wake up in a beautiful penthouse apartment, instead he awoke at the bottom of a pond in Central Park with a knife still buried in his stomach. I have to wonder how a blade to the stomach can kill him at his house but the knife being left in him and him being submerged allows him to come back. It seems to me that whatever The Hand did to him wouldn’t be able to heal him in such a situation but the writers needed him to come back to tell the rest of the story. We don’t learn much more about how this happens but we learn that every time you come back it is as if your brain has been restarted.
You start off childlike with your memories returning over the period of several hours. While you will eventually remember everything about yourself, you will never truly be yourself again. The people who come back are always a little more violent, a little more unstable each time they return. It does not take long to see what this means for Harold but fans of the Marvel/Netflix shows have to be wondering about Nobu and Elektra from the Daredevil series. Elektra is coming back for the first time so she will mostly be herself but she was dangerous and predictable before she died. Now that she is back, I cannot begin to guess how dangerous she will be to our heroes this fall in The Defenders. Nobu has come back multiple times and I am curious to see how it will affect him, if he returns, we only have a few more months to wait before we find out.
Danny still has a lot to learn about himself. We knew he was out of his depth when it came to running a billion dollar corporation, now we learn that he has not mastered the Iron Fist either. He wants everything NOW and doesn’t care to keep learning once he gets it. He got back into Rand and instead of learning about the company and how things function before turning the company on its head he just demanded change until he was forcible removed. In K’un-Lun, he became the Iron Fist and now that he no longer had a goal keeping him, there he fled at the first opportunity instead of completing his training. This is a hardly a new plot device, it may be most famous from The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke leaves Yoda behind to go rescue his friends. Would Danny have been able to defeat The Hand easily if he completed his training, maybe, we will never know because if he had stayed to finish his lessons The Hand would have completed their plot with no interference.
Several major questions were provided by this episode, who is Colleen’s sensei, how does he know so much about the Iron Fist and what secrets has Colleen been keeping from Claire, Danny and all of us? I cannot wait to watch Episode 10 Black Tiger Steals Heart and learn these answers and what will happen to Ward and how will Joy adjust to the major changes in her life.
Channel: Superhero 