The fourth episode of Daredevil: Born Again is titled “Sic Semper Systema”, and finally, in this episode, I started to feel like I had my Daredevil back. Not just Matty, but the show in its new form finally began to gel and feel like its own thing. (Let me know if it worked for you!)
This one was directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and written by David Feige and Jesse Wigutow. The show feels solid and lived in, gave us a New York that felt a little more like New York, and, crucially, gave us some excellent comic relief.
This episode finally digs into what makes this iteration of the story interesting, to me at least—the idea that Matt is white-knuckling his way through being Respectable Lawyer Matt Murdock while DAREDEVIL claws at his brain like the addiction that it is; that Fisk is really trying to be a good mayor, and use legal means to transform his City, but all the while his own true nature waits, unchanged and unrepentant; and that we’re going to get a slightly more expansive view of New York, ordinary New Yorkers living their lives, with the kind of social justice undercurrent that was be present in the best crime shows of the ‘70s and ‘80s.
On the negative side, I haven’t wanted to eat Fiddle Faddle in years, and now I do, and my dentist is going to murder me.
A Quick Recap with Spoilers!
When Matt goes to the morgue to retrieve Hector Ayala’s things, Hector’s niece, Angela del Toro, shows up. She wants to see him, but Matt won’t let her—he knows there are things no kid should have to see.
The niece is sure the cops did it, and Matt does nothing to dissuade her.
Meanwhile, in a different kind of life, Daniel Blake is partying with BB Urich and her friend. It’s kind of adorable to watch him try to keep up. When they pour him into a cab, we get confirmation that he’s from Staten Island. Across the street, a man is being arrested surrounded by boxes of Fiddle Faddle.
Kirsten sends Matt downtown to deal with a case, and it turns out to be Fiddle Faddle man, Leroy Bradford. And here’s where the show kicks into a higher gear—but I’ll talk about that more below.
For now lets check in on the Mayor and his wife, shall we? Fisk and Vanessa are making excellent progress with their counselor, Heather Glenn. But she wants them to talk openly about the man Vanessa had a relationship with in Fisk’s absence. Vanessa, quite reasonably, says that she had no way of knowing if Fisk was coming back to her. Fisk, for his part, says that he can’t imagine a life of meaning without her, and feels betrayed that she didn’t trust him to return.
He assures both women that while in the past things might have been different, Current Fisk just talked to Adam. Unfortunately for Fisk, his “I didn’t murder your boyfriend, Vanessa” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the shirt. Heather even asks Vanessa privately if she’s sure she’s safe with her husband.
Heather also gets the best line in the episode: “Forgiveness isn’t just the highest act of love, it is the only way forward.”
Maybe that should be on a shirt.
Matt confronts Powell, and baits him to see if he’s the one who killed Hector. I’m guessing from the steadiness of the cop’s heartbeat that he did not. And then Matt gets another great line, as Powell threatens to come after him again and Matt sneers and replies, “You’d have to bring a few more than you did last time, though, wouldn’t you.”
THERE he is.
Blow your identity in a fight with a cop in front of dozens of witnesses? THERE’S the guilt-ridden, violent idiot I love.
Meanwhile, in Red Hook: Fisk is really annoyed that Sheila won’t just let him build the big nebulous public works dock project that he wants to. Why does he have to go through a council? Why do people have to vote on it? Don’t people see that he already built the model of the shopping center or whatever this thing is supposed to be, and it’s ready to go because he says it is? Life gets so confusing when you can’t just crush people’s heads in car doors! But he finally bows to protocol, and asks Sheila to start the process. Then he’s whirled through a Mayor’s typical day: schoolchildren sing to him, and then people from a cultural heritage center sing to him—he has to pretend to be really into both performances, even after he finds out one of his aides leaked information and now he’s in a scandal and everyone hates him.
Welcome to New York City politics, Wilson.
Daniel admits he was the leak, and promises that he’ll still vote for Fisk and support him from afar no matter what, and Fisk decides to keep him but warns him that if he does it again, it’ll be the last thing he ever does. Everyone probably thinks Fisk means “politically”.
He does not.
Matt goes to the site of Hector’s murder, and finds a shell casing that… smells like The Punisher, I think? Because then he goes and find Frank Castle in a random basement. Is he a superintendent, or is he hiding out? (I didn’t watch the Punisher series, maybe I missed a step here.) And we get the other really good setpiece of the episode, as the two of them yell at each other about GUILT and SERVICE and Frank tries to make Matt say Foggy’s name and Matt cries.
Just shoot this into my veins.
Fisk and Vanessa talk again, this time sitting across from each other on the shorter side of the table. Vanessa tells Fisk that Heather checked on her, and of course Fisk already realized that. They have their first real-seeming conversation since his return, and when she gently says that people change, seeming to open the door to them splitting up, he replies by saying “You’ve become something even more extraordinary”—pretty strongly implying that he wants them to stay together.
The show cuts back to Matt, coming home to a waiting Heather. The two of them seem pretty good? Except, of course, he only tells her about Bradford, not the meeting with The Punisher, and she mentions that she’s counseling a couple, but of course can’t tell him who they are.
Surely this won’t cause any problems later on.
And then.
Matt wakes up in the dark, and leaves Heather in bed to go practice on the roof. Fisk descends into a cavern, past the blood-splashed “Rabbit in a Snowstorm” to eat a massive plate of sausage a couple feet away from Adam, screaming for mercy from a barred cell.
Looks like those two darker natures are getting impatient.
Oh and then we check in with Muse, draining blood from a victim in an abandoned subway tunnel.
Grace
We get not one, but TWO renditions of the Starship classic “We Built This City”, one from a middle school chorus, and one from the Latvian Heritage Center, and watching Wilson Fisk squirm through both of them was gorgeous. I especially love that he bolted away before the kids could start their second song.
Bradford is initially treated as comic relief. Getting arrested for stealing a box of caramel corn from a bodega is a ridiculous crime, right? Especially when the guy who stole it was caught on camera, and the cashier says he did it, and he has a list of priors as long as a Dostoyevsky novel—but he still wants parole. Matt thinks it’s ridiculous, and all but openly laughs at Bradford. (To be fair, it doesn’t help that Bradford comes out of the gate making cracks about Matt being blind—but the man is also scared and in a holding cell. Matt gets to go home to his plush apartment.) In the scene that restored my faith in the show, Matt flirts and talks philosophy with prosecutor Sofija Ozola, even complimenting her Latvian heritage, and insists on the parole he’s not going to get, until he talks her down from 35 days in prison to ten, which will actually be 7, with the current day counted as time served. So Bradford is looking at a business week in a cell rather than a month. Matt comes back jubilant. Here we go! Matt’s actively arguing against harsh prison sentences! He tells Sofija they believe in redemption after all! He’s going to use his charm and his love of the common man to help people! We’re back, baby! And then he goes back to Bradford with the settlement, and the man about bites his head off.
Here’s where the scene turns. See, Bradford wanted parole because last time he was in prison he missed an appointment to keep his benefits. He lost his food stamps. He hasn’t been able to get them back, so he’s been haunting dumpsters behind restaurants to keep himself fed. For once he wanted something nice, for dessert, like a regular person who wasn’t barely clinging to the bottom rung of society. And what does he go for? FIDDLE FADDLE. Not a slice of cake or a Pepperidge Farm or the fancy $4 dollar doughnuts I regularly buy. FIDDLE FADDLE. And of course he gets caught, and now he’s not just set back another business week and another line on his rap sheet—these couple days in prison have pushed him even further out of a society that clearly doesn’t want him to survive.
“They’re willing to spend five times more to lock me up than to feed me,” Bradley says, and he’s right. Matt can be as charming as he wants but he’s not going to change that.
Matt, being a decent person, apologizes. But under the current system he’s done all he can to help Bradford.
The other great setpiece is the one between Matt and Frank Castle. Frank insists he had nothing to do with Hector’s death, and refers to the vigilantes inspired by him as “fanboys”, and shrugs off Matt’s reply that a lot of those fanboys are cops. Gosh I hope the show keeps this up. The two men bat ideas of service and guilt around, and after a lot of yelling, Frank needles Matt about Bullseye being in prison instead of dead.
“HE GOT LIFE!” Matt screams.
“How ‘bout ol’ Foggy? He get life?” Frank asks.
Now this could have been a killing blow, but here’s where I think the writers took the scene to a better level. Because Matt doesn’t just break down, or yell back, or anything like that. Instead, he replies with: “He was the kindest, purest soul I ever met. and guys like you, and me? We could work a lifetime and never measure up to his decency.”
And Frank shuts up. Because he agrees, I think, and because Matt has finally lumped the two of them together instead of holding his own form of vigilante justice above Punisher’s, but mostly because Matt set someone like Foggy, who was actually trying to use the system to make it better rather than running around vigilante-ing at night, as being a fundamentally better person than one whole will resort to violence and secrecy.
The show holds Foggy’s decency up as the thing to be admired and emulated. It’s that decency that outshines all of Matt’s work as Daredevil, and Frank’s brutality—whether sanctioned by the government or not—and I think it might have made the point clearer in this one scene than most of Daredevil’s second season.
Lou Taylor Pucci only gets a few seconds of screentime as Adam, but he uses them well.
I love Muse’s Francis Bacon-esque paintings? I hope we we get to see Vanessa assess them at some point this season.
Retribution
I think my only slight ding on this episode is that the two brief scenes of Muse felt kind of random? Like a different show was dropping in for a visit. But then maybe that’s how it’s supposed to feel, given that Muse is basically a terrifying Hannibal-esque addition to the universe. Maybe those scenes should feel like they don’t belong.
Fiorello’s Desk
When they asked what people thought of when they thought about Red Hook, I said “IKEA!” out loud, in my empty apartment.
You see, in our timeline’s version of New York City, there’s a giant, chaotic, fabulous IKEA right on the water, an excellent place to spend a Friday evening. There are also some fabulous bars and art centers, a massive community garden, and lots of homes.
I’m assuming that the show’s version of Red Hook is a bit seedier.
I’m almost sad for Fisk that he can’t just barrel through all the red tape—the poor man hasn’t learned how to be corrupt as a politician yet, only as a terrifying crime boss. He shouldn’t have to know what a feasibility study is! Leave him alone!
How’s Lent Going, Matty?
Somebody sure likes sitting on a roof in the light of the rising sun, fondling a broken devil horn.
Somebody also brings up the idea of redemption when talking a client’s prison sentence down.
Quotes!
“No one’s going to do anything about it, cause he was just Hector from the Heights and they’re the fucking cops!”
—Angela del Toro, making a solid point about… everything.
Discussing Adam In Heather Glenn’s Office:
Vanessa: “He wasn’t part of my husband’s world.”
Heather: “What world is that? Politics?”
Fisk and Vanessa in unison: “Business.”
“Forgiveness isn’t just the highest act of love, it is the only way forward.”
—Heather Glenn, most likely summing up the theme of this season.
“Could it have been a Skrull?”
—Leroy Bradford, making sure everyone remembers there’s a Cinematic Universe out there.
“See, I knew you believed in redemption!”
—Oh, Matty.
“Do I care about Latvian heritage?”
—Oh, Wilson.
“How you been? Good?”
“Peachy.”
—Matt Murdock and Frank Castle dispense with the pleasantries.
Matt and Heather discussing Leroy Bradford’s case:
Matt: “A client’s serving a week at Rikers for stealing a bag of caramel corn.
Heather: “Seems a bit excessive.”
Matt: “You ever feel like your pushing a rock up a hill? And there’s a bunch of people on the other side pushing it back?”
Closing Argument
Is this version of Daredevil finally finding it’s feet? I hope so. The first few hours of the show have felt like a simulacrum of something a lot of people loved. This hour felt much more lived in, while still obviously drawing from the other seasons of the show, and the MCU lore as a whole.
And for real—that one scene of Matt arguing about carceral ethics with a character we’d never met before, but who instantaneously felt real and alive, with her own job and story, rolling her eyes at Matt while also enjoying his flirtation, the two of them obviously having a history expressed in body language—it felt like watching a real television show, not a washed-out Disney+ content dump.
It also felt like Matt was actually a lawyer—a plus!
And then the scene between Matt and Frank was even better. They put their whole history into that scene. Matt crying his eyes out, but refusing to take Frank’s bait (mostly), and coming down finally on both the idea of Foggy’s decency, and the belief that he can’t reach it, felt like our hero admitting something to himself about his own nature.
Now to see if the rest of the season proves him wrong, and he finds his own decency in his own way.
