Warning: Spoilers ahead for Season 2 of “Marvel’s Iron Fist”
Couples who Iron Fist together, stay together.
Okay, we know that’s not exactly what goes down between Danny Rand (Finn Jones) and Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) in “Marvel’s Iron Fist” Season 2, but you get the idea.
At the end of the super hero series’ sophomore season, Colleen becomes infused with her own version of the power of the Iron Fist, and becomes the new protector of New York after Danny leaves to find out more about being the Fist (and grow as a person so, it’s implied, he and Colleen have a chance of making things work). But just before he goes, Danny realizes that Colleen is herself a descendant of the first Iron Fist, and that realization, Jones told TheWrap, gave Danny the extra push he needed to be able to leave.
“[Danny] can’t hold himself responsible to hold the fist, until he sorts himself out,” the former “Game of Thrones” star told TheWrap in an interview after “Iron Fist” Season 2 dropped on Netflix. Jones added that over the course of living and fighting alongside Colleen, he sees her as someone who “has tremendous integrity, and responsibility and balance and level-headedness.” Those all sound like pretty good qualities if you’re going to be holding the power of the Iron Fist.
Danny’s decision to leave New York is “very difficult,” Jones said, “but he has to allow Colleen to hold the power whilst he goes and discovers things himself.” And when Danny discovers the medallion in their apartment, “it just clicks for him.”
“The most amazing thing is, is that he’s made that decision [to leave], he goes back to the apartment to kind of pack up his things and clean up, and he finds that medallion on the floor. And he flips the medallion over, and he sees the Shou-Lao symbol,” Jones said. “He realizes in that moment that it was destiny, and it reaffirms his belief that passing on the power and going away [is the right thing to do]… All this season, we’re trying to find out who Colleen’s parents are, we find out that Colleen’s parents is [sic] a descendant of the Iron Fist.”
That realization allowed Danny to breathe more easily about leaving, Jones said: “He goes, ‘ah yes, it is okay. I can leave, Colleen’s going to be fine. This is meant to be for her.’ It’s difficult for him to leave, it’s very hard for him to leave, but he knows it’s the right thing and he can trust that her destiny is in the right hands, and he has to go away and discover his own destiny and really discover it in a more real way something that means something to him, something [to give him] deeper purpose.”
As we wrote about in a post you can read right here, Colleen’s white Fist is a departure from the comic books on which the series is based. But as Jones put it to TheWrap, the story is “still very much in the vein of the comics.”
“We’re still staying within the spirit of the comic books, you know? It just feels like it’s more fleshed out,” he said. “I wouldn’t really saying we’re going off-book, because we’re still very much in the vein of the comics, it’s just we’re starting to play around with ideas and expand on possibilities, which I think is really nice, within the framework of the Iron Fist mythology.”
And there is a thread that links what’s going on with Colleen to the comics. At the end of the season, Danny speculates that Colleen’s ancestor could be Pirate Queen Wu Ao-Shi, thanks to a story her mother told her and the family heirloom box Colleen discovered in the first episode. Wu Ao-Shi was also the first woman Iron Fist, which probably means there’s a whole lot more interesting backstory for the show to explore.
Jones agreed that there’s a lot of interesting ground to cover if Netflix greenlights a Season 3.
“It’s also going to be really interesting seeing how Colleen is having the power of the Iron Fist,” he said. “Like is she too going also to succumb to the power of the dragon? Is the heart of the dragon going to get power over her? Or will she be able to balance it and keep the weapon for peace in New York? It’s going to be really interesting to see where the show can go Season 3.”
“Marvel’s Iron Fist” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.