Iron Fist introduces enough long-term villains in its first season to last a lifetime, ranging from the menacing Meachum family to the far-reaching and easily underestimated Madame Gao. However, by the end of the first season of Iron Fist, Bakuto seems to be the most dangerous. Spoilers for Iron Fist ahead. Not because he's the most powerful, but because no one knows where he is. He was last seen bleeding out from a knife to the heart at Bethesda Terrace, but is Bakuto really dead, or just missing in action?
Death has always been questionable in superhero television — characters tend to come back from the dead whenever convenient for the plot. The Marvel-Netflix universe has avoided this trope for the most part, but Iron Fist absolutely blows the doors off the permanence of death in the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Hand is revealed to have the ability to bring people back from the dead, as they resurrected Harold Meachum 13 years earlier, and the first season reveals that thanks to whatever they did to him, it's now nearly impossible for him to die.
While the first season finale really seems like the end for Harold — unless the Hand can put those cremated ashes back together — the only character whose life is left up in the air is the Hand leader himself, Bakuto.
Hoping to spare Bakuto after their climactic fight, Colleen Wing leaves him with a hefty wound on the ground, in the rain. Davos, however, disagrees and delivers a veto in the form of a blade into Bakuto's chest. After getting very angry at each other about killing the murderous head of a magical international heroin ring, Danny and Davos work out their feelings through a fight sequence, only to discover that sometime during their fight, Bakuto had disappeared.
There's an unspoken rule in fantasy/sci-fi/comic book adaptations that unless you see a character have their lifeless body buried, cremated, or otherwise disposed of, then they aren't actually dead. Even with that rule in place, Iron Fist has shown the body of Harold Meachum left bleeding out in a murky swamp only to bring him back to life later on in the series, effectively throwing the already loose rules of comic book death out the window.
Death may come for other characters, but any associates of The Hand are likely safe from death. Bakuto is almost 100 percent alive, but the question of where he is still stands and may have been hinted at in the final, shocking moments of the season.
At the very end, Danny and Colleen ventured to K'un-Lun — the mystical city where Danny trained to become the Iron Fist, that is the sworn enemy of the Hand — only to find it missing. At the entrance, he finds slain members of the Hand, indicating that there had been an attack before the city vanished. It's entirely possibly that after sneaking away or being rescued, Bakuto made a beeline for the city and is currently wreaking havoc on its inhabitants with no way to be stopped.
Wherever Bakuto is currently, expect him to return in a big way sometime in the future of the Marvel-Netflix Universe.
