Details about the upcoming second season of Netflix's Iron Fist are slowly starting to trickle out ahead of the show's Sept. 7 release. This week, it was announced that the new season would shift from the typical Netflix model of 13 episodes to 10, something the show's Twitter account hinted at over the course of last week.
This isn't the first show in Netflix's roster to reduce the number of episodes in a given season. Dreamworks' Voltron: Legendary Defender shifted its episode count starting with the third season, alternating between six and seven episodes per season with shorter gaps between (the show's final two seasons, one of which begins in August, will both return to being 13-episode affairs).
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Additionally, all four Netflix Marvel series -- Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and Daredevil -- were locked into 13-episode seasons because that was the popular model when they were collectively picked up back in 2013. The proceeding seasons of each show stuck with that order despite the criticisms they faced, namely that none of them contained stories that were sustainable over a dozen hours. At some point, each seasons' story stalled, whether that be because a new player entered the game in the third act or a story beat was drawn out overlong and to disappointing effect.
Iron Fist's debut season suffered from these phenomena the most. In addition to its myriad of problems, its story just wasn't interesting enough to maintain momentum or form a cohesive whole. First, it was a story about Danny Rand's return to America, but then it turned into a yarn about his traumas and stumbling into a war with the Hand. Meandering subplots about the Meachum family and addiction were interwoven throughout, and so on. By the end of everything, there wasn't really a story so much as things just... happening. The result is that the climax, the revelation about K'un-Lun's fate, fell flat.
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But it can't just be a shorter season order that saves Iron Fist Season 2. More than anything, what the season needs to nail is making sure there's enough story to keep the season interesting, along with just having some fun one-and-done tales. In retrospect, the team-up episode between Danny and Luke in Luke Cage's second season isn't vital to the season's overall plot, at least not until Mariah shoots up Bushmaster's home, but the episode masks that by just being fun and letting the team we know will become Heroes for Hire hang out and get to pull off some sweet combo moves. If Danny's solo show can deliver on being fun with a one-and-done episode or two, or even just be entertaining, then that's a major improvement.
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The first season of Iron Fist, and Finn Jones' performance as Danny Rand in particular, left a bad taste in the mouths of nearly everyone who watched it, putting Marvel and Netflix in a position where they need to do everything in their power to put the show on par with its more revered brethren. With that in mind, it's not surprising that Simone Missick's Misty Knight is hopping over from Luke Cage to this show to continue the Daughters of the Dragon arc, or that Danny has now matured and mellowed out. Lowering the episode count won't be the biggest fix the show could make, but it's a move that Marvel's Netflix shows have needed to make for some time now, and a welcome one at that.
So, shortening Iron Fist's episode count is only a positive all around. For those that continue to rag on the show, they can still crack jokes about how it "deserves" to be shorter since it's the weakest Marvel series, or how its brevity is a salve in lieu of quality, but those going in with a more open mind can now enjoy a sense of relief that they have a little less time to devote to binging. Other prestige dramas have managed to do more with less episodes, and it's admittedly frustrating that it took Netflix a total of eight combined seasons across its Marvel offerings to realize this.
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Iron Fist needs every advantage it can get, and if the season ends up being the improvement that it sounds like it is, it'll hopefully lead to the other Marvel shows having shorter seasons. When Iron Fist first came to Netflix, it became the first show to truly break Marvel's streak of decent programming. Now, hopefully the inverse is true and Season 2 will be a turning point for Marvel's Netflix offerings by addressing the television cinematic universe's longstanding quantity-over-quality issues.
Arriving Sept. 7 on Netflix, Marvel’s Iron Fist Season 2 stars Finn Jones as Danny Rand, Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing, Sacha Dhawan as Davos, Tom Pelphrey as Ward Meachum, Jessica Stroup as Joy Meachum, Simone Missick Misty Knight and introduces Alice Eve as Mary Walker.