f13.net

Midland Circle Security Elevator B Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ostYFNFjhJ4

Trailer #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h3m7B4v6Zc

I wonder if Luke Cage is going to stand around scowling at everyone and everything except night nurse the whole show.
I wonder if Iron Fist will always sound like a ten year old when saying "I am the Iron Fist"
I wonder if Jessica Jones will always look bored the entire time
Is Matt Murdock the only one going to bother having an emotional range?

Find out next time in.... NETFLIX AVENGERS!!

Review summary:

 :drill:

And trailer 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_6J9BqgonU

Though I'd only watch it if either you think you need convincing or if you like punchlines being spoiled.

This is great.  Almost done.

Watched the first 20-ish minutes this morning getting ready for work and I couldn't get into it. Probably because I was reminded how little I cared for some of the characters and it *IS* the lame "here's where the heroes are" recap. Was nice seeing DD, Foggy, and Luke on screen again though so I'll probably give it a real go this weekend.

I never finished Ironfist.  Will this disappoint?

Fake edit:  i await IW's final verdict .

I'd put on a par with Jessica Jones or Daredevil season 2. Much better than Iron Fist, but not as good as DD season 1 (which was one of the best shows ever, IMO, and a very high bar). In a lot of ways, it's DD season 3, with all the other Netflix Marvel heroes as guests.

--Dave

Half way through. Not on the level of Jessica Jones but still lots of fun and better than the rest.

Only real niggle is that I don't feel they are dealing with the number of characters brilliantly. 

Also, after this I think I've seen enough of almost everyone involved. Not a criticism, it just feels like most characters have said or done everything they need to. Clearly I'll sit through anything they make, but Jessica is the only character I actually want another season from.

Finished this. It was ok and best summarized by

I dunno, for me what summarizes the whole thing best was everyone treating IF like the complete dumbass he is.

While watching it I had fun but with every passing day I keep thinking how lazy it was on all levels.  World spanning shadow organization around for thousands of years? Let's fight the heroes with like, a dozen guys in suits at the end.

The whole thing just screamed network tv budget.

I haven't been able to get through a combined 3 episodes across all series from the Netflix Marvel stuff.

Just the shittiest pack of heroes with the most mediocre of acting talent.

I love the concepts, I love the characters, I love the basic approach, but...so far the padding and the complicated ambivalence of the producers towards the source material and the cheapness that's very likely a Perelmann dictate have made it hard going. Luke Cage at six would have been great. Jessica Jones at six great. DD 1 was pretty good as-is. DD2 at eight, no more, good. IF was just a misfire period at every level.

I wish they'd take a pause now and figure this out better.

Big spoiler but fuck it.

Daredevil season 1 is superb. I can't imagine not enjoying that. The first season I watched was Jessica Jones, which comes after that, and it's extremely unorthodox and often tongue-in-cheek, especially in gender-flipping the roles of fucked-up reluctant superhero and buff dumb blonde.

These series are low-key superhero stories. They could all be drama series without super abilities, whereas the rest of the Marvel universe revolves around the abilities.

I'm at episode 5 of Defenders. It's good enough so far. I found it had the slowest start of all these series, but my wife is keenly watching for the first time since we lost interest 2/3 of the way through Luke Cage. She's hooked, but I had to explain Stick to her and The Hand's ability to to rez (her initial take: "did the other series have this voodoo shit?"). Also she is annoyed the ignorantly-defined "real African" character. If, like her, he was from the 54-nation continent of Africa, he would go by a nationality, e.g. Kenyan, Zimbabwean, Nigerian, not "African".

I think the idea with him (beyond the origins of the characters in a much less aware time) is that when he and the rest of the Hand left K'un Lun, there were no nations in Africa, certainly none by their modern names.

--Dave

Then he'd identify by tribal name, like Kikuyu or Zulu or Luo. But I guess it doesn't matter that much.

Argggggh, yes--it would never have occurred to anyone who left Africa prior to 1850 or so to think of themselves as generically "African" until they'd spent time in the West. Go back two centuries, and people from the African continent who happened to fetch up elsewhere in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, or North America, completely did not think of themselves in those terms and largely speaking neither did Westerners or Middle Eastern societies. Slave traders in 1750 identified Africans in terms of their societies of origin, some of them inventions or recombinations invented by outsiders, but many pretty well recognizable to those people in their own societies of origin.

But this isn't something special for Africans--take *any* people out of history somewhere between 1750 and a thousand years before that and they wouldn't use *any* of our modern terms to describe themselves. "German" and "Italian", for example, would be largely unintelligible to people living in those territories in 1650. If you establish they know about people today and have had a chance to recategorize, then the African characters should be either identifying with a contemporary ethnonym or a nation.

Everything about the show is lazy to differing degrees. Notice the green screen on the elevator scenes in ep 7-8? It's babylon5 era sfx.

They have all changed their names several times.

It was fine... a bit anticlimatic, but pretty much what I expected.

I just realized for an ancient shadow cabal of ninjas, there wasn't a single ninja in uniform in the entire series.   :uhrr:

The entire show took place on casual Friday.

Yeah, this took a sharp nosedive into shite town once it became clear that this was the Moron Fist In Charge Show.

It's not even funny.  The character is awful.  Literally, I wanna ask anyone who reads Iron Fist comics to tell me that THIS is not an accurate portrayal, because Danny is just... fuck stupid.  I mean, like eating paste special retarded stupid. 

I liked how they started it tonally and had the four sorta 'montaging' and it came together well.  But after about, oh, I dunno, midway through when Danny became the focus, it just tanked.  Totally fucking tanked.

The Hand are retarded.  Elektra/Sky was retarded.  The Cops were retarded. Ripley was fucking retarded.  Stick was retarded.  Daredevil was awesome.  Jessica and Cage were pretty much background scenery, even though I still love them.

Damn.

I mean, it's still better than the Iron Fist Series, but, you know, wasted opportunity here I think.

Bleh, shitty to hear.  I'll try to give it a watch and see how far I make it.

This Iron Fist does not represent the character in the comic in the slightest.  Like, night and day difference on every level.  Iron Fist was actually the series I was most looking forward to when they announced all this, and it was the one they fucked up the most.  What a total mess.

I like the main characters(iron fist is more of a mascot) but I'm really getting sick of tv superheroes having MASSIVELY inconsistent powers. One scene we have Cage breaking through walls, getting hit with cars and walking away and the next he gets punched and knocked down, fucking what? Also being the black sky apparently means fuckall, it was just Electra back from the dead, no super powers.  Basically just another assassin which they should have had hundreds of.

No Joke.  I even went back to watch Iron Fist (I skipped it on recommendation from here) and, man, man, man.  It's just a shitfest from start to finish.  I don't blame the Actors, or the cultural appropriation shite or even the fight scenes ;  for me, this is just badly, badly, badly written and directed shite and it's quite disheartening to see it continued in Defenders. It's just awful plot nonsense that's grabbed from anywhere and doesn't even recognise what a good job of writing and tone the other shows managed.

It's sad.  SAD.

Iron Fist in the comics started as a pretty straightforward attempt to cash in on 70s martial arts fever. He was a pretty bland character but not stupid or annoying. Then you got an Ebony and Ivory schtick going with Luke Cage where generally Iron Fist was the slightly dull straight man to Cage's more expressive, intense character. It wasn't really until Ed Brubaker's recently soft reboot that the character got a bit more of an interesting edge and the underlying mythology got more interesting too.

The one thing that you can't really get away from in the baseline version of the character is that he's a white guy who outdoes a local Asian guy in a mostly Asian extradimensional city and gains the sacred power etc. etc.  When Brubaker rebooted he didn't really go after that aspect of it too much, but he intensified Daniel Rand's fraught relationship with Davos and Davos' father in some useful ways.

I think what you see in the Iron Fist series and the Defenders is that they just do not have a clear idea of what to do with the character. You could do the whole "white privileged kid" in some sharp-edged ways; if you want him to be a hero, you pretty much have to have him work through that and become self-aware. You could do the "let's have fun with martial arts" schtick. Or just have him be the one upbeat, fun-loving person in a group of brooding urban vigilantes. But they don't have a take or a hook, so he's just there, like a big inert turd. And the problem is that Finn Jones simply cannot do some of those possible hooks. It's clear he's got zero ability to do great martial arts choreography. He can't do the "fun swashbuckler" at all. He might be able to do "privilege boy becomes more woke" but damn that takes a deft hand to not just be a pile of bad cliches.

I quite like the Iron Fist character but that's just because I think Martial Arts are fun. In terms of the series, I was left kind of wishing that they had stuck to introducing him as a side character. There's not enough there, without going for a good martial artists and associated effects as the focus, to build a good series around. Fuck they could have even gone and short circuited most of the 'cultural appropriation' issues and made his character Chinese American son of a billionaire who found a mystical city and then just not really bothered dealing with that aspect of the character.

I'm only onto episode 3 and was enjoying it, I'll watch the whole thing but sad to hear that Danny becomes the focal character. Based purely on prior exposure and critical success I'd have assumed they'd have made Matt the reluctant leader. There wasn't really anything in the IF series that indicated he was someone others would follow beyond being stubborn (which came across as just dumb ass stubborn in the show rather than principled and determined).

No,  they tried that and even had stick mentioning it but it didn't work.  He hardly led at all and the story followed fisty.

The defenders leaves me with one big question.
The danny parts were annoying but he legit is a emotionally stunted kid in a mans body who grew into his power by years of effectively physical torture. There was not enough time after the first iron hand to handwave this for him to suddenly mature and be more competent.

I still say it would have been a great take to have Danny's mom Chinese but as a boy he had zero ties to that side of his culture so his main arc would be accepting the kung fu shit wasn't all bullshit.  Make him a more cynical and fun character.  Thinking about that, defenders don't have ANY fun characters.  Jessica has some sarcastic wit and Matt and Luke are nice guys while Danny is an edgy teen but there's no fun guy, no flash or spiderman or an RDJ iron man to lighten the mood in scenes. It's just all brooding all the time.

I keep imagining Daniel Wu from Into the Badlands as a Chinese-American Daniel Rand. He could play the bratty, double-privileged, babe-in-the-woods kid *and* do amazing martial arts. Finn Jones is just a giant block of inert nothing at the heart of it all.

Out of curiosity: Given the decline, how would you want Netflix to proceed?  My best path for them would be to:

* Do more seasons that are shorter (film 2 seasons at a time, each 6 to 8 episodes, release them every 6 to 12 months rather than 12 to 24 months). 
* Keep Daredevil mostly separate. 
* End Iron Fist. 
* Merge Jessica and Luke into one series.
* End Punisher.
* Give us Moon Knight.
* Combine the ABC/Movie/Netflix by giving us a Hawkeye and Mockingbird series.

Do an anthology series based on the old Marvel Team-Up book that used to feature Spider-Man.

Three-episode arcs.

Cage + Iron Fist
Daughters of the Dragon
Daredevil + Spider-Man
Doctor Strange and Jessica Jones (that would be hilarious)
Moon Knight + Punisher
Black Widow + Daredevil

etc. Make a season order 12-episodes, 4 arcs. Have a theme connecting them all.

I have no wish list, just get rid of Iron Fist.

Don't waste a perfectly good Asian actor on a role that demands him to be an indecisive twat with mommy issues. I mean fuck we have the last 10 years of anime main characters living out the basement fantasy of its weeboi fanbase for that.

Iron fist sucks because they want an anime main hero with an origin story where no one acts like an anime character and everyone knows who the fuck they are already. So when he is with the grownups he gets treated like a child, who you can't grab the TNT away from. I didn't hate the iron fist show, but maybe because I've been watching recent anime and de-sensitized my taste pallet when your main character who suppose to be this great warrior, defender of fucking heaven has more in common with deku from my hero academia.

And not knowing what to do with him in this show is painful to watch, but doesn't kill the Defenders. I liked it, not more than daredevil or jessica or luke cage but definitely better than whats on TV. And whats on TV is bad. I wish they just give up on having us care about his personal story and just focus on him being a bad ass martial artist, but you know Netflix has a command from on high that any tv show they make gotta be meta, gotta have social relevance. And while that is easy when your talking vague nothings about today's social issues, its less pointed when your trying to over compensate for a white guy beating up poor people because he knows magic kungfu.

Also we've had 18 hours of shows with Iron Fist in them. That is a lot of screentime in which to show zero growth. RDJ hasn't played Iron Man for that long.

Regardless, I enjoyed this.

Actually one thing did niggle aside from Fist.

"Jessica Jones is an alcoholic ha ha ha what a good punchline"

It might have been that it was never funny.

She is showing genuinely Wolverine levels of shrugging off the drink in ways that are a bit, hey hold on. She's not a high-functioning alcoholic in her habits and amounts but she is treated as if she is one, as if it doesn't impair her except when it's a funny character bit for her to be slightly impaired.

I would want them to proceed by not having shows dedicated to shitty fucking heroes and having the standard course of action be "make it grimdark, everyone fucking broods."

Yeah, I think this is the other thing they need, is to be less embarrassed by the superhero genre. And to spend a bit more money. The long, draggy intervals in all of these series except DD 1 has something to do with wanting to avoid anything that looks like super-hero action for a lot of it for both financial and 'ew, superheroes' reasons.

The MCU is also creeping up on a problem that all super-hero universes have but only a few really come to grips with: that life eventually would be substantially different in those worlds, that things would change for everyone. The old Wild Card books that George Martin edited grabbed that problem by the balls and solved it; so does Kurt Busiek's series Astro City. Marvel and DC's main comics mostly ignore it except when they don't (when they don't often leads to great stories).

The MCU kind of has to deal with it because it's trying fairly hard to stay "realistic" and to be fairly constrained in the way it visualizes superheroes, whether we're talking the TV or the movies. Hence Jessica Jones making fun of Daredevil for having a costume, Luke Cage finding someone being "the Iron Fist" faintly ridiculous just as a concept, etc. This is not a universe where the first thing that someone who gets a power greater than human thinks to do is put on skin-tight spandex and punch bad guys in the middle of Times Square. Captain America's costume starts as a stage stunt and then becomes just a variation on a practical soldier's uniform custom designed for a superstrong guy with a shield. Thor's outfit is an alien's thing and everyone sees it as amusingly outre but also a bit awesome. Hawkeye and Black Widow basically don't wear 'costumes'. The Hulk doesn't either. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver don't. Ant-Man finds his own science outfit kind of ridiculous. Even Spider-Man's outfit is basically being turned into a variation of Iron Man's: a technology first and foremost, not a disguise or "union suit".

But the Avengers-level films are now dealing with: what does it mean to the world when there's a team of global law enforcers/special ops people who have these powers? The Defenders was a bit more reluctant to come to grips with that. Harlem's different because of Luke. There's that one bit where Karen is trying to reassure Matt that he did something necessary and good by being DD even *if* he doesn't need to any longer. They're going to have to keep working on that. Your urban-level characters have either got to be a bit obsessive or kinky or whatever--being a superhero has to be something they just have to do, even if no one really needs them--or the metasituation has to require superheroes because something's changing, so that they have no choice but to keep doing it. Usually it's the latter--the event that made superheroes also makes supervillains, the police have given up and gone home (some versions of Batman's Gotham City at the time Batman suits up), something.

Right now with the MCU TV shows, there really isn't that kind of overall thinking. Luke cares about Harlem, but where does that go? If the politicians and cops don't care enough about Harlem, that eventually means: fighting the cops and the politicians again (which they should have stuck with more anyway). Jessica has sort of lost a motivation and she sure as hell doesn't really care what's going on overall--that will have to change. Matt is an obsessive, maybe; the Hand and Elektra function as a secondary motivator. Iron Fist is stuck in his own origin/millieu--he's got nothing once the Hand and K'un L'un are sorted out. But if in the next round of series you more or less have these four people doing shit in New York that sometimes is visible and has public consequences, eventually that has to change shit. If you were a cop--or a government--and you knew there was an invulnerable guy who could walk into gunfire unharmed, that would change your status quo. If you were an FBI agent and knew there was a stealthy ninja vigilante who could sneak into a mob safe house and get the hard drive of an incriminating computer and then leave it as an "anonymous tip", that would change things. If you knew you could hire a private detective who could throw a car through a wall, that would change things.

The Spider-Man movie actually did an interesting thing with the Vulture along those lines: the street-level consequences of aliens attacking and so on. The TV shows need to do their own version of that.

You want them to end Punisher (one of the most well done characters to come out of this Netflixverse), and do Moon Knight (one of the worst and most pointless ripoff hero's in Marvels line up).

 :oh_i_see:

But yes, kill Iron First or recast him or something god damn fuck

Moon Knight, yeah, I just can't see it.

If they want to do martial arts and give Luke a martial arts buddy, kill IF halfway through his season 2 and introduce Shang Chi to replace him. Though he has some pretty complicated baggage in his own right--I assume they'd just forget the Fu Manchu stuff, since it was a copyright violation back when they first did it.

Does Marvel Studios still own Blade? He could work really well, and introduce a new hook. Brother Voodoo maybe too if they can make him a bit less hokey.

They're doing Cloak and Dagger elsewhere, which is too bad, they could also work.

Ghost Rider, if they can reclaim him from SHIELD.

Taskmaster? He can almost be a protagonist, if he's done right.

Ms. Marvel, maybe, but I think she doesn't work with this mood--she needs to be upbeat and light, plus her powers can't be done on the cheap.

Moon Knight - the first 20 episodes of the original comic - would be awesome. Yeah, he was still a Batman ripoff, but had plenty of unique twists. Moon Knight - I'm on the same team as Norse Gods version?No point.

So yeah, it would fit the Netflix mold quite well.

I am an admitted fanboi though, and own more Moon Knight comics than Batman comics.

So I don't read comics and have no idea who a lot of these characters are... but it doesn't really matter.  Iron Fist sucks even without any knowledge of his comic book background or what he should be like.  I don't like anything about him... his acting, dialog, story, face, hair, outfit... he's just annoying.  His shoes are especially unattractive.  I couldn't get through the Iron Fist series and he might have the ability to ruin The Defenders, which I don't think is so bad.

I finally finished this off with the last episode, which somehow I had lost enthusiasm for. It was honestly pretty crap (the last episode) on multiple levels. And I liked the series as a whole--the Chinese restaurant episode was excellent.

The problem really is multiple:

a) The action was mostly not well-filmed or choreographed throughout, except in the fight in Midland Circle in the middle of the series and then in the Chinese restaurant. None of these shows have ever really hit those heights except for Season 1 Daredevil and a few bits in Season 2 Daredevil and this is a big problem, because it one of the few things they should be able to do stunningly well--strong physical combat scenes that turn on relatively subtle uses of superpowers. But the last episode is especially tarnished by this--the moment where we should see the four of them bringing their unique talents to fighting against a dangerous enemy is instead a messy, badly choreographed scene of fairly generic whack-a-henchman beat-downs.

b) The Hand got less menacing and interesting the more we learned about them. This didn't seem like an organization of dangerous immortals with influence inside every government and business. For people who try to *act* like they're the all-time conspiracy and criminal organization that every lesser mafioso and shady businessman should fear, they were basically just some mediocre martial artists who have some ordinary street trash henchmen (and not even very many of them). Once the four Defenders all found they were equally in the crosshairs of the Hand, they should have been in a desperate situation, and they played it that way for a brief moment--they seemed afraid, they gathered up all their loved ones, and then, pfffft all that tension just kind of evaporated. The friends and lovers and sidekicks should have been in enormous danger in a police station (come on, every shadowy immortal conspiracy knows how to buy off corrupt cops) and had to run into some form of even deeper hiding--it should have been a race: kill the Hand or see everything (even New York) die. We got told that those were the stakes, but from episode 6-8, it didn't feel like it any more. The more we saw, the less dangerous these people seemed, and the less sense it made to blow up Midland Circle. It's entirely tell and not show at that point and the show just couldn't sell what it was telling.

c) Elektra pretty much fucks the whole thing up, because she's the MacGuffin but her motivations, powers, etc., are almost entirely underexplained and the actress playing her basically couldn't fill through performance what wasn't written in script. I kept waiting for something to happen that made the plan to resurrect her make some kind of sense and it just never did.

d) Iron Fist comes close to outright ruining it in the last half just because he's so important to the plot and so underwhelming as a character *and* the performance compounds it.


Basically: they have GOT to get higher-quality action directors in, and they have got to solve the problems of pacing that have undercut every single one of these shows.

I find myself in the bizarre situation of mostly agreeing with Khaldun (no insult, it's just that usually I find we are entertained/offended by different things). I found a lot of things to like about the show, but I really did feel that they set up a menace that never really materialized. From an underwhelming Electra/Black Sky to a grand melee with no sense of menace to all the rest. Yes, we know they are not going to really kill off the mains and blow up New York, but there are a lot of secondary characters that could have been reasonably threatened.

Although, looking back over the list, I don't share the Iron Fist hate. I thought he was fine here, just to share a minority opinion, at least for this board (from what can be gathered from secondary means, it looks like Iron Fist's own show rated pretty much equally to Jessica Jones and Luke Cage as far as general Netflix viewers were concerned -- both of which pale to Daredevil second season).

And speaking of possibly shaky third party analysts, it looks like The Defenders is rating badly compared to any of them, so it's not just the opinion here that it was somewhat weak.

Armchair script doctor mode: They could have kept most of the relative menace without a problem, if they had shown that The Hand was an organization being left behind, a mere shadow of its former influence and glory, and the New York plot was a Hail Mary to win some of it back. Or, as was mentioned by Madame Gao, to leave, to return to Kun Lun, to retreat from this world (actually, we have no idea why they/she wanted to return to Kun Lun -- more mystery it would have been nice to have had been expanded upon).

But in any case, I know it's going to be a problem for me when halfway through a season I start to seriously root for the bad guys...

Agree about the last episode. But would note that you can say all of that about the final episode of every one of these shows except JJ.

They just aren't very good at doing last episodes.

Yeah. It's such a striking pattern that it begs explanation. Jessica Jones I thought had an actual climax (but too much doodling around in the middle), the others didn't. I think they're spending so much time setting the mood and casts for each of these shows that they are forgetting that they also have a story to tell.

I think its just a lot easier to create a mood and not give a shit if they resolve it, as they generally have no idea if they will get another season or not, so they think that they might not have to think up a way resolve the horrible situation they have the heros in, other than the heros being eaten.

Blake's 7 was famous for ending its seasons with the Crew in a horrible situation cliffhanger, so if they didn't get another season they could just say "Everyone died. Sorry"

Until the end, of course, where everyone died except Avon.

True Story.

And if I'm going to watch 10 hours of a thing, I'd much rather they concentrate on making the 8 hour 'middle' good than the 1 hour intro or finale.

I've found the Netflix Marvel shows start out strong only to taper off in the middle and limp to the end.  The Defenders was no different.

Except Iron Fist which already started limping, sadly.

Iron Fist was DOA.

I finally finished watching this and the show actually suffered from binge watching Netflix style. Or at least the poor quality aspects were way, way more apparent. I watched the final 3 episodes over about a week and enjoyed them more than the previous 5 that I'd binged (then had a 6 week or so break from). The action cinematography was a mess and the final fight was a bit of a let down as has been mentioned. That said there were some solid moments, the Stick and Danny scene was good but would have been better used as an opportunity for a resolving confrontation between Matt and Stick. That whole relationship really didn't get the attention it deserved, had they been putting Matt as a more central focus it would have been genuinely interesting to see him, once he'd accepted that the Hand had to be fought, torn between Stick pushing him to war like the Chaste had and Matt's nobler instincts for the team. I could see that having been a tension in the team that would have worked far better, Jessica being a more 'war is war, maybe we do need to take this to them' and Luke being more on Matt's side. Danny being indecisive.

Bleh, I thought this had great potential but it's ended up being a fun weekly viewing type series. Action direction since DD1 has been going downhill it seems and I don't think the writers have a clear idea what they want to do with Danny apart from have him be the focal point (and I think even that was more an accidental consequence of the plot, it was clear they did want Matt being central as well). If they could just fix the action and keep the stakes higher in the mid season this would be a really fun series.

Man I had a lot of problems but I never even realized that the stick/matt relationship never got any decent resolution thanks to that danny scene.   I also really need to emphasize how fucking stupid "the black sky" thing was. They were setting it up since season one of daredevil with an air of mysticism and mystery.  You were left wondering if the black sky was some sort of demon, some ultimate weapon and then you find out it's just a halfway competent ninja. I guess to this shows version of the hand an actual ninja with talent is something of a miracle.

Just disappointing on every angle.

Yeah, having just caught the last part it kind of stuck out to me that I think at least some of the writers wanted the Defenders to be very much based around Matt's relationship with Stick and Elektra thrown in with the Hand. They just couldn't really seem to put aside the fact that they'd built up Danny Rand as the sworn enemy of the Hand and that this was about Kun'lun. I think, having seen the finale, Danny would have worked better in this as the Maguffin. The character didn't have an arc, didn't add to the tension and wasn't worth it for the martial arts. Hell he was just a Maguffin with way too much screen time. Transitioning the finale faster to Matt with Stick pushing him on one side and Elektra on the other and both wanting him to kill, whichever side it was for, would have been good for the non-spandex type tension. If they could have sold us on a guy in a devil costume having an argument about morality with a blind ninja and a Greek undead ninja, that would have been worth the whole build up alone (in terms of presenting grown-up super hero stuff). Instead I kind of like the resolution they got to but trying to go all out on action did not work.

Even that might have worked if they'd delved a bit more into the motivation of the Hand and the ideals of Kun'Lun (I like intellectual wankery) and maybe made some attempt to frame the conflict as one of ideals rather than 4 dudes who were pretty good at martial arts and inexplicably have a lot of cannon fodder. Shows like True Detective have shown that you can put the mystical into shows without needing a massive effects budget. Hell I don't even think the Defenders necessarily needed everything neatly resolved in terms of the Hand, leaving them as the tool of uncaring cosmic forces would have been a way better twist and doing something that suggested both the Hand and Kun'Lun existed as outposts of forces neither of which are particularly relatable could have actually given Danny an interesting character arc as he comes to grip with the idea that he doesn't have a clear role assigned to him anymore, that he's a vehicle for power he doesn't really understand.

Fuck now I want a job doing postmortems of comic show writing where I can go back in time and give ideas to writers.

Yes, agreed.  It was awful from the very beginning.