The season finale of Daredevil: Born Again is titled “Straight To Hell”! It was directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead and written by Heather Bellson & Dario Scardapane. It’s… a mixed bag. Overall I thought it worked well to tie various threads up, and to set up the next season, but there were moments when you could see the seams where the old version of the show met the new. And I do wish we could have spent a bit more time with Matt Murdock as he processes the events of the last 24 hours, like, you know, getting shot saving his mortal enemy’s life.
The more important thing, though, is that the writers made an extremely interesting choice that I think might divide fans again. But we’ll get into that below.
A Quick Recap With Spoilers!
We begin “One Year Ago” per the card on the screen. Vanessa is seated across from Poindexter in an asylum, cajoling him into signing the temporary release in that will give him freedom in exchange for assassinating a target of her choosing. His main interest seems to be in getting away from the hospital because he tired of living through a haze of drug cocktails, but the one flicker of the Old Dex he shows is when Vanessa assures him her husband isn’t part of her plan. “He’s always part of this,” he mutters, sounding exactly like the kind of person who will escape prison just to take a shot at his antagonist.
Back in the present, Matt wakes in the hospital. First he misidentifies Heather as Karen, which she is NOT happy about. Then he tries to explain that Vanessa was behind Foggy’s death. Both Heather and Matt’s other visitor, Kirsten, think he’s delusional.
Meanwhile, in Gracie Mansion, Wilson is still covered in Matt’s blood. Vanessa’s terrified, and starts to tell him about Dex, but of course he knows. They sit side by side and hold hands. Fisk points out that they can move billions through the new Red Hook port project. “I ran to save the city, but opportunities present themselves.”
Man, if only Matt could get a supportive girlfriend like Vanessa, ’cause back at the hospital Heather’s yelling at him that the Fisks were the ones who got shot at, implying that Bullseye couldn’t possibly have been working with them. (She’s in so far over her head she might as well be in a television show about Aquaman at this point.) Matt is tired of Heather and Kirsten not bothering to marathon the Netflix seasons like the rest of us because he finally snaps, in Old Matt voice: “I’m sorry you don’t believe me. But I’m telling the truth.” Heather leaves, and says she’ll be back after he’s “had some rest”, but I think that’s it for their relationship.
Fisk, now in a gleaming white, blood-free three-piece suit, announces that he’s going to seal the city, and unleash the Task Force, encouraging the use of deadly force against the vigilante threat that tried to kill him. Sheila tries to talk him down, but when Fisk asks her to to ferret out people who are disloyal to him, she caves and sets up Commissioner Gallo, recording his plan to escape the city and bring in outside help.
Buck is worried that Matt saving Fisk has messed up the optics, but there’s a reason the Kingpin is the Kingpin: “Imagine if the fearless lawyer from Hell’s Kitchen were to succumb to his wounds. Wounds he sustained trying to save the mayor… a dead hero is better than a live vigilante.”
And Buck is sent off to the hospital, teddy bear poking out of a shiny red gift bag, to kill Matt Murdock. He looks at his watch, preps a needle full of something, and waits for the power to go out before going into his room. Which my first thought was—you’re going to fight Matt in the DARK? Have you thought this through even a little? But then it didn’t matter because Matt’s not there, for he is risen.
And walked home, in the dark, naked under a hospital gown.
(Sidenote: Does Matt live in the New Girl building???)
He walks in and collapses on the couch, and smiles for a fraction of a second. Frank Castle’s in his kitchen.
And right away they give us the glimpse of the Odd Couple-style sitcom a lot of us want.
“You know you’re a wall-to-wall asshole. Power goes out and you got nothin’ to make a goddamn pot of coffee in this house.”
“Well, not everyone lives in a fallout shelter, Frank.”
Matt asks why Frank is even bothering, since he insisted none of this was his fight, and he says “Got a phone call; changed my mind.” So that’s Karen, obviously, but the show dances around it for another scene. The pair get one more moment that I wanted a lot more of, when both of them got real quiet and Frank asked, “Why would you take a bullet for that asshole?” and Matt, instead of snarling or yapping about Catholicism, mulls for a minute and replies “That is a good question.” And you can see the timeline where these two have a real spiky friendship, one where they can actually challenge each other and maybe even listen to each other once in a while.
But we don’t have time for that in this timeline, because Matt can hear the Task Force van pull up outside. He goes upstairs to get a suit rather than fight “with his ass hanging out”.
Once again the show does a fight scene equivalent of a Vaseline lens, by having the two fight a small army, in quick cuts, in the dark. It works, it just doesn’t have quite as much weight as I want from these sequences. I also find it hilarious that Matt yells at Frank not kill anybody, and then we watch him puncture people with a fucking grappling hook and fling them around like so many Skip Its before snapping their limbs in half. At least Frank believes in headshots.
But funny story: as soon as I saw that the cops were wearing their fake-ass Punisher logos, I said, out loud, “Oh Frank is gonna eviscerate them”—and much to my delight, he did! Literally stabs he shit out of one guy and yanks his intestines out!
The magic of Disney +, everyone.
Frank spots one of the Punisher-themed shell casings (could we get an episode about all the cops meeting up for like Arts & Crafts day where they all paint their cute little bullets together?) and shows Matt, who, once again, can smell the Punisher logo or whatever. Matt confronts Cole North about Hector Ayala, knocks him out, and yells in frustration because he wants to Murder. Frank, of course, tells him he should. When Frank goes in for the kill instead, Matt stops him by standing in the way. Frank asks “are you just taking bullets for everyone now???” and shoots a different cop out of spite, and then they both yell variations of “what is wrong with you/no what is wrong with YOU” while they shove each other.
(I don’t know, “The Flawed Couple”, maybe? Tuesday nights on ABC? Just spitballing here.)
And then Matt yells at him to shut up because there’s a grenade incoming. They both dive out the window, survive that, and the apartment blows up a whole bunch so once again Matt’s moral wheezing is rendered irrelevant.
“You’re an asshole,” Matt tells Frank.
“Yeah, I know,” Frank replies.
But enough of this witty banter, Karen’s here! Hold on tight for another tone shift!
She pulls up in a car, gets out, stands there all framed in moonlight and years of bad decisions, and goddamn if I don’t want this episode to be an hour longer just to spend more time with these three.
Matt calls shotgun.
Later, back at Frank’s UNDERGROUND LAIR, Karen stitches Matt up, Frank insists the coffee will fix anything wrong with him (good man) and the three of them bat tension around like they’re in a blood-soaked remake of Challengers. Karen points out that the file Matt needs to prove that Vanessa had a reason to kill Foggy is in their company storage space. Because of course it is. They head out, but Frank, his emotional reservoir utterly depleted after offering them each a cup of coffee, chooses to sit this one out.
Meanwhile, Daniel confronts the City Council, asks them about their loyalty, and lets them know that Mayor Kingpin has dirt on all of them, so they can either fall in line or get out. At one point Buck chimes in with a threat, and Daniel says, “Thank you, Buck” without looking at him, clearing aping his boss. And maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I don’t think Buck was happy about that—and I know Wesley would have ended that little punk for doing something like that. I’ll be interested to see if this is the first hint of division.
BB Reports shows footage of fires, fighting, and looting. (I’ll remind you that lights have been off for like an hour at this point.) Then the show gives us one of my favorite scenes of the series—a kid breaks a store window and the cops catch him. He puts his hands up, and as they shine a light on him he’s clearly a scared, un-armed teenager, not some hardened criminal. One of the two cops shoots him anyway, and when he partner gasps, “He was just a kid!” the shooter comes over and says “That’s not a kid—that’s a masked vigilante” and tugs the boy’s beanie down over his face. It looks exactly like Matt’s black mask from season one of the Netflix series.
Is Matt parkouring about Manhattan trying to help the helpless on this terrible night? He is not. He and Karen did in fact go straight to the storage space. They root through files, talk about their heart rates, hint that maybe Karen and Frank are into each other, and Matt finds a little wooden sign that says “Avocados at Law” because apparently the writers want me to feel things, too. He tries to explain the joke, it’s very sweet, and I’m glad that the show is keeping Foggy in the front of everyone’s minds. It almost makes that particular choice okay.
But back to the plot: Karen finds a deed for the Red Hook port from 1855, that apparently declared it a “free port” outside of any jurisdiction. (Who the hell signed off on that????) So what Foggy thought was a truck robbery was actually a building block to the Fisk empire, and that’s why they had him whacked. Now the Fisks’ obsession with what I know as a charming, out of the way neighborhood makes more sense because they are, in Matt’s words, “building their own city state.”
Right on cue, Frank leaves his lair and heads to the port. He puts up a very good fight, but this seems to be some sort of Task Force spawning ground, and eventually they overpower him. We cut between Frank, zip-tied to a chair, and Fisk, confronting Commissioner Gallo in an ominously plastic-sheeted room. Now, the scene with Frank we’ve seen before, when the Irish mob captured him back in the Netflix days. The interesting twist here is that these cops adore him, they stare at him like he’s a poster on their wall, but then that adoration morphs into a kind of sad glee that they get to torture him. (Wait, is FRANK our actual Christ figure, here in this finale that’s airing the week before Easter?) Fisk, meanwhile, clamps his meaty paws around Gallo’s head, and for a moment it looks like we’re getting a replay of The Mountain killing The Viper in Game of Thrones—except then they do something new. Fisk twists Gallo’s head like he’s unscrewing an especially tough pickle jar, until the top half of his skull caves in from the pressure of being turned one way, at the same moment that his jaw snaps, jutting out in the other direction.
It isn’t a thing I thought the human head could do before last night.
Fisk asks his followers if they have any questions, and unsurprisingly no one does. Everyone looks unsettled, actually, even Buck. Welcome to working for the Kingpin, you silly bastards.
Matt and Karen have just gotten to the port. If you thought they were going to swoop in and save Frank, you’re wrong—they don’t even know he’s there. The show even feints toward this, with Matt immediately telling Karen to stay hidden while he goes in, and she doesn’t even get mad—she’s exhausted. “It’s crawling with Task Force. You will not survive. Is that what you want?”
And he lies back on the rocks, under the unnaturally starry sky, and thinks about it. Rather than breaking down doors and fighting everything that comes at him and lunging after martyrdom, he actually lies there and thinks. Which is when I realized we weren’t getting the usual kind of finale here. He decides not to go in. He tells Karen that they can beat Fisk, and that they have to take their City back, but that they need an army. And for the first time since she showed up, she explicitly says that she’s with him.
The next day, Fisk asks Heather to be his Commissioner of Mental Health, and she says it would be her honor. Then Mayor Kingpin addresses his constituents. He tells them “we survived together”, that Commissioner Gallo “chose to resign, to turn his back on the people of New York”, that vigilante activity is illegal, that there is now an 8pm curfew, and that “New York City is under martial law. With the rule of law restored, we can go back to our pursuit of life, liberty, happiness, together in the finest city in the world.” And finally, the line that made me pause the episode for a long minute: “Never forget. I love New York.”
For a second I was afraid to hit play. Were they ending here??? Did I want them to??? Because that would be a bold move. But no, for better and for worse, they give Matt the final word. He muses on his time in the orphanage, telling Karen that he thought God gave him a special destiny in exchange for his sight. “It was me needing to believe in that that saved me.” They talk about Foggy, and then Matt monologues about needing to resist Fisk over a series of scenes of Vanessa and Wilson walking past cages of apprehended vigilantes, including Swordsman and Frank, while Matt suits up and meets with a tiny group of people at Josie’s bar, including Cherry and Detective Angie Kim.
“This is our city, not his, and we can take it back…” The scene cuts from shots of ordinary New Yorkers, Sheila leaning against a wall in despair, Kirsten reading the Red Hook deed, BB Urich staring terrified in a Gracie Mansion hallway, Angela del Toro looking worried on the street, various militarized cops prowling street corners, Dex in an abandoned apartment.
And our final shot of the season (almost) is Daredevil, in his suit, standing in a dark room behind a broken window, as Matt says: “Resist. Rebel. Rebuild. We are the city without fear.”
So… Matt seems to be giving this incantatory speech to the tiny knot of people in Josie’s. But we don’t see him giving it, we only hear it as a voiceover. It’s possible he’s saying it to Karen. It’s possible he saying it to himself. It’s a fascinating choice because while we’ve been set up for the heroes to make a comeback in season two, season one is absolutely ending on Fisk winning.
And then it kind of messes it all up with an after-credits scene of Frank breaking a young cop’s hand, presumably to get his keys and bust out of Fisk’s prison.
Grace
There are a couple different moments through this hour that the show stops in its tracks to show us a beautiful sky over Manhattan, sky bursting with stars. And it’s TERRIFYING. You’re not supposed to see those things in New York! If I wanted to see stars I’d live in Iowa! New Yorkers barely even acknowledge the sun because we know we’re the real center of the galaxy. So I appreciated that the directors gave us these particular shots that are lovely for a split second before you realize how wrong they feel.
The music choices in this season have been stellar, but the finale especially, using “Killing Me Softly” in the attempted assassination of Matt, transitioning from hospital Muzak to the original Roberta Flack version, was really fun. And even better was Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” (not just an excellent song, but also the inspiration for my current favorite band Everything Everything’s name!) showing up as the Fisks walk hand-in-hand past vigilantes who are literally chained in cages on the floor, and Matt gives an inspiring speech (in voiceover) to a handful of people in a bar that hasn’t even re-opened yet.
I’ve never been a fan of the Punisher, but damned if I didn’t giggle with delight when he was waiting at Matt’s apartment. Something about his framing on he show works for me—I think it’s that the show seems to know how over-the-top he is. So when he’s shooting people and Matt’s freaking out, and then their moral argument devolves into them shoving each other like little boys on a playground, it allows a tiny bit of dark humor into all the dour manpain. I genuinely felt things when he faced off with the Task Force at the port.
I didn’t think we’d ever top Fisk’s execution by car door, but what he does to Commissioner Gallo’s head, with his bare hands, is pretty epic. I love that all of his henchpeople go from being smug to being shocked and nauseated.
I really love that Buck seems to be not completely happy about things, and that Daniel is the happiest we’ve ever seen him.
Having Karen back makes me happy in a way I can’t put into words. The chemistry between Woll, Cox, and Bernthal is hilarious, and every scene between the three of them SINGS. Actually, I don’t know if I’ve made this clear: everyone in this show has done a stellar job of inhabiting characters that have gone through a ton of bumps and rewrites, and even when the episodes haven’t been as strong as I might like, the acting has been amazing.
Retribution
This might be my starry-eyed love of my City, but I’ve been here through a couple blackouts, along with plenty of other crises, and I don’t buy that we’d descend into a dystopian hellscape that fast. In my experience when the lights go out like that, the restaurants open their refrigerators and give their food away before it spoils, and people gather around bonfires in the closest park to party. But I guess this New York is in a different timeline than ours—worse in some ways, and better in others.
I wish this last episode of Daredevil had more Daredevil in it? Or at least Matt Murdock. I know the writers had a lot to wrap up, but I ended up feeling like I spent a lot more time with the Fisks and the Punisher than with my beloved Devil Formerly Of Hell’s Kitchen.
Fiorello’s Desk
Mayor Kingpin! He sets the Task Force loose, he creates an enemies list and commences to the digging of dirt, he’s letting that little rat Daniel run amok, he has Sheila and BB under his thumb (at least for now), he’s accepted the Commissioner’s uh, resignation, he’s won Heather’s loyalty away from Matt, and he’s managed to capture a bunch of people he calls vigilantes.
How’s Lent Going, Matty?
He ends the episode meeting people in the suit, so there’s that.
Here he builds on his previous self-mythologization by saying that he thinks God gave him special abilities in exchange for taking his sight—which sounds dangerously close to something a Protestant might say, so let’s hope Sister Maggie’s in season two.
But if you don’t mind me creeping closer to seriousness: I was pleased that the show gave this moment to Matt and Karen, where he talks about believing that a sense of purpose and a mask could save him, only to learn that it was his people that did that. And Karen insisting that Foggy believed in him, in Matt—not Daredevil’s special destiny—and that he knew him.
“That’s wrath, that’s mercy, that’s the dark and the light. He knew all of it. He knew you. I do, too.”
And it’s an elegant sleight of hand to take all of Matt’s tortured God drama and redirect it into his grief over Foggy, and a reassurance that no matter how lost Matt thinks he is, they’ve both always loved him. And to go from that, into Matt meeting with what I assume is the beginning of a resistance group at Josie’s, was really a nice note to end on.
Quotes!
“On your way out, could you send in our friend from Con Ed.”
—Wilson Fisk, with the most ominous line in the entire series.
“Well get through this. The City always does.”
—Commissioner Gallo, whom I desperately want to believe.
“You’ve been prettier.”
—Karen to Matt, stitching him up.
“Nothing in this world a good cup of coffee cant fix. Want a cup? How ‘bout you, Red, you want some coffee?”
—Frank offers five-star hospitality to Karen and Matt.
“You got oat milk?”
—Matt responds in the best possible way. (GET A ROOM YOU TWO.)
“Stay safe.”
—Frank, only after he’s sure Karen’s out of earshot. Matt totally heard that, though.
“I heard his heart when he saw you.”
“Adrenaline I’m sure… you heard mine when I saw you.”
“Yeah. Adrenaline, I’m sure.”
—Matt and Karen talking about the complicated threads between the two of them and Frank.
“It’s not dark—it’s like a thousand suns.”
—Matt on how he “sees”.
Closing Argument
I am of two minds. I expected, even if not the defeat of Fisk (that seemed impossible) at least the “breaking into the port like Kool-Aid Man and improbably rescuing Frank” ending. Instead we get fully 20 minutes of heroes chained in literal cages on a basement floor. We get Vanessa grinning psychotically into Wilson’s face as they drink champagne in the murder basement. We get Sheila and Heather aligning with a monster—one knowingly in order to survive, one seemingly oblivious to just how bad things are. We get Matt admitting defeat, if only briefly. I think it’s a bold way to end the season.
HOWEVER. It does also end us on a whimper rather than a bang, as far as action goes. And logistically, why the hell is the rest of the country allowing this to happen? Couldn’t She-Hulk just pop over to visit her FWB and snap Fisk like a twig? Isn’t Doctor Strange like, two blocks away? But I suppose that way Marvel Cinematic Madness lies.
BUT ALSO. I really love that the show decided to go somber, and show us what an actual resistance looks like at first—just a few terrified people hiding out, with no idea whether or not they’re be able to overthrow the Big Evil, muttering hopeful platitudes to themselves to drum up courage. (Hahahahahaha everything’s fine.)
This sets us up for a season two where Karen is back, where Angie Kim gets more to do, where Kirsten has to pick a side, and where Heather’s intimate knowledge of Matt could be a problem. Where BB Urich is a double agent, posting propaganda by day, and in incredible danger at all times. Where Daniel and Buck are fighting for the #2 spot. Will Dex be an agent of chaos? Or is he going to get a redemption arc of a kind, and ally with Matt and Karen against the Fisks? And Matt? Matt admits that he was lost after Foggy’s death. This is a neat way to explain how clunky some of the season has felt, but I hope that they can move our hero fully into the center of his own show next season, rather than letting Fisk and Frank get more of the spotlight.
Doctor Strange doesn’t get involved with non-supernatural crises, and She-Hulk’s too genre-savvy to mess up another hero’s dark storyline with an unwanted crossover. But I was kind of hoping that the audience at Daredevil’s resistance meeting might include Ms. Marvel. And I keep wondering where Spider-Man and Kate Bishop are through all this.
This was an astonishingly timely allegory, enough that I’m surprised it even got on the air in the current climate. I mean, it ended with a literal call to rise up and resist an oppressive leader. Still, I had a number of issues with it. I can’t believe that Matt could be anywhere near this physically active just hours after being shot in the shoulder. And I will never understand why graphic on-camera violence is considered a desirable thing. I couldn’t look away fast enough when that happened to Gallo, and even just the tiny glimpse I got nauseates me to think about.
The free port thing has precedent. I’ve heard about storage facilities on the grounds of airports and sea ports that are technically not in US jurisdiction because they’re located between the point of arrival and the customs check facilities, so as long as people don’t bring things through customs but leave them there in storage, they’re not subject to customs fees or inspections or taxes, so people use them as tax havens or way stations for smuggled goods or the like. Wikipedia says Red Hook was once a prosperous shipping port, so it’s plausible that it could’ve had free port status, at least on Earth-616.
Well, if She-Hulk and Dr strange are out, how about Jessica Jones (she’ in Hell’s Kitchen, after all) and, maybe, Luke Cage? (nah; theyre not going to intrude on someone else’s vendetta)
<snerk>
Yeah, I thought they were just going to go with a sound effect to imply what happened to Gallo, but nope. They obviously want to earn that TV-MA rating. It was pretty surprising to see on a Disney+ show, even after they’ve embraced more mature content.
Back in the ’80s, mature content meant nudity and sex. There was graphic violence in some genres, but it was often fairly restrained. These days, graphic violence is all over the place but nudity is comparatively rare. What is up with a society that considers a mutilated body less obscene than an unclothed one?
I mean, granted, to some extent the difference is probably that the gore is fake while nudity is real, and there’s more sensitivity to performers’ right to decline nude scenes than there used to be. But that doesn’t explain why it extends even to animated shows. Harley Quinn, for example, has constant graphic gore and profanity, but its nude scenes are posterized, which makes no sense. Why censor it when they’re already TV-MA?
Hey, you’re preaching to the choir. I’m getting old enough that remembrances of my childhood are not as sharp as they once were, but I can still recall seeing both explicit nudity and graphic violence on cable television for the first time, and I know which one I found more disturbing.
Same here. I was 7 when Roger Rabbit came out and I had zero issues with Jessica Rabbit’s generous figure. 3 years later I was traumatized by T2’s nuclear nightmare scene.
The Matt/Karen/Frank love triangle dynamic was certainly a delight. Not only it feels like a hypothetical Netflix-era Daredevil season 4/Punisher season 3 crossover of sorts, but you can tell the actors haven’t lost their take on the characters. These smaller moments shine (and it almost compensates for the loss of Foggy).
I’m still a little baffled as to how two episodes ago we had a Fisk set piece with him trying to win the affection of the rich elite to then have this reveal that he’s been quietly arranging to have this non-NY rogue state in the middle of the city. I feel as if the show sometimes isn’t sure whether it wants to present Fisk as this fish out of water inept mayor or the criminal mastermind. I feel part of that is that I’m never sure whether Fisk is telling the truth or not. That’s the inherent issue in watching a sociopath’s arc.
And then we have NYC under martial law. Yeah, it brings up the big elephant in the room, or rather the big Spider. We’re getting Spider 4 in theatres next year, and it pretty much has to address that new plot development. Peter Parker is the friendly neighborhood superhero who by definition has to be involved with whatever happens next, and he has just become enemy number 1 to the Fisk administration alongside Matt, Frank and all the yet-to-be-seen Defenders lurking in the background. At the very least his predicament warrants a voiceover, and some variation of an act 1 situation where he’s on the run from the police.
Red Hook (within the series) isn’t a “non-NY rogue state,” it’s a free-trade zone where the Fisks could conduct their business unfettered by customs fees, inspections, and taxes. A state is a government; this is a place to do business where government can’t reach.
As for being in the middle of the city, yes and no; Red Hook is on the Brooklyn coast of New York Harbor, so it’s technically surrounded by boroughs of NYC on three sides (Manhattan northeast, Brooklyn south and east, Staten Island southwest), but it’s functionally on the edge of the city. Free-trade zones, by their nature, are located at borders, frontiers, and air or sea ports.
About getting other heroes involved, this is where you have to have a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief when dealing with the MCU.. This dates back to Iron Man 3 which follows a few months after events The Avengers where Tony Stark is trying to bring down the bad guys and his main ally is a 12 year old boy he just happens to run into in the middle of nowhere.. now if this were real at that point in the time line he would have of course be on the phone to Nick Fury or Steve Rogers.. but in real life the budget is not stretching to Sam Jackson and Chris Evans .. similarly here we are not getting Tom Holland swinging in for a cameo.. (Sony right’s notwithstanding)
On the episode itself I didn’t think it quite held together as well as episode 8 from last week however the high point was the fight in Matts Apartment where Daredevil and Punisher take down the task force in their own unique ways, Matt hurting and knocking out people and Frank Brutally killing anyone who crosses his path. Karen also being back and Fisk ripping the head apart of the commissioner also stand out.
Weakness’s.. the rather soft capture of Punisher by the task force, Matt’s psychiatrist girl friend still making no impression at all and the disappointing post credit scene.
This episode 8/10
The Whole season also a solid 8/10 The way the show runners rescued the show after taking over half way into filming has to be applauded and gives me real anticipation for season 2 where they have a real uninterrupted run at it.
I’m not expecting massive superhero crossovers from one production to the next – budget issues, scheduling or otherwise. But Fisk just declared martial law. At the very least, if the next Spider-Man film still takes place in NYC, they have to acknowledge that situation: patrols, curfews, police clamping down on the population. It has to be a part of the movie somehow.
Only if we assume the shows and movies take place in the same chronological order as their releases, which isn’t necessarily the case. After all, ever since Endgame, the MCU has been several years ahead of real time. So different productions have some leeway to jump around in the timeline.
I have no realistic expectation of a Tom Holland appearance, but if they were able to name-drop Ms. Marvel, they should’ve been able to at least allude to Spider-Man in some way. Like, in one of Fisk’s anti-vigilante speeches, he could’ve brought up a spider-masked vigilante who was both a threat and a menace. I mean, Matt Murdock had a cameo in the last Spidey movie, so at least they could’ve reciprocated with a name drop.
To be fair Fisk mentions a man in a Spider suit in his inauguration address.
I do believe if the eventual show runners had been in place from the beginning we may well have had at least a cameo from a defender or two .. Krysten Ritter for one has always expressed her desire to return as Jessica Jones.
Here’s hoping for season 2, then.
For a moment, when Commissioner Gallo got in the SUV and addressed the shaven-headed African-American man in the driver’s seat as “Luke,” I was hoping the guy would turn his head and turn out to be Luke Cage come to rescue him. No such luck.
I assume the writers were thinking of the 1977 blackout, because that one did get kind of ugly.
I was surprised that this was the finale, because I’d read somewhere that this season would have 18 episodes, and I clearly haven’t been paying much attention to media coverage of it since. And it does feel like half a story, but at least it ends at a natural transition point. I wasn’t crazy about how over-the-top the violence was, but otherwise I enjoyed this episode and this season as a whole. In general, I’m not the biggest fan of gritty superhero drama, but the original Daredevil series did it better than most, and this is close enough to feel like a proper continuation. Plus, at least people like me got to enjoy “With Interest.”
The Punisher disgusts me in concept and, no pun intended, execution. I read his first appearance off the spinner rack, wherein he was a mercenary hired to kill Spider-Man — under false pretenses or impressions, but still — and have never bought the majority of Marvel superheroes tolerating him in any way.
I find the balletic violence disgusting too. With the likes of Deadpool, so intentionally overboard (and not really for me), I understand it to an extent yet hate the most extreme aspects being presented as inherently exciting fight choreography to cheer over.
The Odd Couple banter from Matt and Frank is fun but it’s not right. Daredevil and Punisher might be situational allies in an isolated fight when their lives are on the line but, sorry, chilling together afterwards is a step too close to Batman laughing in The Killing Joke (depending on how close the at least slightly ambiguous ending really is to the climax of Born Again Episode 1, not that it’s proper Batman…). Maybe I should’ve expected a sympathetic portrayal here given Scardapane coming from the Netflix Punisher series, which I didn’t watch despite appreciating the rooftop sequence in Daredevil because see above.
Plus, I needed some kind of reference to how Matt physically made it back to his apartment in bare feet and a hospital nightgown, and yeah, I don’t buy Matt reading the skull logo on the bullet casing. I’m also very disappointed that we didn’t even get a thwip and wisecrack from offscreen amidst the blackout / police assault / rioting, or the Swordsman in action beyond that video clip in a past episode whether Duquesne is actually him or not, or so much as a nod to other street-level protectors who could and would step in without the aloof hand-wringing over whether it was their place like Doctor Strange might.
I get that Fisk was ensuring his task force’s loyalty by making those who stood by and watched him kill Gallo with his bare hands complicit by their silence / inactivity but although we know the real world works that way at times it was still a hell of a risky exposure of his nature.
The voiceover didn’t sound (literally, in terms of audio) like it was Matt speaking to the crowd at Josie’s verbatim, and I hope it wasn’t supposed to be since he shouldn’t be revealing his identity to them en masse for everyone’s safety. While I don’t have any problem with him letting isolated characters in when appropriate, I think White Tiger is both here — where his being taken out that way is a whole other complaint — and in the comics a proper argument for masks.
Matt and Karen / Cox and Woll together is indeed great stuff.
I agree about the Punisher, but Jon Bernthal does give a compelling performance.
“and yeah, I don’t buy Matt reading the skull logo on the bullet casing.”
Why not? The logo is etched into the casing, so even someone without radioactively augmented supersenses could probably feel it. And in the comics, Matt’s sense of touch is so heightened that he can read normal printed text with his fingers as well as Braille.
Well, I recall in the moment thinking that the symbol looked airbrushed on with a stencil, not etched, and that Matt was regarding it as if with sight. His bioelectric (?) “radar” sense isn’t that granular. Of course, I could be misremembering or mistaken.
Many excellent points!
where are the helpers?
Current relevance
yes, my cohort felt that there was a strong allegory for ‘young men being radicalized online’
bullet wounded ninja
i know, right? Muscle fibres were severed by a bullet! Blood loss and anesthesia! Some ninja moves are not going to work right immediately afterwards! Season 1 DD did a better job of showing Matt being tired and injured.
Gallo
I’d read that Kingpin did this in the comics (more or less). As soon as Fisk put his hands on Gallo’s head, I was looking away. Glad I did. IDK why it seems worse to me than Castle eviscerating a guy, but it does.
‘Free state’ of Red Hook
OK, I’m going to grant this deus ex machina. I think it’s an excellent law-based reason for next season’s conflict.
As with most episodes, this was good, but not quite there. Partly because some things were unbelievably even within the comic universe (where vigilantes have supernatural healing powers), like
Nobody, especially not Matt’s girlfriend notes that his apartment blew up? After he said, that Fisk is evil?
And Fisk knew all those vigilantes? And just captures them, instead of shooting them (like White tiger or literally a random kid)? Why? Frank I can understand, hats like a trophy and the cops love him, but the rest? I wonder who all those people are…
(As an offside: The guard taking FranknCastles hand was probably the stupidest move this season…. I expected Frank to have tracker or something, not improvise his way out. He came better prepared in similar situations in season 2 and his own season 1)
Good opportunity to establish new series, especially the defenders though. Here’s hope for Colleen Wing!
My favorite episode was With interest though. Not sure what this says about the re-writes