Finished watching this season, yesterday. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this show. There was some clunky dialogue and pacing issues, especially in the first half of the season, but I've also found that to be the case with the other Marvel Netflix shows too. To be fair, while I'm a long-time comic book reader of both Marvel and D.C., I've never read Iron Fist, so while I had a vague understanding of Iron Fist's backstory, going in, I would be a poor judge of whether or not the tv version of the character differs significantly from the one in the comics. So, my opinion is really based solely on what I was watching, on the show.
Personally, I had no issue with Finn Jones's portrayal of Danny Rand. I found him to be likable and engaging in the role. While I see some merit to the argument for having a martial arts expert in the role for the sake of better fight scenes, really, that argument could be made for any type of show like this. Casting someone with only a stunt/fight choreography background might also run the risk of severely limiting any of the dramatic scenes too. I guess that's one of those things that's impossible to know for sure, because they cast who they cast, and at this point, that would just be speculating on hypotheticals. In general though, I thought all of performances from the main cast were good. Some of the episodes did seem a little superfluously Claire-centric for some reason. I really like Rosario Dawson in the role of Claire Temple, but it seemed like where her appearances in some of the other Netflix Marvel shows were more in service to the story, here that didn't always seem to be the case. Throughout the show, I had minor nitpicks like that, but I was willing to overlook them, as I really enjoyed the overall story. I'm interested in seeing where they go with the story, next. Will they develop the relationship between Danny and Luke Cage during the Defenders show, and could we possibly get an entire season of Powerman and Iron Fist, sometime after? I think there is a lot of potential for interesting storylines, going forward.
The reviews on this have, in my opinion, been excessively harsh. It currently sits at 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, putting it squarely between the Matt Salinger Captain America and Dolph Lundgren Punisher movies. And the audience score is 82%, so there is a huge gulf between the opinions of the "critics" and casual viewers.
