One of the problems with making a TV show that’s all about your main character sucking for a long time, before finally learning how to be cool, is that, well…You spend a long time with a main character who sucks, don’t you? If you know you’ve got enough runway and network support to pull the full schlub-to-superhero turn off, it can be incredibly satisfying for audiences (and creators!). But if you end up getting the renewal rug yanked out from under you—maybe because, to make up a reason totally at random, the company that owns the rights to all your characters is gearing up to have a big streaming service pissing match with the one that actually airs your show—you can end up with two season of a show about a guy who nearly gets to the fireworks factory before abruptly getting canceled.
Such was something of the fate of Marvel’s Iron Fist, a fact bemoaned this week by former series star Finn Jones. After all, things seemed to have been going just fine for the series: The Netflix Marvel shows were trucking along with decent numbers and reviews, and most people considered the second season of Iron Fist to be a marked improvement over the first. In fact, Jones revealed to Collider this week that he and the rest of the show’s writers had been so sure they were going to get a third season that they’d already started planning out the plot outline for it. And since, well, nobody really seems to be coming around looking for more Iron Fist to turn into a TV show at the moment, Jones was happy enough to spill some of the details of what they’d had planned.
Specifically, this was apparently the season where Finn’s Danny Rand was finally going to become, in Jones’ words, “the Iron Fist, fully accomplished, fully charged up, and fully in control of his shit.” Meanwhile, Jessica Henwick’s Colleen was going to be coming into her own newpowers as well, until: “At some point, we would have met again and probably formed this crazy power couple [or] superhero relationship.” Which does, indeed, sound cool, especially if you factor in that Jones and Tom Pelphrey’s Ward would have gotten to go on a bunch of buddy cop-style adventures in far-off lands in the meantime, as teased in the show’s second-season (and series) finale.
Speaking of that abrupt ending, please enjoy this follow-up paragraph, in which Finn Jones—bless his heart—expresses what is likely the most powerful feelings that were ever evoked in a human being, anywhere, by the cancellation of the television program Iron Fist:
It’s horrible. It’s like the death of a friend or a close family member. You’ve spent years building this other world within yourself and sharing this other person with the whole world. Usually, with films or plays, you get to see that arc through. There’s a journey. But with Iron Fist, it was like we just got to the peak. We were just getting there. We’d just turned the show around. We had just done so much great work, really getting the train back on the tracks.”
Which is presumably why many qualified railroad engineers recommend building smaller trains, or maybe just shorter tracks, but still: Aww.