Full spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episode 1.
Daredevil: Born Again returns with a premiere intended to better establish the new status quo in New York following the big events in Season 1’s finale. And it’s successful on that front even though – rather than hitting the ground running – it feels like the table setting that it is.
Season 1 ended with Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) imposing his full corrupt will upon New York, with all masked vigilantes targeted by his men and martial law declared in the city. Obviously it’s purposeful to then have the second season begin with a surprise look at such shiny happy people in NYC, seemingly living their best life. But even understanding BB Urich (Genneya Walton) is making what amounts to full propaganda videos for Fisk and why – the better to protect her own investigations against him – it still feels we could get a more straightforward look at how things are going with Matt’s burgeoning resistance group from the end of Season 1.
We see Matt (Charlie Cox) in contact with Cherry (Clark Johnson) and Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) now chatting with BB (I don’t think those characters ever met in Season 1) but still, have their ranks grown significantly yet? And jokes about “Where’s Spider-Man?!” aside – along with knowing Jessica Jones shows up at some point this season – has Matt made any attempt to reach out to the other vigilantes in the city, given they’d be targets of Fisk? None of that is said.
Matt Murdock officially considered missing and possibly dead is a bit funny and also a bit semi-frustrating because, man, this version of Daredevil simply cannot go very long existing as both his everyday lawyer persona and his costumed alter ego in his full horned costume. Think about it – in Season 1 of the Netflix series, Matt was a lawyer the whole time but only got the full Daredevil costume in the back half of the season finale. In Daredevil Season 3, Matt was publicly believed dead for much of the season and he never wore the full costume. In Born Again Season 1, he was working as a lawyer again, but had given up being Daredevil (again) until around the last third of the season. And now he’s all in on Daredevil, but Matt Murdock, Attorney at Law, is once more out the window. So congratulations to 2016’s Daredevil Season 2 for the one time we got the lawyer Matt Murdock by day, Daredevil by night dynamic for the entire season! You are truly a unicorn.
That being said, Daredevil’s “new” costume looks awesome! It’s obviously supposed to be his regular costume painted black, with some red showing through underneath, which is a cool touch. And, finally, after 11 years, he has the comic book DD logo on his chest! Honestly, given they waited this long to give Matt the Double Ds (sorry, sorry, that bad joke is a must), it would have been nice to see it happen or at least learn whose suggestion it was that Matt go for a bit more branding. But regardless, it’s great to see.
Matthew Lillard is a welcome addition to Born Again, as he is to any project he shows up in. And it was a nice touch to see his CIA agent “Mr. Charles” act so relatively restrained in his first scene when he’s on the phone with a colleague versus when he burst into Fisk’s meeting with the Attorney General and was going much more Full Wacky Lillard – essentially insinuating that Mr. Charles knows the power of performance. And there’s intrigue in learning Fisk is now making deals with the CIA to help smuggle weapons, implying a whole new can of worms has been opened for the Kingpin.
Matt and Karen suddenly being a full couple works thanks to everything established in the Netflix series. We know these two have long shared an attraction and flirtation, and even toyed with becoming something more before, so it tracks that in the midst of such a tense scenario, they’re finally acting on these feelings. And given everything she’s gone through, and what the current stakes are, Karen much more actively training to fight makes a lot of sense too.
Not that it wasn’t already part of the show, but using Fisk and, by extension, his Anti-Vigilante Task Force as a parallel for our current administration and for the use of ICE is more pointed than ever here. No doubt some will bemoan superhero stories treading in such waters, but anyone familiar with comic book history knows this feels very much in line with how they’ve often operated in terms of reflecting current events, as we see the AVTF’s brutal tactics and get lines like “Task Force took him, which means nobody finds him,” or have restaurant owner Ariana (Annie Parisse) call the ever-violent Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley) a fascist to his face.
The fights on Born Again continue to be a strong element, albeit not quite reaching the very high bar of the Netflix series. There’s a slightly stylized approach here that feels like it’s embracing comic book aesthetics more, complete with some fun shots of Daredevil’s shadow looming in the opening fight on the tanker. And the final scene, as Daredevil went to rescue Cherry, was very well done, with a great added piece of tension provided by Cherry’s heart attack and how his worry for his friend led to Matt being nearly fatally distracted as he fought the AVTF. The fact that Bullseye of all people ended up saving Matt is curious, to say the least – their last encounters were Matt beating Dex up in prison and then stopping him from successfully killing Fisk – but also innately exciting to ponder what Bullseye’s angle is…
Other Thoughts From Hell’s Kitchen:
- BB’s pro-Fisk videos were given a counterpoint with a look at that “Mayor Kingpin” video with its Anonymous-style vibes. Whoever is making them is doing a decent parody of D’Onofrio as Fisk!
- Heather (Margarita Levieva) was one of the aspects of Season 1 that never fit, as she and Matt never had chemistry as a couple and some of her negative reactions to Daredevil and embrace of Fisk felt forced. So it would have perhaps been best to simply write her off. Fingers crossed she works better in her new dark side role though, as she’s changing up her psych evaluation of Jacques Duquesne (Tony Dalton) to help get him convicted. Her still being haunted by visions of Muse feels a bit extraneous at this point, but again, we’ll see how it goes.
- Speaking of Jack, more Tony Dalton is never a bad thing, and fingers crossed we get him freed and in his own full costumed look at some point this season, after the iPhone-shot glimpse from afar in Season 1.
- There were a couple of small, appreciated touches here with Matt as Daredevil to underline that sure, he’s a superhero, but he’s still human and vulnerable. This included his labored breathing when he surfaced from the tanker and the big swig of water he took upon returning home from the conflict. Often superhero stories skip over tiny things like that, but Daredevil is just like us… he gets freaking thirsty after a hard workout!
feedzy_import_tag
About the Author
