Danny fights the Hand. Yay?
The Hand gathers their “best fighters” and presents a challenge to Danny, calling him out for a tournament. Fortunately he manages to find the invite left with the head of the chemist’s bodyguard before the cops do, dragging Ward into it as well and giving him even more reason to dive into his drug addiction, which is problematic because he threw his pills away.
Claire and Colleen finally give up and take the chemist to the hospital while Danny goes to the tournament. The Hand tries to play with his mind, pointing out how stupid he is, but fortunately he’s hallucinating visions of his former master and gets the encouragement needed to win. He takes out a couple of Russians in the first round, and barely manages to not make out too much with a spider lady in the second.
Ward and Joy make it through a meeting with a crisis management company to deal with Danny’s corporate mistake in admitting that the company was giving people cancer, Danny couldn’t make it because he was preparing for the fight, and then fighting, and also because the job he fought so hard for doesn’t really matter. After the long and grueling meeting Ward is jonesing pretty hard and breaks his hand to try to get more pills from urgent care before Joy stops him.
Meanwhile Claire and Colleen find that the chemist has been taken from the hospital. They try to go after him, but are not successful.
Danny’s hallucination reminds him that he needs to let Danny Rand die in order to truly become the Iron Fist, something that will be mostly ignored from this point forward, much as these visions of his master will never be seen again. He then takes on a weapons master for round three of the increasingly unfair tournament, but it’s more screen time of Danny being beat up, so that’s all good, even if he does eventually win. Or at least mostly win, at the last minute Gao pulls a fast one and threatens to kill the chemist’s daughter if he does not withdraw. Considering he was supposed to defeat the hand at all costs, withdrawing leads Danny into a bit of an existential crisis, presumably why his vision master won’t talk to him anymore. But at least he rescued the girl.