They Must Have Deemed A Rematch Unnecessary

It occurred to me, possibly while contemplating just how awesome Robot Fat Cobra is going to be, that we never saw Danny rand get another shot at the Mecha-Gorgon. You might recall the Mecha-Gorgon appeared very early in the Immortal Iron Fist (I believe #1, but I don't have my copy to confirm that), and proceeded to whup Danny's skinny butt rather impressively.

This, in of itself, isn't unusual. It's a common form of storytelling, especially in superhero stories, for the hero to suffer a defeat, or at least a setback, when confronted with a new foe, or a new trick from a recurring foe. The hero manages to escape, licks their wounds, figures out how to offset or circumvent whatever it was that gave their foe the advantage, and triumphs in the rematch. Depending on how the writer wishes to structure it, the hero may suffer more than one setback before their victory, but they do eventually defeat their adversary.

Except in this case, Danny never saw the Mecha-Gorgon again. The one time we saw it again, Davos was using the energy he was being given by the daughters of the Crane Mother to obliterate it, and several HYDRA agents, simply as part of an exercise. So you might figure that's that, but this is HYDRA. "Cut off one head and two more shall grow in its place"? You'd think they'd have more than one Mecha-Gorgon. Perhaps it had served its purpose, defeating Danny, then being easily dispatched by someone who wants to destroy Danny, it establishes Davos as being a serious threat to Danny, thus heightening the tension for when the two collide.

Except, they never really did get down to it. They fought briefly, after Davos beat Orson Randall to death, but were interrupted by Lei Kung and the Yu-Ti arriving to tell Danny he had to report for the Tournament of the Heavens. They never resumed their battle. You could argue they even did it one more time, by having John Aman humiliate Davos in the Tournament. By initially presenting Aman as coldly efficient, unfriendly, highly dangerous, and by far the most experienced fighter at the proceedings, one could interpret it that he was the one danny might have to deal with down the line. Of course, that's not the way it goes, as it turns out Aman is on Danny's side, and so there's no grand battle between Danny* and the Prince of Orphans, which demonstrates Danny's skill as a warrior. Instead he punches out a train.

Hmm, yeah, I think that works.

I don't know what to make of that precisely, beyond that it suggests Fraction and Brubaker were playing with our expectations, so they could then go in a different, more intriguing direction. Hey, I love a good hero/villain battle as much as the next person, but I believe where they went with it - the intrigue, subterfuge, the shifting alliances - almost surely made for a richer story**.

I still wonder if we'll see another Mecha-Gorgon.

* You can probably make the case Danny is the weakest of the current Immortal Weapons as, thanks to Orson Randall, Danny never got to read up on all the clever ways to use his chi that his predecessors devised. Presumably the others were not so deprived.

** Even if I do think they dragged it out too long.