I mean, it's not great and probably not as good as the other three, but it's no more a waste of time than they are, and in some ways, less annoying. And it's got a white guy. I was looking forward the most to "Luke Cage," but the racial stuff got really old. It's gotten to the point where I noted to myself about halfway through "Iron Fist" that a character's virtue or likelihood of being right in a given situation is based on a matrix of his race, gender and economic status. Daredevil is an intelligent white male professional, but he's handicapped and broke so it's okay. Luke Cage is black, has been in jail, been victimized and is both poor and a champion of the poor, but he does have that penis like an anchor, so all the women of color on the show get to take the moral high ground. I hate Krysten Ritter, and never want the protagonist to end up with her, but I was praying for Jessica Jones to show up and save Luke from Misty (BTW, most of the actors whom I didn't like coming into these shows have manged to completely flip me, or at worst, not detract from my appreciation of their characters, including Ritter, Charlie Cox, Deborah Woll, Carrie-Ann Moss and Rosario Dawson). "Jessica Jones" wasn't too bad with it, but the conclusion of one character's subplot was a bit of feminist bullshit. In "Iron Fist", it goes back and forth, and the bad guys are the most relatable characters in the Netflix run so far. JJ & DD were up against absolute monsters, and none of the trite criminal upbringing stuff, nor the well-acknowledged talents of the antagonist actors made their bullshit any more legitimate on Luke Cage. Most of time on "Iron Fist" he's up against childhood friends whose lives have become complicated by him and are all in way over their heads in comic-book stuff and in varyning degrees, in the dark about why or how.

It's fairly obvious why a lot of critics might have been against "Iron First" from the start. You can't help looking at it through the lens of the rest of its corner of the Marvel Universe, and there might be a backlash factor, where any excuse to rip into one of these properties that have so far defied all reasonable expectations of creative and commercial success. I tried to just watch it and weigh it on its own merits, but I can't help thinking of other stuff, especially when characters from the other shows ooze in, like Claire Temple, Madam Gao and Jerri Hogarth (they don't mention if she managed to work things out with Pam, or successfully recruited Foggy, in case you were wondering). Then there is the story itself. Danny Rand is the son of a billionaire corporate guy, who gets orphaned as a child and is presumed dead. But he grew up in a magic city in the mountains of Asia, but not the one where Dr. Strange learned magic, and they taught him magic kung-fu. The show opens with him coming back to New York looking to reclaim his identity and incidentally, his family fortune and ownership of his father's corporation. He clashes initially with the heirs of his father's late business partner, Ward & Joy Meacham, who have trouble believing his identity and relinquishing the business they have been trained to run since childhood and operated successfully for several years before their predecessor's son shows up and demands his seat at the table. And Danny is white and the best martial artist on the show, which offends sanctimonious prigs, who haven't noticed that it's okay for Asians to use automatic weapons. So we have a rich white guy, demanding wealth and a position of status but right of birth, who has geographically if not culturally Asian influences, and beats Asians in fights. They went apeshit over what they THOUGHT "The Great Wall" was about, before the second trailer was even released. But as with "The Great Wall", this is not even the thing where a white guy shows up in a foreign culture and does their stuff better than the natives. Kunlun isn't REALLY in Asia, it's in some other dimension or something, with a "way" that is only open sometimes. Like with Dr. Strange's school, it seems as if it could gather in people from all over the world. The one other person with any significance from Kunlun is not East Asian either, and his father was referenced as being there as well, so it's not like a kung-fu orphanage.

Now the story is not perfectly handled in the dialogue and acting, but it also has to build things from the ground up. Aside from the lawyer he induces to take his case in a couple of the early episodes and the villainess from Daredevil in the middle, there is only Claire, who shows up halfway through, seemingly more to give Claire something to do until she invites all her weird friends over to meet her boyfriend and we get "The Defenders" (which would have been a better name for the Avengers, not that anyone asked me about how ANYthing in the MCU should be arranged to make a modicum of sense - if you need a name for a team of gritty street level superheroes, "The Avengers" would be an acceptable consolation prize, since they go around avenging crime victims, while the superstars with the movies defend the world from apocalyptic menaces). They really kind of force her in there, and they force the introduction of a female martial artist, Colleen Wing, as Danny's love interest. Other times it seems like they have charted out where the big plot points should be in the series, and don't know how to move organically between them, with Danny treading water for a couple of episodes, either being really dumb in what he shares or withholds from other characters, or else being stupidly impulsive and messing things up, before suddenly luck or a forced change of plans by someone else moves the plot to where they need to be. It's probably not a spoiler to indicate that eventually Danny gets back into his company, since you can't really see them running a superhero show about a kung-fu master seething in frustration over losing billions of dollars, but first the show piles up enormous obstacles to that happening, and then handwaves it all away when they're ready. Another torturous plotline with which they keep playing games is Ward Meacham, who sometimes seems not unreasonable in his enmity to Danny, then does something which would totally mark him as a villain, then it turns out he has reasons for his behavior, then he goes to far, then he tries to fix something and screws up, then he does bad stuff but which might give him some closure or make him less of a dick, then he loses that, then he tries to get better, but does something ELSE that's awful... The man behind his curtain is kind of similar, going from enemy to possible suspect ally to fellow victim who could get better and back. It's more clear cut in his case where he stands on the enemy/ally spectrum, at least, but they keep jerking you back and forth.

There are a lot of complaints about the martial arts, but I thought it was okay. They are slower and less gritty, but Daredevil is not a martial artist, he's a vigilante with superhuman senses, who has some martial arts skills. Iron Fist & the Hand are all about their martial arts, so IMO, it seems more like the grace that masters would have. But maybe I'm wrong and someone more familiar with TV martial arts could say that for sure. They cut a lot in the fights, but they all do that nonsense now. "Taken" is infamous for this, but it was still good. "Daredevil" & "John Wick" are notable because they DON'T do it, but that doesn't make "Iron Fist" bad for doing what most other shows & films do. And when you have superpowers and can control the energy in your body, you don't need plausible fight choreography anyway. Daredevil has to get the fights just right, because none of his powers relate to doing damage to people. But that's another problem with Colleen, because martial arts are all she has, so if she's not good, then all her fights become problematic. Which brings us back to why did she need to be in there? Couldn't Danny have found a love interest with whom he can relate as a person, rather than a comrade in arms AND fellow martial artist, thus forcing the show to do a lot more with her, when its lead and villain are somewhat underserved?

I actually thought the characterization was pretty good. For one thing, there were no cops on this show, or at least none who were characters. That means many fewer moral debates, just the occasional argument as whether or not killing someone would be murder or justice. I kind of like that Danny's all over the place, and seems to switch roles and agendas. He was orphaned and raised in isolation, which is a plausible reason for him to want to come back, because it makes sense that his childhood world would take on disproportionate stature in hindsight. When you're taken away from your life and spend more than half your time in a kind of exile, getting it back is a natural priority, no matter how you have grown away from the track down which you were originally headed. Likewise, his over-the-top reactions to discovering the Hand (which, BTW, I cannot hear without thinking of the Foot from Ninja Turtles, especially when Claire rants about other body parts they could be called), since he was raised to believe they were the archenemy. Combined with the circumstances of his departure from Kunlun, and his handling of the mantle of "the iron fist" I think the erratic and unclear development of his character makes sense, because DANNY dosen't know who he is or what he wants. Jessica, Matt and Luke came into their situations relatively organically, and either had formed adult personalities or grew into their powers while living a normal life. Danny was a rich kid, who suddenly lost everything, embraced a new life while still a child, then came back into the normal world as an adult raised in very sheltered circumstances, who got his powers & skills in isolation from the normal world. It makes absolute sense that he doesn't know what he wants, that he makes mistakes of judgment and trust and overreacts to new information. His struggles as part of the corporate world might seem to be the trite whacky outsider who has decent values which run up against the System that has captured even the good people within, but the show gives us both sides of the issue without ever definitively stating who was right. It treats the Meachams' frustrations with Danny undermining their corporation's image and legal defense as legit, not evil and greed lashing out at virtue, and shows how Danny's good impulses hurt his business partners, without suggesting the right thing if for them to embrace his social conscience or for Danny to get a realistic grip on business. As far as I am concerned, the business stuff in the beginning works to establish stakes and show where people stand and why certain people do stuff. It doesn't take over or drag down the show. There are legit pacing problems, but it's not from choosing to concentrate on the business stuff or Danny's failure to commit to a character arc or spending so much time with the Meachams.

I thought the action and story were good, the character stuff was interesting, it connected sufficiently with the rest of the Marvel-Netflix world, while operating under handicaps I don't think the other shows had, and the social justice elements are not nearly so pervasive, and there is much less moralizing and whining, yet in some ways, I think the main characters are more complex.

It's not great, but there are legitimate strengths to go with its weaknesses.

And on a final note: Just because you can cite a name for a frequently occurring story element or character type, does not make you clever, or the story bad. It just leads to intellectual laziness, and that's really come out this year with people shrieking about the "Great White Savior Trope" without even waiting to see if it applied. In the first place, it's a "trope," because it resonates. For all that the same sort of people love to go on and on about how awful slavery and genocide are, the only times that has ever been stopped has been by white foreigners! Other-colored people simply do not come to "white" cultures and save them, historically speaking. But when a white person brings the knowledge of the most scientific and technically advanced society in the history of the planet, and uses it to his advantage, it is the "White Savior Trope". But when they flip the tables, and invent some sort of knowledge another culture might conceivably have that has eluded us (which is pretty absurdly unhistoric), then we have the Magical Negro Trope. One critic sneered at how offensive it was to see a privileged white guy spouting Asian culture and Buddhism, but what's wrong with that? If someone got up in the middle of a sermon by an African or Vietnamese priest and said "How dare you lecture white people on a fundamental aspect of our culture!" that person would rightly be criticized for his appalling racism. So why is it impossible for a white person established as having lived in Asia for most of his life, to have accumulated aspects of that culture. It isn't even really all that much. I certainly didn't notice him giving anyone Buddhism lectures, and his admonition to a bunch of martial arts students to respect their dojo and sensei is not so much a scene of cultural appropriation as an indication of the critic's own racist assumptions that these are somehow intrinsic to the Asian race. Instead, as it happens in the show, it is an illustration of how Danny's sheltered training is at odds with real world experience. The kids are horsing around like kids do in every class, practice or lesson, unlike kids raised in a monastery by guys whose lives center around their kung fu and can beat you with sticks if you mouth off. It had NOTHING to do with race or culture and everything to do with the character's experience clashing with his current circumstances.

Back when I was watching Luke Cage, I made a list of complaints against political correctness and regarding racial stereotypes, which were literally true, but completely invalidated by the context in which they were presented. But the show had a black man as a moral hero, without a single good white person, so of course the SJWs were not going to voice them. "Iron Fist"'s critical mauling has a lot to do with the lack of any such immunity.