Full spoilers follow for Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episode 4, which is streaming on Disney+ now.
In my season premiere review of Born Again, I joked about Daredevil adding the DD logo to his costume this season to increase his brand awareness, but hey, maybe that was the case. Because look at Bullseye too! Not only is he also finally wearing his comic book-based target logo on his costume this season, but he’s leaving it as a calling card on knives and doorways.
What a great opening sequence, showing an average morning for Dex these days, complete with a delicious milkshake, as it quickly escalates when he purposely lures AVTF agents to the diner just to wipe them out. Bullseye’s skillset is innately cinematic and visually cool, and right now at least he’s actually going out of his way to not kill innocent people, which is a new development. Wilson Bethel’s delivery of, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m one of the good guys” to that one guy he called out for sneaking his dog into the diner was perfect, mixing Dex’s newfound approach with him still feeling incredibly dangerous and unhinged, despite his would-be comforting words.
The eventual explanation for Bullseye’s change of heart is a bit messy, but acceptable because Bullseye himself is so messy. Dex basically told Matt that he felt like he had to take Vanessa up on her offer to free him from the mental institution and then make good on their deal, which included killing Foggy… but now he wants to balance the scales by killing Fisk for Matt. I guess Bullseye began to better himself a bit while locked up, but only in a “will try to aim my murdering the right way, except when I owe someone for something” way? Okay, I can buy that. Classic Dex!
On the downside, come on with Jack/Swordsman just peacing out like that! Even if there was a scheduling issue with Tony Dalton or other offscreen reason to need to write him off, it feels very forced and unbelievable to see Jack insinuate he won’t be coming back to help Daredevil anytime soon without a better explanation than we got. Go get your shower and some rest, dude, sure, but you of all people have seen firsthand how bad things are under Fisk! With Jessica Jones still not making her return appearance yet, it is frustrating to have Matt’s first potential fellow ongoing vigilante ally against Fisk leave so quickly – and no, Angela’s still not interesting enough to make up for that, even as she begins White Tiger-ing.
Governor McCaffrey’s scene with Vanessa felt a bit wonky, as far as something completely believable that she might go for at this point, though the idea of it was also interesting as she told Vanessa she wanted her to help temper Fisk’s darker impulses. Of course, it also feels like this conversation might go nowhere and could have been skipped altogether based on how the episode ends…
That ending included Fisk’s charity boxing fight going exactly how you might expect in terms of Fisk’s temperament towards his opponent. Vincent D’Onofrio is such a wonderfully intimidating presence as Fisk, perfectly embodying the animalistic rage the character can so easily let out when he feels provoked, which was the case here.
Of course then Bullseye showed up and things got even more chaotic. It’s perhaps a bit predictable, on a Shakespearean tragedy level, that Vanessa might eventually die, given how she’s been portrayed as the only person in Fisk’s life he’s able to show such love for – and the tantalizingly scary concept of what losing her would do to him. But it played out in an exciting manner, with the added touch of her being pierced through the forehead by a shard of glass after Fisk shattered that ornament Bullseye threw at her. Which means Fisk kinda-sorta has some blame he could torment himself with, since if he’d deflected or blocked the ornament just a bit differently, she might not have been hit at all.
If this is truly the end of Vanessa, she will be missed. Once the character came back in Daredevil’s third season, it was fascinating to see how she fully embraced the life of crime Fisk brought her into, with D’Onofrio and Ayelet Zurer bringing just the right twisted chemistry to their interplay. This season of Born Again did slightly backtrack their dynamic a bit, yet her scenes still provided Kingpin with a different kind of energy than the norm, adding a strong element to the series.
It’s been standing out in Season 2 that showrunner Dario Scardapane and Born Again’s writers are happily incorporating far more of the Netflix Daredevil show’s history than the first season. That makes sense given that before Scardapane overhauled Season 1, it originally had no explicit ties to the old series beyond Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio as Matt and Fisk, with even Karen, Foggy and Bullseye only added later. On this front, it was nice to see Fogwell’s Gym again this week, but come on, would a venue that small really be used for a high profile charity boxing match of this sort? Daniel was bragging about having great seats in a place that doesn’t appear to have any bad seats!
Those ties to Season 1 this week also included some quick flashback footage from the Netflix series of Matt as a kid, and it was interesting but appreciated to see it was allowed to be included in its original aspect ratio, rather than trying to crop it to match the different framing of Born Again.
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