The Marvel Universe loves secret societies, and Danny Rand is no stranger to the mysterious undercurrents that shape the world. Spoilers for Iron Fist Season 1 ahead. Iron Fist shows Danny fighting against The Hand, a shadowy heroin-dealing organization that uses magic to get its way. However, Rand's perception of the organization is shifted when it's revealed that Colleen Wing is part of The Hand, and has been for a long time. It seems that the portrait of The Hand that the audience has received hasn't been entirely accurate, and that the villainous Madame Gao was representative of the bad side of the hand. Is Colleen telling the truth, that The Hand can actually be a force for good?
What could've become a complicated question on ethics and organization is resolved when it turns out that The Hand is 100 percent evil. Bakuto, the new leader of The Hand (at least in New York) who replaces Madame Gao, quickly takes on her role in trying to expand heroin distribution through Rand Enterprises and keeps manipulating Danny and the Meachum family to do his bidding. But was Colleen Wing really evil the whole time — even from the beginning when she was just an instructor stapling karate class flyers to public posting boards?
It turns out that when Colleen was telling Danny that The Hand was good, she was telling him the truth — at least as she understood it. Colleen had long held the impression that The Hand was dedicated to helping people reform their lives for the better and make the world a nicer place to live. So it was to much disappointment that she discovered that her sensei, Bakuto, was just as evil and manipulative as the people she had sworn to protect her students from.
While Colleen is never a member of The Hand in her comic book appearances, she does briefly become the leader of a new version of The Nail, a subgroup that Daredevil relaunches. Colleen's comic book origins differ from her story on the television series, but give the character a compelling story arc and some difficult choices to make on her path towards realizing that you can only ever truly count on yourself. Colleen is just one of the many characters on Iron Fist who have deep-seeded trust issues, and rightfully so. After being manipulated and tricked by Bakuto and her fellow Hand members for years, it's no wonder she has teamed up with the hero who was destined to take down The Hand.
Colleen's shifting relationship with The Hand mirrors the same journey that Ward and Joy Meachum go on with their father, and that Danny goes on with just about everything in the world. No matter how much you think you know, there's always a chance that it could all be a facade, and that the groundwork upon which your life is built could end up being faulty. Colleen Wing fell for The Hand once, but by the end of Season 1 of Iron Fist, it's clear she'll never make that mistake again.
