Maybe Marvel’s Iron Fist Needs More Time to Develop?

There is an overwhelming consensus out there that Marvel’s Iron Fist is a colossal failure at best.   There has not been one decent review of the show yet.  The only positive I saw was from Bustle who said they were waiting on more Claire Temple and that the show would be more interesting as she is really the focal point of the story.  But other than that there’s an overwhelming agreement that the first season has completely fallen flat.   Why?

There are two main themes that people have disliked about the show: character development and “we’ve seen this before.”  Like so many comic book stories, Iron Fist is marked with tragedy.  Nearly every hero has a background that goes a little something like this:  What comic-book adaptation centers on a white man orphaned by tragedy but blessed with great wealth who travels to an Asian country, only to return to America as a fearsome hero of amazing skill?   Iron fist has been labeled as a copy of a copy of a copy which is more or less true.

The second theme addresses character development.  Perhaps one of the more scathing comments I’ve read is “Each of the six episodes made available to critics proves a taxing affair where you’re asked to invest in characters so thinly constructed they could be cardboard cutouts cleverly lit to resemble human beings. It demonstrates the limits of the Marvel brand and how desperately the superhero genre needs to evolve.”

And it’s not just Danny Rand that people are having a hard time caring about.  Colleen Wing’s character has also been marked with criticism.  And despite Finn Jones saying the show was “not meant for the critics” it’s hard to see if the show was “meant for anyone.”

But I can’t help but to think of another show that was universally getting panned at the beginning:  Gotham.  It’s almost as if season one is a distant memory.  Anyone remember how much that show got drilled?  And then all of a sudden we started to care about the characters, more were introduced, and each episode got better.

Is that all we need with Iron Fist?  My theory is that the story can always remain the same, it’s the characters we have to care about to make a story work.  This is what the show lacks right now but maybe there’s still hope?