Review: Daredevil: Born Again, "Heaven's Half Hour" | Season 1, Episode 1

Daredevil returns to the MCU with a bold storytelling choice

Photo: Giovanni Rufino/Marvel

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.

“Why are we even talking about this? You know, he supposedly crushed a guy’s head.”

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.)

Photo: Giovanni Rufino/Marvel

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.

Photo: Marvel

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.