Huh. Given how much flack I give Marvel for always falling back on the same old tropes, I guess I should applaud a finale that attempts to go in an entirely different direction instead, delivering a classic shoot-’em-up laser fest finale…but only briefly and in service of a much weirder, wilder endpoint. But a successful structural departure comes down to execution more than intention. And given how odd (and unfinished!) that execution feels here, it’s honestly hard to know what to make of “The Past is the Past.”

It's also hilarious that the much-discussed Mephisto (Sacha Baron Cohen) finally makes his official MCU debut four years after all that WandaVision speculation and it’s barely even made a cultural blip. When these Marvel Disney+ shows first debuted, they felt like appointment viewing. Now I’m not sure how many people are actually even watching Ironheart, especially given how Disney has all but buried it with this odd release schedule. And the lack of clarity on what the MCU plans to do with Riri moving forward also colors how I’m viewing this finale.

If I knew that Riri’s story would be continuing on somewhere, I might be more intrigued by the choice to end this season with her making the “wrong” decision—giving into Mephisto’s devilish temptations rather than heroically rejecting them. But, as is, it’s hard to know what to make of that choice. Is Ironheart meant to be an eerie, self-contained Twilight Zone-esque fable about a traumatized young woman who started and ended this season making decisions with little consideration for how they affect other people? Is this a low point Riri will have to overcome on her path to true heroism? Or does the show think bringing Natalie back from the dead is the heroic move of a future MCU superhero?

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Before Marvel decided that its Disney+ TV shows should function like actual TV shows, there was a pretty clear pattern to these six-episode miniseries: a strong opening, a messy middle act, a phenomenal penultimate episode that suddenly feels like you’re watching a show with actual intent, and then a lackluster finale that prioritizes bombastic action over satisfying storytelling. We’ll have to wait and see if Ironheart sticks with that last beat for its finale, but, for now, it’s pretty much following that template to a tee.

“Karma’s a Glitch” is easily the best episode of the season yet, with strong character work, well-choreographed close-quarters fights, and some of the best CGI Marvel has delivered since the pandemic. If it had come at the end of a 13-episode season that gave all its various storylines and characters room to breathe, I would be full-on ecstatic. But coming at the end of a rushed, overstuffed miniseries it’s a little harder to parse. It’s excit…

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Watching these six-episode Disney+ Marvel shows sometimes feels like watching an outline for a series that could have been much more powerful with more room to breathe. And I really felt that with “Bad Magic.” On paper, I like the idea of an episode that slows things down for more character scenes and thematic explorations. But, in practice, I found myself struggling to completely care about everything that happens here.

That goes back to a premiere that didn’t do the legwork it needed to introduce its leading lady. Because Ironheart is building on Riri’s wild adventure in Wakanda Forever while thrusting her into a new wild adventure with Hood’s crime gang, I never quite got a grasp on who she is at her baseline. So now that the show is having her grapple with self-doubt and identity issues, it’s hard to understand the contrast between who Riri used to be and the person she’s become. The best insight we get is Xavier calling her a Mr. Spock who hide…

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Since this episode starts by spelling out the show’s title in dollar bills, let’s talk about money for a second. I mentioned this in one of the Stray Observations on my previous review, but there’s an odd disconnect to the financial reality of our leading lady. As far as I can tell, Riri got a full ride to MIT at 15. (At the very least, she spent four years there without working towards graduating, which implies she wasn’t stressed about tuition.) Then she and her peers got a no-questions-asked grant from Tony Stark, which she used to fund the creation of her iron suit. Then—seemingly out of convenience more than anything else—she started a cheating side hustle to fund the rest of her projects, like creating an AI inspired by Shuri’s Griot system. And then after getting kicked out of MIT, she immediately turned to a life of high-level crime to keep funding her work.

Ironheart clearly wants to juxtapose Tony’s born-into-privilege story with the groun…

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While there’s an overall house style to Marvel’s Disney+ shows, they have generally been better at offering actual tonal variations than the big screen outings do. WandaVision was a trippy sitcom riff, Loki was Douglas Adams meets Doctor Who, Hawkeye was a Chris Columbus Christmas romp, and Ms. Marvel was like a John Hughes teen coming-of-age story. After a bit of a soft launch in the premiere, Ironheart finds its own tone in this second episode. And that tone is a supremely corny ’90s genre show—like one of those Star Trek: Voyager episodes where they time traveled back to Earth and had to learn to fit in.

While I suspect that corniness might be off-putting to some people, I’m actually kind of digging it. Even more so than Ms. Marvel or Hawkeye (which also had some corny family friendly vibes), Ironheart reminds me of a Disney Channel Original movie like Smart House or The Cheetah Girls—one that didn’t really capture the reality of being a contemporary teenager but sort of created an alt universe with its own slang and emotional logic.

I really felt that in the scene where Riri’s mom and the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. artificial intelligence casually bond over how difficult it is to breakthrough Riri’s hardened exterior. Instead of being totally freaked out that Riri has RECREATED THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF HER DEAD BEST FRIEND, Ronnie totally takes it in stride. Though this episode features a literal tech ethicist, the point here is clearly to tell a kid-friendly emotional story, rather than a thinky adult one.

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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of Ironheart, which debuted tonight on Disney+. This review covers the first part of the three-episode premiere. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews—which will follow daily this week, then return on a daily basis for the last three episodes next week—will only be available to paid subscribers. Yearly subscriptions are 10% through 7/1.

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When Marvel first launched its grand interconnected universe experiment, it started with a simple idea. You’d meet heroes in their own solo properties and then watch them come together in big crossover events like The Avengers. Somewhere along the way, though, Marvel changed its calculus. It decided it would be better to meet future heroes in a pre-existing property and then launch their full story elsewhere. And while that gamble paid off sometimes (Black Panther and Spider-Man’s debuts in Captain America: Civil War are awfully fun), there’s a pretty big drawback to that approach too.

Take Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams—a character who was introduced three years ago in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Because we’ve already met Riri, her new solo series has to jump into her story midstream, with an opening monologue that references her “internship abroad.” But because this is the first episode of a six-episode series (three episodes drop today, but I’ll be reviewing them one at a time), we also need all the introductory worldbuilding you’d get in a traditional pilot too. In some ways it’s a problem spinoff TV shows have always dealt with. And in other ways, it feels like a conundrum unique to the MCU.

To its credit, I think this episode does a pretty decent job juggling those two conflicting demands. It’s definitely a little clunky to meet Riri in her iron-suit-wearing, MIT student status quo from Wakanda Forever only to immediately expel her, strip her of her suit, and ship her off to Chicago for a fresh start. But you can mostly wrap your head around everything in the course of this 41-minute episode. While you probably wouldn’t introduce Riri this way if the character were brand new to the MCU, the cheat just about works.

Instead, the biggest potential issue with the series revolves around Tony Stark, and I mean that in a couple of different ways. For one thing, because Riri was introduced in Wakanda Forever, it’s a little weird to now re-anchor her story around an Avenger who was only tangentially referenced in that movie as opposed to the Wakandans we saw her with. For another, Tony has been gone from the MCU since 2019’s Endgame, so suddenly returning to questions about his legacy feels a bit random now that we’ve had two whole multiverse sagas in between.

That’s probably because this series was announced in 2020 and filmed in the summer/fall of 2022, back when Tony Stark’s death felt a little more present in the MCU. The show has sat on a shelf as Marvel has rethought its TV strategy, however. And after a few months of additional photography in 2024, it’s now emerging in a less Tony-centric MCU moment. (Although maybe Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom casting makes this all relevant again, who knows.)

It doesn’t help that the MCU has already (annoyingly, in my opinion) positioned Tom Holland’s Peter Parker as Tony’s legacy protégé—right down to the Iron Man-ified Spidey suit he wore for his trio of films. True, Riri is being set up in a different way here. Though she’s inspired by Tony from afar, she has no personal connection to him or access to his resources. And she’s got a genius-level inventor’s intellect well beyond Peter’s more everyday smarts. But in a cinematic universe where so many characters already have a little Iron Man in their DNA (and their supersuits), do we need another Iron Man legacy character in the mix? Even if she did hold that mantle in the comics first?

I’m just not entirely sold on Riri’s Tony Stark fandom the way I was for Kamala Khan and Captain Marvel. It feels lacking in specificity other than her general love of inventing stuff—although we do get a scene that suggests she might just be using the world’s Iron Man obsession to get people to pay attention to her work in a way they wouldn’t without an Avengers connection. Still, it’s at least nice to see a superhero who actually struggles with money for once, since the MCU didn’t take that route with Peter Parker. (“Do you think Tony Stark would be Tony Stark if he wasn’t a billionaire?”) And the idea that Riri wants to design a suit that would shorten the response time of first responders and firefighters at least feels rooted in the specific trauma of her past

Indeed, it’s the stuff centered around Riri herself that works best for me here. That includes the fact that she’s the first MCU character from Chicago, which is a real thrill for me as Episodic Medium’s resident Windy City representative! Riri was whisked away to MIT when she was just 15 years old with a seemingly bright future ahead of her. But after four somewhat aimless years, she’s kicked out for selling completed projects to other students and returns home a much less confident 19-year-old. Thankfully, she at least has a warm South Side community to welcome her back, including her supportive mom Ronnie (Anji White), a cute boy next door named Xavier (Matthew Elam), and fun side characters like elementary school hustler Landon (Harper Anthony) and her mom’s hippie friend Madeline (Abbott Elementary’s Cree Summer).

Though Ironheart lands on a tone that’s a bit more serious that Ms. Marvel, it shares some of that show’s coming-of-age lightheartedness too. (The crash-and-burn title card felt like it would fit right into that series.) In fact, there’s more comedy here than I was expecting, and not just because Jim Rash is on hand as somehow not the Dean of MIT. Riri quickly gets connected with a misfit crew of criminals that includes comedian Eric André, Drag Race star Shea Couleé, the ever-charming Manny Montana, and some other eclectic young robbers.

So far, they’re working better for me than Anthony Ramos’ mysterious ringleader Parker Robbins a.k.a. “The Hood,” who looks like he accidentally wandered away from the LARPers on Hawkeye. It’s a fine performance, but a goofy as hell costume. While the scene where Riri has to hack a death-trap elevator as an entrance test is fun (there’s big Ocean’s Eleven vibes to the ongoing group commentary), I’m a little worried about whatever is fueling Hood’s weird tattoo procedure and mysterious locked cloak room.

Thankfully, the series has more on its plate than just high-tech hooded crime. After teasing out flashbacks to Riri’s beloved stepdad Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins) and best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross), who were killed in a drive-by shooting, “Take Me Home” ends with a real shocker of a twist. Riri’s attempts to create her own proprietary AI technology for her suit leads her to accidentally recreate a holographic version of her dead best friend—which is, like 10 percent cool and 90 percent absolutely horrifying.

As the world’s biggest Lyric Ross fan (her work on This Is Us was truly tremendous), I’m excited that means she’ll be integrated into the show in a major way. But it’s also a really wild swing that brings Ironheart closer to WandaVision territory than Ms. Marvel. That could wind up being a good thing, if the show can stick the landing. But it’s definitely the riskiest move of a premiere that otherwise plays it pretty safe.

Indeed, given this charming but kind of basic intro to the world of Ironheart, I get why Disney wanted to do a multi-episode drop to give viewers a chance to get hooked. We get a fun call back to the first Iron Man movie as Riri adds some “contingencies” to her suit-making process (his were fire extinguishers, hers are pillows and smelling salts). But when it comes to Riri charting her own path, this is (hopefully) just the beginning.

Stray observations

• Welcome to Ironheart coverage! My reviews of the next two episodes will drop daily through Thursday. Then we’ll do it all again next week, when Disney drops the final three episodes of the season in one go.

• I rewatched Wakanda Forever ahead of this series, and while it doesn’t seem like it’ll be hugely relevant plotwise, I found it much more cohesive on a second viewing so it might be worth revisiting just for that. I’d forgotten how much Thorne is actually in the movie.

• I’d also forgotten that Jim Rash previously popped up in the MCU as an MIT faculty member in Civil War. (Back when the Russo brothers were trying to get all their old Community buds into the MCU.) It’s in the scene just after Tony showily launches a new grant to fund all student projects, which is the “fellowship” that Jim the junkyard owner references.

• Not to be rude, but I’m kind of shocked Anthony Ramos is famous enough to score a “with” credit here.1

• I like when Riri delivers what could earnestly be played as an empowering line (“You want me to be small, but I refuse”) only for Dean Choi to call her out for bullshitting.

• But, like, couldn’t Riri just get a job at Stark Industries? According to Wakanda Forever, she’s the first person on Earth to invent a vibranium-detecting machine. I feel like Pepper Potts would take notice of her résumé!

Daredevil: Born Again’s premiere began by bringing back some fan favorite characters only to quickly wipe them off the board and reset the show’s status quo. Now the finale brings back our favorite faces in a more permanent way only to chuck the entire board off the table instead. “Straight to Hell” is an absolutely gonzo episode that blows up the show’s status quo in a major way—both in comparison to the original Netflix show and especially in comparison to the lighter episodic series we were sometimes watching this season.

Once upon a time, the idea of Fisk keeping a guy in a basement prison cell felt like a crazy reveal. Here he declares martial law in New York City, speeds up his plan to create a lawless city-state in the “free port” of Red Hook, and SQUISHES A MAN’S HEAD LIKE A GRAPE. I’ve been on the fence about whether this Disney+ era of the show is more violent than the original Netflix one, which, to be fair, did feature a man impaling his own head of a rusty spike. But I think Fisk’s murder of Commissioner Gallo officially tips the scales in Disney’s favor, which is a pretty wild state of affairs.

Is that what we want from a Daredevil show, though? “Straight to Hell” is such an Empire Strikes Back-style low-point cliffhanger for our heroes that it’s hard to judge it as its own thing. Whether it succeeds at what it’s trying to do will largely depend on how season two pans out. Thankfully, the show is currently in production so we shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out, which feels like a luxury in an era where shows often take years between seasons.

For now, all I can really say is that “Straight to Hell” is a somewhat jarring tonal shift that also does a surprisingly solid job tying up this season’s dangling plot threads. On the villain side of things, Dex’s assassination attempt inspires Fisk to complete his full-circle return to Kingpin mafioso—going so far as to decide that Matt would serve him better as a martyred mayor-saving lawyer than a scapegoat vigilante. (So much for gratitude.) And on the hero side, the episode’s big ace in the hole is that it brings back two of Matt’s old allies in a meaningful way after their brief appearances earlier in season. That means whether or not this episode works for you will probably hinge on how much nostalgic investment you have in Frank Castle and Karen Page—both as individuals and as a duo. And since I, in fact, have an infinite amount of investment in both of those things, a lot of that stuff worked like absolute gangbusters for me.

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Welcome to the new era of Daredevil: Born Again! After spending so much of these reviews parsing the show’s creative overhaul, I was a little worried it might all be for naught. Maybe the final two episodes of the season wouldn’t feel that different after all. But from the moment this episode opens with a spinning shot of a blue rose that eventually pulls back to reveal Dex in his prison cell, I knew we were in for something distinctive.

Writing-wise, this episode features a whole bunch of reveals, confrontations, and questions that send us into the season finale on a note of bloody intensity. And visually, Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson bring a welcome bit of cinematic flair to a show that could sometimes look just a touch pedestrian this season. Dex, for instance, gets a dramatic blue color scheme to contrast with Fisk’s white lighting and Matt’s orange/red palate. While I’m not sure whether I’ll ultimately end up preferring this version of the show to …

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Ante-penultimate episodes aren’t usually all that notable in a season of TV, but in this case Daredevil: Born Again reaches a pretty significant milestone this week. This is the final episode to feature footage from the original six episodes shot before the strikes/creative overhaul reworked this season into its current form (more on that in the Stray Observations). The rest of the season is written by new showrunner Dario Scardapane and could take the series in any number of new directions. So before we get into this rather odd and unexpectedly gruesome ending to the Muse saga, let’s take our final chance to weigh in on the highs and lows of this weird piecemeal part of the season.

To me, the biggest weakness of Daredevil: Born Again so far is that it’s really struggled to give Matt a sense of depth and interiority. Part of that could be because the show is retrofitting the intensity of Foggy’s murder into a season that didn’t originally open that way. B…

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Every season of TV brings its own reviewing quirks. With Daredevil: Born Again I’ve given myself the extra challenge of trying to suss out what happened during the show’s big creative overhaul (which I hope is fun for you guys to read about too). Initially, I assumed that Disney was dropping two episodes this week because they worked together as a two-part story. But now I see that—much like the two-episode premiere—Marvel is trying to balance out one version of the show with another, hoping to appease all fans in the process.

That starts with a really fun little self-contained bank heist story that drops the rest of the show’s supporting players to depict a crazy afternoon in the life of Matt Murdock. It doesn’t follow on naturally from last week’s episode nor does it set up any more season-long stories (other than the general idea of Matt having dinner with Kamala Khan one day). But it’s an entertaining one-off that uses Matt’s abilities in some clever ways—from actively…

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Little girls saying fuck the police. Fisk’s protege clubbing with Ben Urich’s niece. Charlie Cox wearing a slutty little Henley. This ain’t your grandma’s Daredevil. While the original Netflix Defenders universe wasn’t afraid to tackle criminal injustice and corrupt law enforcement—particularly in Luke Cage—those series also had a certain conservative belief that with good people at the top, the system could function the way it was supposed to and true justice could be served. That’s why two of Daredevil’s three seasons ended with Matt sending Fisk to prison instead of just killing him.

I’m not sure Born Again feels the same way though, and watching this hour slip into some dark (and darkly funny) new arenas makes it the most exciting episode of the season yet, even though it doesn’t feature any conventional action scenes. (It’s also the first not to feature the Kirsten/Cherry side of the show, so make of that what you will.) I’d be curious to know how mu…

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The original run of Daredevil was a character drama first and a vigilante superhero legal procedural second. When Karen and Foggy set about helping Elena Cardenas keep her apartment, we were first and foremost watching their friendship and mutual sense of respect grow. And when Matt called Claire Temple for help, we got to see how his vigilante perspective clashed with her “do no harm” philosophy, even as romance blossomed between the two. While the offices of Nelson and Murdock were sometimes a spot for plot revelations, more often than not they were a space for interpersonal drama.

It's wild how different Daredevil: Born Again feels. Even in the rewritten pilot, the show has made virtually no attempt to explore who Cherry and Kirsten are as characters nor flesh out their relationship with Matt. We know basically nothing about them other than their job descriptions and their generally cordial professional relationship with our leading man. And if you dov…

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Daredevil may be best remembered for its dark, gritty tone and violent fight scenes, but at its best the show could be really charming and funny too. In fact, one of the reasons I’m less high on season three than a lot of fans is because it lost the wry sense of humor that was so key to the show’s tone for me. Thankfully, that wry confidence is back in the second episode of Born Again, particularly in the Fisk-as-mayor side of the show. And while that lighter touch doesn’t really make sense for a series that opened with Foggy Nelson bleeding out in Karen Page’s arms, it is a nice fit for a season looking to carve out its own identity.

As I laid out in my review of the premiere, we’re now in the run of six episodes that were written and shot during the pre-creative-overhaul portion of production. (In addition to the pilot, new showrunner Dario Scardapane also wrote the final two episodes of this nine-episode season.) This script is by original head writers Matt Corman and Chris Ord, and you can easily imagine at least parts of it serving as their intro to the Born Again universe. And, I have to say, this more standalone entry point works way better for me than Scardapane scrambling to connect to the past in the previous hour.

Tonally and visually, this episode doesn’t entirely feel like the original Netflix run. But there’s something about Fisk stopping his car to order a bunch of construction workers to cut through the red tape and fill a big sinkhole that felt right to the spirit of the original. Fisk is a man who wants what he wants when he wants it—and wants to be publicly celebrated for doing it. And the idea of how that philosophy manifests now that he’s the most powerful politician in New York City is a fascinating one.

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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of Daredevil: Born Again, which debuted tonight on Disney+. This review covers the first part of the two-episode premiere. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews (including the second episode, which will go up tomorrow morning) will only be available to paid subscribers. Yearly subscriptions are 15% off through 3/15 as part of our anniversary sale.

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a funny relationship to the past. The company line is that Marvel designs its movies and shows to work equally well for casual viewers as for long-time fans, but the results are decidedly mixed. Sometimes you get an extended sequence like the one in Captain America: The Winter Solider, where Steve Rogers visits a museum exhibit about his life and the entire ethos of the first film is boiled down to a beautifully melancholy two-minutes. Other times you get a clunky moment like the one in Captain America: Brave New World where Isaiah Bradley is introduced as a forgotten Captain America who went to jail, someone jokes “Yikes, that sucks,” and the entire metaphorical/historical resonance of the character gets lost in the ether. The necessary exposition is technically there, but the emotional impact is entirely lost.

I say all that because questions about the past are at the heart of Daredevil: Born Again’s supremely messy production process. The show was originally pitched as more of a hard reboot, with original head writers Matt Corman and Chris Ord bringing back Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk for a lighter episodic legal procedural without too many connections to the original three-season Netflix series. Fisk’s wife Vanessa was recast with a different actress and supporting players like Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson and Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page weren’t set to appear at all. The original talking point was that this new series would be “a whole new thing” rather than a pseudo fourth season.

That all changed during the 2023 writer/actor strikes, however, when Marvel looked at the first six episodes that had been filmed and decided the standalone concept wasn’t working. Marvel fired Corman/Ord and the original directing team and brought in former Punisher writer Dario Scardapane as the new showrunner alongside Moon Knight’s Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead as the main directors. Their job was to rehaul the series to make it a dark and gritty direct continuation of the Netflix run, all while utilizing the footage that had already been filmed. The new team wrote three new episodes—including this premiere—and added serialized elements to bridge the gap between the original Netflix run and this Born Again era.

For fans of the original Netflix series (including myself), it felt like cause for celebration. I was especially overjoyed the new creatives were adamant about bringing back Karen and Foggy, with producer Sana Amanat calling them “the heart of the old show, as well as the heart of Matt.” The fact that Henson and Woll have been front and center during the show’s press tour seemed to indicate everyone’s favorite legal trio would officially be back in action this season. So color me disappointed (if not exactly surprised) that the actors actually only returned so that Foggy could be brutally murdered and Karen could be unceremoniously shipped off to San Francisco. (Along with her trusty purse gun, of course.)

My big question is, who is this for? As a huge fan of the original series, bringing back my favorite characters only to immediately write them off the show feels like the opposite of fan service. And I can’t even imagine what a new viewer would make of this opening, which does almost no work to establish the dynamics and histories of Matt, Foggy, Karen, or returning baddie Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter (Wilson Bethel). Technically, sure, new fans and old can probably both follow what happens here on a plot level. But, emotionally, does this resonant with anyone beyond shock value? Especially because so much of the rest of this premiere relies on Matt being surprisingly well adjusted, despite his best friend’s murder just one year ago.

To be clear, there is a lot of stuff I liked in this episode too. The filmmaking is stylish and confident, and it’s truly a blast to have Cox and D’Onofrio back in these roles again. I liked seeing a slightly sunnier Matt (at least compared to his rock-bottom in season three) and a slightly more reformed post-Echo Fisk. And I had a lot of fun watching their dynamics with new characters like Fisk’s eager young campaign staffer Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini), Matt’s new legal co-worker Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), and especially Matt’s new love interest, Queens therapist Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva).

It’s the stuff that tries to pull from the past without fully embracing the nuances of the show’s history that bothered me, and that extends to this premiere’s big showy action setpiece too. The extended fight through Josie’s bar is meant to call back to the one-shot fight scenes the original run of Daredevil was famous for. The thing is, though, those fight scenes were captivating because they combined the in-world effort of Matt fighting bad guys with the meta fun of watching effortful old-school action filmmaking techniques like hidden cuts and Texas Switches. Here, however, it’s clear that whole swathes of the fight have been rendered digitally and composited together. There are several points where I’m pretty sure we’re watching a fully animated sequence—right down to the extras scurrying away in the background.

The original run of Daredevil asked, “Isn’t it cool that we actually did this?” Born Again asks, “Isn’t it cool that we can do even more with CGI?” Perhaps comics fans who have been yearning to see Daredevil’s more acrobatic, balletic fighting style brought to life will say yes. For me, the sequence only really came alive during Matt and Dex’s tussle in the stairwell, which did call back to the more tactile fights they had in season three.

Speaking of season three: While there’s plenty of promise to the idea of Fisk as New York City’s man-of-the-people mayor (#FiskCanFixIt), I have a lot of question marks there too. Fisk spent two of Daredevil’s three seasons serving time and the series finale ended with Matt exposing even more of his crimes and sending him off to an even harsher sentence. So what happened to get us here? That Fisk would somehow worm his way out of prison and that the public would be willing to support a monstrous felon as their preferred mayoral candidate certainly rings true in our current political landscape (eerily so, in fact). But it’s weird to me that Born Again doesn’t even bring those ideas up as talking points. Why is Fisk’s criminal past being treated like neighborhood gossip, rather than documented legal fact? And why is Matt so chill that Fisk is a free man again when he worked so hard to put him behind bars in the first place?

So far Born Again seems to want to have it both ways when it comes to where and how it connects to the Netflix series, and that’s a tricky place to be as a viewer. The big Heat-esque diner reunion between Matt and Fisk literally requires nostalgia to work. Yet you also need to be able to selectively forget everything the show doesn’t want you to remember too. For instance, we’re seemingly supposed to take it at face value when Fisk says he had nothing to do with Foggy’s death. But anyone who watched season three knows he’s the one who turned Dex into a murderous assassin with a grudge against Daredevil and his friends in the first place!! I just don’t believe Matt would so easily let that go.

As a scene in isolation, I can totally enjoy the flowery language and great chemistry between Cox and D’Onofrio. But as a piece of a 10-year-long saga, it’s hard for me to ignore the emotional continuity issues. Hopefully I’ll get better at doing that as the season goes on. Daredevil is my favorite installment of the Netflix Defenders universe and I’m excited to watch a series that so clearly wants to recapture the magic of the original run. Rather than clumsily recreate the past, however, I’d love to see the rest of the series carve out its own identity this season.

Stray observations

• Welcome to your weekly coverage of Daredevil: Born Again! Former A.V. Club readers may remember that I used to “binge-review” all of these Netflix Defenders shows, and—despite this mixed review—I’m hugely excited to be back in this world again! Disney dropped two episodes today, but since there was so much to unpack in this premiere, I decided to tackle it by itself. My review of the second episode will hit your inboxes soon!

• On the one hand, watching Matt throw Dex off that roof was genuinely shocking. On the other, my dude was constantly throwing bad guys off roofs only for them to survive during the original series, so it was also kind of business as usual too.

• I guess they figured it would be too sad to have Foggy leave a family behind, but I definitely imagined that he and Marci would’ve been married with a few kids by now.

• I loved that Foggy’s funeral program (which Matt now carries around in his pocket at all times) was written in Braille. Such a lovely tribute to their friendship.

• Royce Johnson probably isn’t old enough to play a retiree, but it would’ve been fun to see Detective Brett Mahoney in the role of Matt’s retired-cop-turned-private-investigator ally. Instead, we get Clark Johnson as Cherry and some uncomfortable copaganda from his friend, Detective Angie Kim.

• Easily my favorite part of this premiere is the little man-on-the-street interviews from someone named BB Urich! Presumably she’s a relative of gone-too-soon journalist Ben Urich and I can’t wait to see how she gets woven into the season.

• Other threads for the rest of the season to pick up on: a masked vigilante named White Tiger, who we briefly see on some security footage, and a mysterious graffiti artist leaving murals throughout the city.

• The original run of Daredevil was so hyper-focused on Hell’s Kitchen, it sometimes felt like a city unto itself rather than a relatively small neighborhood in Manhattan. It’s interesting to see this series take a much more holistic approach to New York City politics, which, frankly, makes way more sense.

• I yelped with joy at the mention of Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz!

• The most high-stakes question of the season: Will my beloved Turk Barrett return for a cameo this season?!? Fingers crossed!

• I rewatched the original run of Daredevil, The Defenders, and some of The Punisher ahead of this premiere (as well as Cox/D’Onofrio’s recent appearances in Hawkeye, She-Hulk, and Echo), so if you need a refresher on anything that happened in the past, feel free to leave questions in the comments and I’ll try to answer them! I also did a bit of a live-blog over on Bluesky while I watched.

It was fascinating to watch the first half of tonight’s two-part finale knowing there was another episode in store. By all accounts, “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End” is exactly the sort of rushed special-effects-heavy bonanza Marvel’s Disney+ shows so often serve up as their finales. The episode opens with a bunch of exposition, quickly gets the Coven of Misfits through the final trial and off The Road, then jumps into a backyard battle between Agatha and Rio. It all has the feeling of a big, slightly hollow MCU finale, right down to the new costumes everyone gets. There’s a world where this show really does end with Agatha sacrificing herself to kickstart Billy’s superhero journey. Except that’s (mostly) not the story Jac Schaeffer is here to tell. Instead, Agatha ends as it began: with a whole lot of tricks up its sleeve—some for better and some for worse.

Let’s start with the good first: This season of Agatha All Along has been so engaging that it’s easy to miss the fact that we actually haven’t learned a ton about our leading lady yet. Before tonight, we knew she had a son called Nicholas Scratch and that she used to date Death. But those things are more so mysteries than meaningful character development. Her meatiest episode was her trial back in “Darkest Hour Wake Thy Power,” which also happened to be the shortest episode of the season. But the first half of “Maiden Mother Crone” finally fills us in on at least a little more of Agatha’s backstory.

In 1750—almost 60 years after killing her first coven—a pregnant Agatha goes into labor in the woods. When she looks over and spots Death, however, she knows her baby is doomed to die. But because Death is her lover, she’s able to bargain for more time with her son; allaying pain in the moment only to face years of anxiety and an even greater pain in the future. Still, what desperate parent wouldn’t make that bargain? The whole thing has the feeling of a haunting short story or a tragic Greek fable. And that’s fitting because it turns out this season has been built around a fable all along.

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As I was reviewing the first half of Agatha All Along, I couldn’t tell if I was being too hard on the show. Maybe it was unfair to compare it to the heights of WandaVision or Loki. Maybe this witchy series just wanted to be simple, old-fashioned TV with a predictable episodic structure and corny character work. Maybe I should stop complaining when the trials were too simple or the characters acted too erratic. After all, not every television show needs to strive for greatness, sometimes just being “good” is good enough.

Except it turns out my expectations for Agatha All Along were, if anything, not high enough. This back half of the season has delivered banger after banger, upending expectations, paying off fan theories in a way that feels powerful rather than cheap, and crafting character work that is truly meaningful—not in a “girlfriends chit chatting around a fire” way, but in a “let’s metaphorically contemplate the entire experience of life and death and womanhood” kind of way.

The first four episodes of Agatha All Along were good. The past two have been great. And tonight, the series delivers a truly standout hour of genre TV, one that’s edging up there towards Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Inner Light,” Lost’s “The Constant,” and Doctor Who’s “Heaven Sent” in terms of how much emotional meaning it manages to cram into its clever sci-fi mystery. (Even more impressive when you consider that it does all that in just 28 minutes.)

Befitting Lilia’s unique temporal existence, let’s start at the end. Before Lilia sacrifices herself to protect her coven, she leaves Jen with one simple sentence to sum up her life: “I loved being a witch.” It’s a line that immediately made me think of the WandaVision finale, back when Wanda said goodbye to Billy and Tommy by telling them, “Thanks for choosing me to be your mom.” Both lines are tearjerking in their simplicity, but—for as good as the WandaVision line is—it’s also part of a larger tradition of stories about powerful women who are defined by their relationship with their children (one Agatha All Along is also exploring with Agatha and Nicholas Scratch).

Lilia’s story is different. She doesn’t have kids. She isn’t married. She’s spent large swathes of her life isolating from the world. And she’s not just “centuries old” in an abstract way, like the other witches in the series; she’s also being played by an actress in her mid-70s. In other words, she’s exactly the kind of woman who can so often be rendered invisible—not just in pop culture but in the real-world too. (“Forgotten” is the word Lilia uses.) It’s why her coven is so quick to write off her temporal interjections as just the ramblings of a batty old woman.

Lilia is, at best, the kind of character we’re used to seeing as a quirky supporting player in someone else’s story—a fairy godmother to a younger heroine, so putting her at the center of a time-hopping fantasy epic is quietly revolutionary. She may be dressed as Glinda, but she’s no all-seeing, benevolent mentor. She’s a flawed, flesh and blood woman who’s still discovering things about her life and her powers right up until the very end. “Death’s Hand in Mine” argues that Lilia’s life matters not because she was someone’s mom or wife or teacher, but because she was a person in her own right. A witch who loved her craft and who died doing it. And that’s just not the kind of story I can remember many genre shows telling before.

The fact that showrunner Jac Schaeffer chose to direct this episode suggests that everyone behind the scenes recognized just how special it is too. (Her only other directing credits are the double-header premiere.) And Schaeffer delivers some of the most memorable images of the season here—from the eerie opening shot of Lilia falling through darkness to the welcome sense of calm that instantly hits whenever Lilia zaps back into her childhood divination lessons in Sicily. The sweeping score from Christophe Beck is also crucial when it comes to grounding us in Lilia’s emotional arc, even as time literally swirls around her.

Indeed, save for an opening segment with Agatha and Billy to introduce this week’s “famous pop culture witches” Tarot trial, writers Gia King & Cameron Squires anchor this episode entirely in Lilia’s perspective. That means we get a whole lot of intentionally jarring scenes where Lilia “wakes up” in a new place with someone filling her in on stuff she just said to them but that she hasn’t yet experienced herself. And while the script does some welcome handholding when it comes to revisiting all of Lilia’s random interjections from throughout the season (just what I asked for in the Stay Observations last week!), it also trusts its audience to follow along with some pretty trippy time jump stuff too.

Like the best closed loop stories, the episode eventually circles back around to fill us in on the “gaps” we missed (creating no small number of fun bootstrap paradoxes in the process). But even when we’re confused about the plot in the moment, we at least have Lilia’s linear emotional journey to anchor us. It’s a neat screenwriting trick that allows the episode to be twisty and turny, while still grounding us in an arc that’s slowly building up to Lilia’s final sacrifice.

The trial itself is also great—memorable in its “swords from the ceiling” threat and also not so obvious and easy that you’re just waiting around for the coven to figure it out. The stakes genuinely feel sky high, and the final “twist” that Lilia needs to read her own cards, rather than Billy’s, is a perfect metaphor for the way she steps into the hero role this week. Witchcraft-wise, the Tarot challenge is also way more meaningful than the vague potion and protection stuff that Jen and Alice got to do in their respective trials. And it’s a great way to work in the “Rio is Death” reveal too. I don’t know what Rio being Death means, exactly, but I get why and how Lilia figured it out and that’s enough for now.

Of course, this episode wouldn’t work as well as it does without its standout performances; mostly obviously from Patti LuPone but also from Sasheer Zamata as well. I won’t have thought of Lilia and Jen as a natural duo for the show to pair off, but their dynamic is fantastic together. Jen—the most rational, practical member of the Coven of Misfits—finally takes the time to really listen and understand Lilia’s experience, rather than merely writing it off. And part of what makes Lilia’s big sacrifice moment so moving is how emotionally Jen responds to it. Going into this episode, I don’t know if I would’ve picked Jen as “the path ahead,” but after Zamata’s quietly empathetic work here, I totally see it.

Still, this is clearly LuPone’s show and it would be hard to overpraise the work she does. A lesser actor might’ve really leaned into the over-the-top melodrama of Lilia’s big emotional journey, but LuPone never loses the edge of worldweariness that defines Lilia too—a quality she seems to share with her mentor (mother?) back in Sicily. After living years of a life where all she could see was the inevitable deaths of those she loved, it became easier for Lilia to close herself off. She resigned herself to being alone and safe and never surprised by anything, rather than truly opening herself up to new experiences. It’s only when her own death becomes inevitable that she finally starts to live again. “I was falling… I will fall,” she realizes. That’s when she can finally take to heart her mentor’s question, “What will you do with your remaining time?”

LuPone may be famous for her diva public persona, but there’s nothing diva-ish about this performance. In fact, it’s that very sense of holding back that makes Lilia’s arc so moving—particularly as she finally comes into her full power in the final moments of her life. Lilia gets her big “badass” moment when she kills the Salem Seven, but her first real hero moment is the earlier note of vulnerability when she asks Jen to join her because she’s her “sister in the craft.” Part of stepping into her power means letting other people into her life again—including some gifts/parting words of wisdom for Agatha, Billy, and Jen. Lilia may have spent centuries feeling isolated and overlooked, but after how she saves her coven here, it seems clear she’ll never be forgotten again.

Stray observations

• So Agatha is the Wicked Witch of the West, Billy is a fabulous looking Maleficent, and Lilia is Glinda the Good, but who is Jen supposed to be? The witch from Into the Woods? Or maybe the Evil Queen when she disguises herself in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

• There’s something so beautiful in the way this episode links the beginning and end of Lilia’s life together. It feels like she’d been mentally dividing her life into “before” and “after” she lost her first coven, and now she finally gets to experience a true sense of unity and closure.

• While we don’t get answers, this week’s episode confirms we are supposed to be thinking about two big questions that have been on my mind lately: Is Wanda actually dead? And is Billy simply Billy Maximoff now or is William Kaplan still a part of him too?

• We get an extended but inscrutable look from Agatha when Billy questions whether she’s actually been on The Road before.

• This episode seems to suggest that Billy lost control of his powers when he threw Lilia and Jen into the mud back in episode five, but it feels like the show is just trying to retroactively justify that cool-looking cliffhanger.

• This week’s credit’s song is Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” which is a fitting song for Lilia’s story and also potentially a nod to Evan Peters’ famous Quicksliver scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

• Choose your fighter: “You want straight answers, ask a straight lady” or “I guess I’m the queer-ent.”

As someone who’s deeply invested in the MCU but isn’t really a comics reader, I have a funny relationship with fan theorizing. I’m tuned in enough that I can usually tell you who and what is at the center of all the online speculation for any given project, but I don’t have any particular emotional connection to those theories. For instance, I’ve known for a long time that most Marvel devotees assumed Joe Locke’s Teen was actually the comic book hero Wiccan a.k.a. William Kaplan a.k.a. Billy Maximoff. But that’s not an idea that really meant anything to me because I find the emotional “how” and “why” of adaptation so much more important than the “who” and “what” of comic book lore.  

Thankfully, this week’s flashback origin story is all about filling in not only who and what Teen is, but how and why it matters emotionally too. The show may have delivered its showy comic book fan service with last week’s deliciously fun needle drop, but this week is…

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It’s always a little disconcerting to click on one of these Marvel Disney+ episodes and discover that it’s only 31 minutes long (24 minutes without credits and the previously on). My first instinct is usually to assume that corners were cut or something went wrong in the editing room. But “Darkest Hour, Wake Thy Power” proves it’s not about the length of the runtime—it’s what you do with it that matters.

In fact, these might be the most thrilling, emotionally complex 24 minutes of Agatha All Along to date, which is especially impressive when you consider that they’re more about raising questions than providing answers. While I critiqued last week’s episode for falling into a predictable trial-of-the-week pattern that I assumed the show was going to follow for the rest of the season, “Darkest Hour, Wake Thy Power” suggests Jac Schaeffer and co. have far more tricks up their sleeve than I was giving them credit for.

That starts with the fact that this…

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When it comes to genre storytelling, there’s a fine line between enjoyably playful and frustratingly random. And this episode really pushes that line as much as it can. One of the main characters is dead? Sure! The coven can randomly beam down Aubrey Plaza? Sure! They’ve got to sing a 1970s rock ballad to defeat an evil flying-monkey-demon-curse that’s been haunting Alice’s family for generations? Sure!

I read an interview with showrunner Jac Schaeffer in which she said that each of the trials/houses the Coven of Misfits encounters is supposed to represent a different era of witch pop culture—with last week embodying “ladies in their coastal grandma chic that are backstabbing and duplicitous and fighting for spots at the private school” and this week standing in for Stevie Nicks’ “white witch” era. Unfortunately, I can’t say I got any of that from the show itself. Last week felt like a Nancy Meyers pastiche, not a commentary on a Big Little Lies-es…

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After last week’s one-two punch of very different episodes threw me for a bit of loop about what kind of show Agatha All Along wanted to be in the long run, this week’s installment helps clear things up. Based on what we get here, it seems like showrunner Jac Schaeffer is aiming to make an old-fashioned weekly genre series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Charmed, where likable characters tackle episodic problems that will (hopefully) all come together into one larger storyline by the end of the season. That used to be the default way most genre shows operated, but it’s increasingly fallen out of favor these days—especially with the end of the Arrowverse over on The CW. So it’s fun to see an MCU series try to bring it back, even if the results are a tad uneven.

This week, our Coven of Misfits stumbles upon a Nancy Meyers-esque coastal home just off the Witches’ Road and face the first of five trials that will test their individual types of magic (potions, protection, green magic, divination, and whatever it is Agatha does). A poisoned bottle of wine means Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer is up first, and while the premise is simple, it leads to a nice locked-room drama that lets the show indulge in a whole new visual palate while we get to know our main characters better.

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