The theme of this episode: the sweet release of death. We should all be so lucky.
Harold receives a visit from a couple of goons from the Hand, there to punish him again for sneaking out. Danny shows up, they fight, and Harold kills them both. Danny heads for Colleen’s for a glass of wine and she invites him to stay and break his vow of chastity while Harold calls Ward in to dispose of the bodies, continuing his really rotten day.
Danny heads into the office to have Joy demand that he make a statement about the chemical plant, but he gets distracted when Gao shows up to see him. She offers to let him join her, giving up being the Iron Fist for a cushy life as a corrupt businessman, but he just keeps whining at her wanting to know how she knew his dad. She throws in a casual threat against Claire and Colleen before sneaking out. He sees her use a company key card in the elevator and decides to follow by jumping down the elevator shaft and discovers that the Hand has control of the secret thirteenth floor. He sneaks around and overhears their evil plans before subduing a helpless pharma girl, stealing her laptop, and forcing her to give him the password.
Colleen, meanwhile, gets a visit from a guy named Bakuto, and is happy to see him. She gushes about Danny and his Iron Fist-ness to him, and he tells her to be careful and keep him posted in a way that isn’t remotely ominous or in any way obviously foreshadowing anything.
Danny then takes a moment to whinge about the plant issue, makes a few phone calls and heads in late to a board meeting where he tells them that he’s unilaterally decided that they will be shutting the plant down, regardless of what anyone else thinks. He leaves and takes the laptop to Harold and they figure out where the heroin is being produced, so Danny goes to get Colleen, currently holding a graduation ceremony for Darryl into an elite training program. They go and recruit the Hatchet Men to help them raid the Hand and retrieve the chemist.
When they arrive there is a big fight that sounds pretty cool, even if we don’t see much of it, and they find the chemist nearly dead, apologizing because he gave Gao the formula. He also tells them that Gao has gone to China to make the heroin, despite going through all of the trouble of bringing him and his daughter to New York, presumably to make the heroin locally. Specifically she’s gone to the town in China that Danny was supposed to be going to when his plane crashed.
Joy then receives a visit from the board, and is informed that she, Ward, and Danny are being ousted from the company. Meanwhile, Ward tries to go off to a private rehab center to escape from his father’s control and his resulting drug addiction, but finds that his hidden bank account is suddenly empty, which is weird because it had a lot of money in it when it was introduced earlier in the episode. He confronts his father about it, but he just gives him lip for being bad at embezzlement and tells him he did him a favor by keeping him here. Ward gets fed up with Harold controlling his life and stabs him dead, dumping the body in the convenient body dumping site Harold sent him to earlier.