Iron Fist (season 2)
Roy Thomas, Gil Kane, [Doug Moench, Chris Claremont, Ann Nocenti,
Tony Isabella,] and Scott Buck, 2018
For a long while this was looking like the first season from the television side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that I was going to give an outright thumbs down. I’d read that it was considered an improvement on the first season, and it’s true that at least it isn’t as dependent on the who’s-zoomin’-who mechanic of the 2017 edition. “Ha ha, I’m secretly a baddie! Wait, no, I’m not as bad as all that, and we can forge an uneasy alliance against the real threat! Oho, just kidding, I am the real threat after all!” And that was over half the characters! But the first season had more problems than just that mechanic. Another was that in the comics Iron Fist has never had any particularly interesting villains, so the writers were stuck with “evil businessman and his family” and “organization of evil ninjas borrowed from Daredevil comics”. This time around we get the evil businessman’s daughter and her (initial) ally Davos, known in the comics as the Steel Serpent, Danny Rand’s childhood bff in K’un Lun who turned bad because he thought he was supposed to grow up to be the Iron Fist and Danny was supposed to be the sidekick. He successfully seizes the power of the Iron Fist from Danny and turns into a less gun-happy version of the Punisher, deciding that it is his mission to eradicate crime by any means necessary—or maybe a better parallel is with the sensei of Cobra Kai in The Karate Kid, as he opens up a martial arts school and instructs his charges that they must show no mercy because mercy is for the weak, etc. This guy is not a very compelling Big Bad, so the writers throw a wildcard into the mix, and once again, it’s one pinched from the Daredevil mythos: Ann Nocenti’s signature addition to his rogues’ gallery, Typhoid Mary. Cool, I thought, this move has way more potential than putting in Master Khan or whoever…
…but, nah, there is a threshold at which my “hey, this is the comic book character come to life!” response is triggered, and the TV version of Typhoid Mary falls well short. Like, in the comics that defined her, when Mary (who has a split personality) switches to her violent persona, her long straight hair turns into a wild mop of dreadlocks. On TV, she… puts her hair up into a ponytail. Yawn. They’ve also aged her up by ten years or more. It is less Typhoid Mary come to life than a “we have Typhoid Mary at home” meme come to life. It’s emblematic of how the execution of Iron Fist is lacking in a way that is not the case for other MCU shows, even when those shows fail to satisfy in other ways. For instance, the dialogue in Iron Fist sounds distinctly more scripted than that of the other MCU TV shows. A deeper flaw is one that it shares with its sibling series, though: at its center is an unlikeable character. The second season of Luke Cage was essentially about Luke (and Nightshade) breaking bad; Jessica Jones was designed to be a dumpster fire of a human being; TV Daredevil is an insufferable ass to everyone he knows; and TV Iron Fist is a callow hothead, 170° removed from his comics counterpart. He’s supposed to embody the wisdom traditions of the East, if somewhat naively, and instead he’s the guy at the frathouse who read one book about meditation and now that’s his thing. Watching a season about the blond trustafarian billionaire getting his powers back from the swarthy usurper—perhaps undergoing a Hero’s Journey™ along the way to prove himself worthy—did not seem like a fun time. So it was a pleasant surprise when for their big climax the creators decided to bestow the Iron Fist on Colleen Wing, seemingly permanently—not only because she was pretty much the only likeable and deserving character in the series, but also because it truly was a swerve and not something telegraphed from the beginning. I’m always happy to see deviations from a narrative formula, and if the formula you’re deviating from is the fuckin’ Hero’s Journey, all the better!
Daredevil (season 3)
Stan Lee, Bill Everett, [Frank Miller, Marv Wolfman, John Romita Sr.,]
and Drew Goddard, 2018
Here’s how I began my last writeup of this series: “I had assumed that, having devoted to the first season of Daredevil to Stan Lee’s trio of Matt, Foggy, and Karen, with the Kingpin as the season’s Big Bad, the folks running this show would move on to Frank Miller’s defining story arc with Elektra and Bullseye. And so they did, mostly, just with no Bullseye.” Well, here’s Bullseye. Sort of. There is a guy wandering around with Bullseye’s special ability, which as his name suggests is uncannily perfect aim. But he never actually uses that name, nor does he wear Bullseye’s costume (though he does at one point wear a baseball cap with Bullseye’s logo on it). Instead, the TV people have taken the civilian name of Bullseye’s Ultimate Universe counterpart and attached it to a personality that seems to be of their own devising. The Marvel Universe version of Bullseye is the lowest of the low: he loves killing, and that is pretty much his sole characteristic. His gimmick is that he’ll pop by your office to kill you, sent by the Kingpin or someone, and when he’s done doing that, he’ll pick up a paper clip off your desk, flick it out the window, and sever the carotid artery of a child fifty yards away, just for funsies. That’s all there is to him. Nearly fifty years after his debut, we don’t know his real name or his real backstory. But the TV people decided to give him an arc, and a past to go with it. It goes something like this: Benjamin Poindexter was a psychopathic child who loved torturing animals, but when he murdered his kind, inspirational Little League coach for taking him out of a game so another kid could have a chance to pitch, he was sent to a child psychologist who worked with him intensely for years on end, helping him learn to fake empathy and become a semi-functional adult, with his murderous impulses channeled into a job as a sniper on the payroll of the U.S. government. So well-adjusted is he that he doesn’t even kill the woman he’s stalking. But then he and his abilities come to the attention of the Kingpin, who incorporates “Dex” into his plan to escape from prison, reunite with his wife, clear his record, and re-enter polite society. Many murders ensue.
As I’ve noted in recent articles, a lot of these shows have been circling around the same set of themes—basically, the trolley problem—but with so little explicit messaging that I’m not really sure what they’re trying to say. Danny Rand refuses to take steps to stop Davos permanently—“He’s like a brother to me!”—and as a result Davos’s body count climbs at a rapid clip. Jessica Jones aids and abets the rage monster—“I hate what she’s become and I don’t forgive her for all the murderin’, but she’s my mom!”—and as a result even more people end up dead, just like in the first season when she passes up opportunities to kill the Purple Man. And now here we have a season that makes a big deal about Daredevil crossing a line by deciding to kill Wilson Fisk, then pulling himself back from the brink by merely beating him to a pulp—but it’s society in general and the juvenile justice system in particular that is stuck with the real conundrum. Here you have a tween boy who has just moved up from torturing and killing animals to murdering a human being, due to a neurological abnormality that renders him incapable of caring for the suffering of others. So what do we do? Euthanize him? Lock him away to protect ourselves? Or take extraordinary measures to try to rehabilitate him, knowing that a single lapse could mean piles of dead innocents? On the show, society goes with the last of these options, and sure enough, that decision makes the world a much worse place, with dozens gruesomely butchered and hundreds of lives shattered. It seems like these shows are engineered to lead to the conclusion that trying to redeem monsters does nothing but increase the amount of suffering in the world—yet they tend to wrap up on a note of self-congratulation over the fact that the heroes haven’t stooped to the monsters’ level. So which is it? Are we expected to look at corpses stacked to the ceiling, at neighborhoods teeming with new orphans, and grimly accept it as the price of virtue?
On another note: bonus points to Daredevil for featuring my favorite eatery of all time, Di Fara Pizza. It was a delight to see that familiar, beloved storefront pop up on my screen. It got me wondering whether proprietor Dom DeMarco was still alive, and I was saddened to discover that, no, he died last year at the age of 85. Now there was a real superhero.
Runaways (season 2)
Brian Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, Josh Schwartz, and Stephanie Savage, 2018
So it took all of season one to meet all the kids, reveal that their parents are villains, establish everyone’s power set, and turn the kids into the runaways of the title. We concluded with a new status quo: the Runaways are obviously the good guys; the Big Bad is Karolina Dean’s biological father Jonah, an evil alien overlord; and the Pride, the parents’ nefarious organization, was now an X factor in the conflict. Yes, they’re plenty evil themselves, and have quite a few murders to answer for, but they’re also keen to take down Jonah, so there’s a suggestion that even if the two groups can’t work together, they may nonetheless find themselves on the same side somewhere down the line. And while a couple of storylines from the Runaways comic do find their way into the show—Topher the vampire has his little run early on, though in this version he’s not a vampire, and Xavin the Skrull joins the cast toward the end of the season, though in this version she’s not a Skrull—the big plot arc keeps ticking along. It’s unusually paced: the season consists of thirteen episodes, so you’d expect the climax to come in the season finale, or possibly in episode twelve, with the finale left for denouement. Instead, the dramatic showdown comes in episode seven, smack in the middle. Meaning that the whole second half of the season feels like it’s just mopping up… until we start to pick up hints that, actually, the reason we still have so many episodes to go is that the Jonah plot is still active, and, ugh, c’mon. Yes, there are some villains audiences can’t get enough of; a big part of the raison d’être of Better Call Saul was that Breaking Bad fans wanted more Chicken Man. But hitting that “love to hate” sweet spot is relatively rare. Villains that miss that spot can still be effective insofar as we do genuinely despise them, but in such cases our eagerness to see them get what’s coming to them goes hand in hand with the desire to finally be rid of them for good. And Jonah is one of these. It already felt like we were in overtime with him when he was not successfully dispatched at the end of the first season, so to have to go into double-OT with him is exhausting.
Years ago I used to grumble all the time that American television was squandering its potential by locking itself into ongoing series with episodes of a uniform length. Stories should have a beginning, and ending, and a planned middle, I maintained, not a beginning, possibly an ending, and an indefinitely drawn out and episodic middle. Somewhere along the line I’d picked up the impression that in other countries, most TV shows were actually limited series, and only lasted as long as it took to tell the one story they had to tell; if the creators had more stories in mind taking place with the same characters in the same setting, well, those would be “series two” and “series three” and so forth, ordered once all the pre-production steps were complete. My past self would probably be surprised to learn that in the age of streaming, things actually do work more or less as I had hoped. Series are no longer hardwired at twenty-two episodes per season. Creators have the freedom to make some episodes forty minutes long and others seventy, as the material dictates. This freedom to tailor the form to the content makes the structure of the second season of Runaways all the more bizarre, with its climax halfway through, a weirdly extended denouement that ends up suggesting that the climax was a mirage… and then an abrupt stop. I felt like I had watched all of a seven-episode season two and then the beginning of a season three that was just arbitrarily split down the middle somewhere. I remember comic book reviewers complaining about a similar phenomenon back when superhero writers started to shift from writing with individual issues in mind to “writing for the trade”: some went so far as to write a 132-page story with no regard for where the breaks between issues would fall, so readers who bought an individual issue might find that it ended in the middle of a scene. But it seems to me that TV series could borrow from modern comics plotting and put more emphasis on shorter story arcs rather than feeling the need to make every season into a single epic storyline. Brian Vaughan’s arcs on the Runaways comic were six issues, then four, then two, then five, then a standalone issue, then six, two, four, one, five, three, three. That seems more manageable than ten, seven, whoops I started a long storyline but only had six episodes left in my series order, oh well. Plus it means more beginnings and endings and fewer nigh-interminable middles.
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