Iron Fist was easily the least liked of Netflix's Marvel stable. This stemmed mainly from a first season that had no clue what direction it wanted to go in, with the few certainties it made leaning more toward boredom than anything interesting. It didn't help that Season 1's plot and unlikable depiction of Danny Rand were continued in the almost as maligned Defenders.

The show's second season was able to start turning a corner for the character's portrayal, however, with the second half of the outing, in particular, making fans excited to see where Iron Fist would go next as a character. Further growth was curtailed with the show's cancellation soon after, but the planned third season would have definitely been a game-changer. With exotic adventures, martial arts mastery and a much tougher Iron Fist, Danny Rand's third outing was what the show should have always been.

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Iron Fist's Faults

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The show's initial criticism in its first season stemmed mainly from the results of its rushed production. Helmed by Scott Buck, who was also behind the somehow far worse dumpster fire Inhumans, the show's first season was cheaply and even more quickly made. This amateurish affair made it necessary to ground what should have been the most fantastical and extravagant Marvel Netflix series yet. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage all made some slight changes to their respective mythos' to give them a bit of a darker edge, but they generally matched the gritty, street-level tone and scope of those characters' comics.

Iron Fist, on the other hand, is a character who regularly deals with magic, interdimensional martial arts, and at the very least, 1970s-inspired international globe-trotting. These elements were glossed over entirely, perhaps to make it fit in a bit more with the other Marvel shows, but most likely because Buck wanted to expend neither the time nor the budget necessary to portray these concepts. Instead, the show focused mostly on legal and boardroom storylines, which was a decision made worse by the fact that none of this was done particularly well. Even the fight scenes were notoriously bad, especially for the character. Danny Rand is never portrayed as having any sort of master or moderate familiarity with advanced martial arts, constantly struggling with mere mooks who should logically pose no real threat to him.

This continued into Defenders, where Iron Fist was seen as being as annoying as ever to audiences. His luck finally turned around with a one-episode appearance in the second season of Luke Cage. Likewise, the follow-up season to his own show was generally seen as much better, with the show and character finally moving in a direction that both matched the source material and was actually genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, the show's cancellation meant that the third season, which promised to finally deliver what the show should have always offered, went unmade.

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Iron Fist Season 3

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In a recent interview, Finn Jones, who portrayed the protector of K'un L'un, discussed the much more promising direction that the show would have taken." Raven [Metzner], who was the showrunner for the second season, and I were sure that there was gonna be a Season 3, so we had already devised the whole thing," he explained. "I was so excited to get into that. It really was gonna be about Danny finally assuming the role of the Iron Fist, fully accomplished, fully charged up, and fully in control of his shit, as well. It was gonna be this amazing story [with] Danny and Ward off in foreign lands as a buddy storyline almost. And then, you had Colleen in New York, isolated with this new power, struggling to come to terms with her identity and with this power. At some point, we would have met again and probably formed this crazy power couple [or] superhero relationship."

Even without exact specifics concerning the villains and threats of the season, this sounds more like what people would have expected from the series from the get-go. Globe-trotting, a fully realized Iron Fist, and likely much better fight choreography would have been instant improvements from the first and even second seasons. It doesn't mention anything about the iconic Iron Fist costume, which was notoriously unused in the series, but some variation of it would have likely shown up, especially to conceal Rand's identity as he traveled.

The series, as mentioned, was initially rushed so as to get The Defenders out. However, taking the time to make the first season of Iron Fist more like what this tentative third outing would have been likely would have made the show much more successful, thus making Iron Fist as a television character pack a lot more punch.

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