(Spoilers ahead for season 2 of Marvel’s “Iron Fist” on Netflix.)
All of the main characters in season 2 of Marvel’s “Iron Fist” on Netflix were introduced back in season 1 except one — Mary Walker (Alice Eve), the mysterious woman who saunters into Danny Rand’s (Finn Jones) life seemingly by accident.
Except as the season goes on it’s revealed it was not in any sense an accident, as Mary Walker has dissasociative identity disorder, and has a split personality — one of them is a very nice, sweet person, and the other is a private investigator/assassin.
The key moment in Mary’s life prior to her introduction on “Iron Fist” comes in a location that will be very familiar to fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Sokovia. Sokovia is the homeland of Wanda Maximoff, aka Scarlet Witch, and the location of both the opening fight and final battle in “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” It’s also where Helmut Zemo (Daniel Bruhl), the villain of “Captain America: Civil War,” hails from.
At some point in the past, Mary Walker was an American soldier whose squad of eight was captured in Sokovia by unknown forces. Half her squad was killed in the ambush, three were executed by their captors, and only Mary Walker survived the order. After nearly two years in captivity, one of Walker’s alter egos broke out, killed all the captors and escaped.
There are some big question marks about this story — we don’t know who the captors were or whether Walker’s dissasociative identity disorder had surfaced before her time in captivity. One of the flashbacks to that time seems to indicate that the personality split did “occur” when it rained while she was locked up. And there’s really no information at all about who the bad guys were, aside from Walker referring to them in one scene as Sokovians.
My first impulse when she talked about being held captive in Sokovia was that she was held by HYDRA and Baron von Strucker. Strucker was in charge of the research base that the Avengers raided at the beginning of “Age of Ultron,” where HYDRA used Loki’s scepter and the Mind Stone inside it to give the Maximoff twins their powers. It could certainly track that Strucker experimented on Walker and that those experiments caused her mind to break. And perhaps they tossed her in a cell at an ancillary facility just to see if something developed over time.
But there’s ultimately no evidence for all that. In fact, there’s so little information provided in “Iron Fist” that it’s impossible to say whether Mary Walker’s story has a tangible connection to the MCU films, like maybe that Zemo’s Sokovian military squad Eko Scorpion could have been involved somehow. It’s just as likely that it has no connection beyond the location.
However, I’d guess that we’re going to learn more about all this next time around, considering how Walker realized at the end of the season that she had a third personality that she didn’t know about, and it was that personality who broke her out of that cell and butchered all the guards present.
With Walker now on a quest to learn more about that third personality, the third season of “Iron Fist” will almost certainly revisit Walker’s time in Sokovia, and maybe we’ll learn more then. But for now, we’re left guessing.