'Iron Fist' recap: 'Felling Tree with Roots' 

Finn Jones, Jessica Henwick, Jessica Stroup

After a relatively exciting sixth episode, “Felling Tree With Roots” feels a bit like a letdown. At times, it feels very much like a table-setting episode. It’s mainly concerned with moving the pieces around and setting up the rest of

‘s first season. Sadly, part of that involves borrowing from

‘s seventh episode but failing to capture that hour’s intensity.

Following Danny’s meeting with Madame Gao, the Hand shows up at Harold’s apartment and demands to know why he didn’t tell them that Danny was the Iron Fist. He swears on his children’s life that he didn’t know he was, and right after that, Danny barges into the apartment to tell Harold they have a problem. A shoddily edited and incoherent action scene ensues, and it ends with Harold killing everyone, much to Danny’s horror. Harold is a master manipulator, so he convinces Danny not to worry about it and to just let him get rid of the bodies.

More so than any episode that has come before, “Felling Tree With Roots” really swerves into the idea that Harold might be a raging sociopath. He’s very methodical and clear headed about the way to handle the henchmen’s bodies. He summons Ward to help him, and when Ward shows up, he finds his father bashing the henchmen’s faces in with a hammer to make them unidentifiable. Ward, who is still pretty messed up from what happened in the last episode, nearly barfs at the site of it but reluctantly agree to dump the bodies in Pelham Bay Park for his father.

Danny returns to the dojo, where Colleen stitches up his wounds. It’s a very lengthy scene that feels somewhat out of character for Colleen but is also a great showcase for Jessica Henwick. Colleen is being mildly flirty and makes a humorous but out-of-nowhere joke about Gao’s name: “Not Mrs. Gao or Linda Gao. What, does she run the best little whorehouse in the Hand or something?” It’s very weird. Colleen asks Danny to stay and have a drink with her because she doesn’t like drinking alone, and the very palpable yearning in Henwick’s performance in this scene comes to a head when Colleen finally asks Danny to stay the night. (For the record, Henwick is doing all the work in this scene and Finn Jones gives her absolutely nothing). So they have sex, and it’s quite possibly the most boring sex scene Marvel has done, which is quite disappointing when you think about how hot

‘s scenes were. I feel like this what a

sex scene would’ve looked like if the show ever did one. (To be fair, I can’t remember if the show ever actually had one).

I’ll admit that I was pretty confused by how quickly things heated up between Danny and Colleen, but I think the show explains why a few scenes later, when Colleen receives a surprise visit from her friend Bakuto. Colleen tells Bakuto about Danny being the Iron Fist, and it’s clear that Bakuto already knew that the Iron Fist was a thing. Which leads us to believe that Colleen did, too, because Bakuto tells her to just keep doing what she’s doing. Has Colleen been hiding something this entire time? Is that what we’re supposed to get from that scene? Honestly, I don’t know because this show has this tonal problem where it struggles to add any kind of tension or excitement to scenes with important revelations. It’s very hard to know when a bit of dialogue is important or not.

The other hint that there may be more to Colleen than meets the eye comes a bit later in the episode, when she announces to her students that Darryl has been chosen for an elite training program that comes with a scholarship. “You’re part of something bigger than yourself now, Darryl,” she tells him before sending him on his way. Here, the music suggests that what she just says was pretty loaded, but again, the show doesn’t do a good of making this clear.

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