The premiere and the second episode definitely felt a little bit Frankenstein-esque, but I'm decently happy with the product. Cox and D'Onofrio are a joy to watch interact, as always, and I think the set-up we've gotten is promising. I completely agree re:hallway fight, the CGI was honestly pretty distracting considering how visceral and tactile the fight choreography/cinematography usually is in Daredevil. Definitely think the best part was the one in the flickering light hallway.
As for Foggy's death, I really hope we're getting a fake-out, and they borrow from Brubaker's run. We didn't see the funeral nor a corpse in the morgue (delusional I know), so I'm hoping they just got forced into this corner with the pre-overhaul footage and are gonna have Foggy be in witness protection due to the threat on his life for the season, then bring the man and Karen back in Season 2.
Bethel was incredible for the brief chunk he was in, so excited to see more of him over the next two seasons as well. The show is definitely not at Netflix Daredevil yet, but I can feel the creative team flexing and pulling to get this show oriented for a fresh story. I'm definitely looking forward to what more they cook up this season.
Foggy being in hiding doesn't track with Karen's appearance later in the episode. Bullseye tried to kill her to so if he is in witness protection she should also be. Furthermore she wouldn't be coming back "for Foggy" if she were also being protected. Finally when Karen and Matt are talking outside of the court room it sounds like he is dead.
I suppose you could could work it out that the feds let everyone think he was dead when they put him into WP including Karen and Matt, but that still leaves the problem of Karen not being in protection.
Also with Bullseye being sent to prison Foggy should have come out of protection (unless Bullseye was found to be working for someone else and they haven't figured out who yet).
Fingers crossed for Turk and Mahoney both! Probably no chance of the bigger Defenders names, but you never know. I hope we at least get some fun references to them at some point.
I think that a Daredevil show *could* work without Karen and Foggy, and if that's the story you want to tell, this was a decent way to write those characters out (other than Dex's attack not really having a clear motivation). But outside of actor availability / needing to use the footage already filmed without them, I'm not really seeing the benefit here yet. It feels like the show needlessly tying one hand behind its back to cut them both loose so soon.
The Fisk/Trump parallels are definitely the element of this new series that I'm most interested in seeing unfold. Well, that and the slim chance of a She-Hulk cameo, I suppose.
Reminds of Kung Fu Panda 4's late addition of the Furious Five and prior series villains (confirmed via Reddit AMA with crew member). It's to the point where you have to wonder, would it better to just not have them there at all then merely toss them in and spam them all over the marketing.
Happy to read more of your coverage! I personally found Iron Fist to be the best Defenders series and really enjoyed your take on it.
Imo, the idea of the S4 premiere was to bridge the original show and the reboot. Like, the new crew had to work backwards and figure out - why aren't Karen and Foggy there anymore? What justifies this? Well, what if Foggy died and this broke up NMP?
Regarding cont-ty: I find it hard to believe that after all the stuff Fisk pulled with the FBI that he'd be allowed to run for office. But that's more of a 'fundamental conceit' issue really.
"My big question is, who is this for?" Me apparently i.e. someone who didn't love the Netflix series and was looking for something more in line with the Disney Plus prerequisite shows like Hawkeye and She-Hulk (and presumably Echo which I haven't seen). Also I'm someone who finds Kingpin, and especially the Vincent D'Onofrio portrayal of Kingpin, to be far more interesting than Charlie Cox or Matt Murdock or Daredevil. So I was very happy to see another Daredevil show mostly based around Kingpin. In fact I would've been even more likely to watch the show if it was called "Kingpin" or "Fisk" or something and was explicitly about Kingpin as the protagonist in a sort of Disney Plus answer to the Penguin show on HBO. In addition I've always found Foggy annoying as a character so having him there at the beginning purely to establish that this is the same universe as the Netflix series but then having the guts to kill him was perfect for me.
Ha! Honestly, I love when a show winds up feeling like it was made just for me (I had that with a good chunk of Loki S2), so I'm glad you get to have that experience with this one!
Watching this episode was super jarring fresh off a rewatch of Daredevil and Punisher. The initial action piece with Bullseye attacking the bar was so weirdly shot - shaky handheld cam, uncharacteristically bright lighting, very clearly shot on a relatively small set, the CGI already mentioned - we were like "is this ... a play?", as if the camera would pull back and reveal this is all some kind of low-budget retelling for an in-world audience.
I'm willing to give the season a chance but damn. I agree with the review, what's happening in this episode is not emotionally justified yet. It's moving too fast - I understand they didn't want to drag out Fisk's election but still, it's not earned.
I will never understand the impulse to write a superhero show around the premise "I don't want to be a superhero anymore". Give or take a Watchmen, it's a genre about wish fulfillment and "wouldn't it be cool if". Why do showrunners seem to want to begrudge the audience every little bit of pleasure they might take from seeing the heroes be super?
I understand a little better the appeal of Fisk and of D'Onofrio's performance and the desire to him around, but I'm still pretty exhausted by another season of Daredevil built around Kingpin. It's okay to let the good guys win and the bad guys lose full stop. You can always invent new bad guys for the next story.
All that said, Charlie Cox is still very good in the role and it's always nice to see Clark Johnson in front of the camera.
I always find it very odd that fans of a medium which endears itself to them through adherance to rigid Campbellian plot structures would balk at the "reluctant hero" trope. It's the first act of every fuckin thing, man. If you're going to question why *that* keeps happening, you might as well ask yourself why everything else is constantly repeating itself in the same way.
Yeah, no. Reluctant hero is a trope, sure, but it's by no means universal. Tony Stark wasn't reluctant. Peter Parker wasn't reluctant. Thor wasn't reluctant. Those guys were falling all over themselves to be heroes. And while you can point to reluctant hero phases in most of the MCU guys' stories 1) they only take up 20-30 minutes of a movie versus half a TV season and 2) Campbellian or not, those tend to be my least favorite arcs in those stories as well.
Besides, Daredevil already spent most of season 3 being reluctant. Thankfully She-Hulk fully got him off the bench. Killing Foggy just to put him back there was a lame move.
And let's be honest: Show runners do this to save money. If Daredevil is all in you've got expensive FX shots and fight choreography in every episode. It's much cheaper to film Charlie Cox sulking. I get that show business is a business and I don't blame them for trying to stretch a limited budget; I blame them for doing it in such a fun-sucking way.
You may well be right about saving money on going talky; that was the complaint the few people who watched the HALO show seemed to have about it.
I haven't seen She-Hulk and can barely recall the events of the Netflix series, so I can't speak to any arcs, and also wasn't expecting / kind of hoping I didn't need to be up on any to understand the beginning point. So what the show's put down has been fine by me, in that regard.
I do think Stark / Parker / Thor all went through their Campbellian points, and have done so multiple times. In truth the structural pattern doesn't necessarily require reluctance as such, but a preceding step of any kind: a lack of focus, maturity, confidence, or purpose. Circumstance gives them power, then a threat moves them toward selfless heroics. Stark gets kidnapped and gets a reality check, Parker realizes the city has bigger problems than purse snatchers, Thor takes his lot for granted until he's betrayed by his brother.
You can't have a Campbellian story without the "call to action", and you can't have a call to action without a hero who has to "step up", in some form or fashion, from wherever they start. They need to make an active decision to intervene. Or at least, they have to do so in a *well-told* story; it wasn't until the 80s that writers started to consider that heroes might not be perpetually hunky dory about getting involved in shit whenever it stirred, might not take to it like they're getting customer satisfaction scores at the end of the day.
More to the point, though, there isn't a superhero, at least none iterated on post-Alan Moore, who hasn't reckoned with the existential loneliness and potential futility (if not the self-destructive impulse) of being an individual hero after they've established themselves. They all struggle with longing to trade their swords for ploughshares in some capacity: Stark wants to stop churning out weapons and make tech that helps people; Parker wants to just be a college student with a girlfriend; Thor wants to be a good king to his people rather than an adventurer.
Cox's Daredevil is all about knowing that heroics aren't good for him on a number of levels, and yet. The calls keep on coming, and nobody else springs to action.
But the plots always suck them back in to what they do best... Or the property reboots... or the mask is passed to another character. Reluctance is just a means of getting the character to a place of heeding a call to action a second, third, or Nth time after the first.
I have the failing of not remembering a single Marvel plot after I’m done watching, so I went along with any discontinuity and dropped threads pretty easily. I did need to be reminded that Fisk knew Daredevil’s identity, though.
Everyone looked oddly different. I don’t know if it was just the passage of time, angles (there were some ODD choices), or field of view or something. People just looked like the AI-generated versions of themselves.
What even is Vanessa’s accent?!
My husband and I joked that the reshoots came about because the showrunners were about to kill off Karen instead, but someone thought they’d better not fridge yet another woman in Marvel so it was Foggy instead. Maybe they’re saving Karen for another Punisher team up (synergy!); I’d be game.
I couldn’t help but think that, if this show had been made a decade ago, there would’ve been more time spent on the buildup to the election - perhaps speaking out against it, trying to stop it, and so on. It’s the sort of thing that is usually paced out more, one, and also something that Attorney at Law Matt Murdock could have a public stance on.
But in today’s climate… yeah, the dude with a criminal record and a cult of personality surrounding him gets elected, tout de suite.
1) "The big Heat-esque diner reunion between Matt and Fisk literally requires nostalgia to work" is not true. I would say that the only thing that any scene needs to work is good actors, and we obviously have those or else no one would have made this. Even then, I don't think the writing of the scene -- and it's not the best writing by any means -- requires Lore knowledge to plug into.
This is coming from my perspective as someone who barely remembers the Netflix show and has actively avoided the more recent Disney+ shows in which these characters have figured. I arrived with more or less the same ambient knowledge as anyone coming freshly into the fiction would have: The basic understanding of rivalry between two major characters who haven't crossed paths in a long time. That's all the scene needed me to know. It neither dragged nor lost me with demands for lore knowledge, or whatever.
I could tell there were references to other shows -- I assume somebody shot Fisk in the head on camera at some point -- and if they'd dropped names as though I should know them, it would have been different. But as it is, it works just fine: We've seen Murdock experience (allegedly) transformative trauma, such that he (allegedly) renounces his old ways. The attack on Fisk is mentioned to establish symmetry -- here's another guy who went through bad shit and claims to be changed. I don't need to know who shot Fisk, or even why, to understand why this conversation is happening. Or to enjoy it, frankly.
I'm as exhausted by continuity and lore shit in mass media as anyone, but I feel like there's an ever-increasing tendency for people to work themselves into caring about Lore to the point of exhaustion even when the text itself doesn't actually demand it. They've developed this death grip from texts that *do* demand diagrams and flowcharts (Westworld, etc) and have lost other sensitivities.
So there's this weird inversion, where people feel overburdened with their knowledge of context (ie, knowing where this specific story fits in relation to other stories), while at the same time feeling as though a story which doesn't have substantial context is unreal / unbelievable / insubstantial, but also that a story which has context but *doesn't* capitalize on it to the fullest extent possible is sloppy or full of holes.
I think that's what we're running into, here. Because I don't have an investment in / memory of either of the contexts being set against one another in this review (ie, the separate MCU and Netflix continuities) and I'm finding it kind of absurd to say the show is "wasting" Foggy and Karen, as though the story being told requires their presence and all the shit we're supposed to know about them, while at the same time claiming that the show is overburdened with another, unrelated context (which at this point I'm not feeling the weight of).
All of this is to say that this show is not a hard reboot, but it is a show that's taking its previous context and putting it more or less aside. DDBA takes where the Netflix show ended, shows that to us as the status quo, then breaks the status quo -- perhaps irrevocably, perhaps not -- as the inciting incident of the new series. You can obviously conclude that this new direction is less interesting than the old one, you can say that you miss the departing characters, but the story as presented isn't confused or committing formal malpractice in giving them the boot. This is in fact the way you traditionally tell a new story using old characters.
There is the obvious risk (one that I've seen murmured about in other pubs) that the show will start getting sucked into Tolkien-type epics-within-and-between-epics quicksand on the MCU side of things, but at this juncture, I just don't think it has.
2) I am always here for my man, THE man, Vinny "The Golden Man" D. CRIMINAL INTENT was the only good Law & Order. There will be no further discussions of this.
3) The CGI is really bad. Like THE ARRIVAL (1996) bad. Punishing to watch, more punishing than THE PUNISHER season two.
I definitely agree that the Fisk/Matt reunion doesn't require any lore knowledge to work, but I do think it's explicitly designed to get fans who watched the original show to say "Wow, I'm so excited to see these two great characters together again!" (which is what I meant by nostalgia). And if you were a new viewer who had never seen the original Netflix run at all, I'm just not sure that scene would work as well for you. Then again, I did always enjoy the implied history between Professor X and Magneto in the original 2000s X-Men movies, so maybe you're right that brand new viewers would enjoy the dynamics more than I'm giving them credit for.
And while I do agree with your point that there can definitely be too much lore focus in genre shows these days, in this case I actually think the show introducing Karen and Foggy again only to immediately send them away is just that! I feel like the showrunners overvalued lore/plot ("we need to explain why Matt isn't working with his old friends anymore") and undervalued emotional continuity ("let's just say they died/left and Matt got over it quickly"). If the show wanted to give Matt a fresh start, I would've preferred it just jump in with that.
(And, just to be clear, I don't think you need any knowledge of Fisk/Matt's recent MCU appearances for this show to work. My discussion in this review is just about the OG Netflix show vs. Born Again and how the show is handling the gap that has passed between them, which seems fair since this series is explicitly being marketed as a direct continuation!)
Agree about the undervaluing of emotional continuity. I was curious how Foggy’s death would be handled as the episode moved forward. In the next scene, it looks like Matt is preparing himself for a funeral, so I thought the show might actually tackle the processing… nope, cut to one year later! Thought that was cheap.
The Karen-Matt scene post courtroom, when those two hadn’t really talked since the death, was more loaded, at least, and one of the stronger emotional moments of the episode.
That's fair. I'm reticent to give the writers credit they have yet to earn (it is easier than it should be to imagine better thematic arcs than most TV shows go for), but you can see the potential for rhyming action that brings Foggy's death back into the narrative, bigly.
The show's pretty clear that Karen and (moreso) Matt are avoiding the pain of Foggy's death; that they avoid one another as part of this is emotionally legible enough. There's also an opportunity to elevate the murder from a flat pretense to reset Murdoch's emotional journey, into something knottier. Rather than being the last push on a long road to giving up DD, Foggy's death could be the *only* reason... Which is to say, the moment he dons the DD suit again must necessarily coincide with a moment of honest accounting with Foggy's death, and Murdoch's contributions to it. Otherwise it would be unbearable to wear, even for a practiced masochist like Murdoch.
(Worth noting that if Foggy hadn't had such strong misgivings about enabling Murdoch's vigilantism, Dex's decoy gambit might have been foiled, and Foggy kept out of the bullseye [pun intended]. No wonder Matt foreswore the persona in short order!)
Also, as wildly unethical as it might be to depict, Murdoch's new therapist girlfriend would be the obvious character to talk through these things with. Somehow I doubt it will all be as considered as what I'm imagining -- maybe Foggy really is fridged and gone, to be replaced by other concerns -- but I suppose we'll see.
I was shocked that Foggy died, but if Karen also stays away in SF, then I’m probably out ( haven’t watched ep. 2 yet). I have no interest in Fiske, or Matt and Fiske squaring off, and was only willing to put up with that if we also get our trio back.
I didn’t realize they had shot six episodes and then scrapped the concept, so if they are trying to work with that material, I can see why Foggy and Karen got sidelined. How infuriating that they put them at the forefront of the press tour, though.
I can’t remember, but does this take place in the same universe as the events of the MCU?
I always like the Daredevil series and this tracked with why I enjoyed it. I like Karen and Foggy, but I don’t need them in the series for me to enjoy it.
Yes, this is set within the MCU proper. Technically, the original Netflix show was too, but this one is even more officially/openly in line with the main MCU since it's fully in Disney's hands.
The premiere and the second episode definitely felt a little bit Frankenstein-esque, but I'm decently happy with the product. Cox and D'Onofrio are a joy to watch interact, as always, and I think the set-up we've gotten is promising. I completely agree re:hallway fight, the CGI was honestly pretty distracting considering how visceral and tactile the fight choreography/cinematography usually is in Daredevil. Definitely think the best part was the one in the flickering light hallway.
As for Foggy's death, I really hope we're getting a fake-out, and they borrow from Brubaker's run. We didn't see the funeral nor a corpse in the morgue (delusional I know), so I'm hoping they just got forced into this corner with the pre-overhaul footage and are gonna have Foggy be in witness protection due to the threat on his life for the season, then bring the man and Karen back in Season 2.
Bethel was incredible for the brief chunk he was in, so excited to see more of him over the next two seasons as well. The show is definitely not at Netflix Daredevil yet, but I can feel the creative team flexing and pulling to get this show oriented for a fresh story. I'm definitely looking forward to what more they cook up this season.
Foggy only being in hiding would track with what the reviewer called Matt being "surprisingly well-adjusted".
Foggy being in hiding doesn't track with Karen's appearance later in the episode. Bullseye tried to kill her to so if he is in witness protection she should also be. Furthermore she wouldn't be coming back "for Foggy" if she were also being protected. Finally when Karen and Matt are talking outside of the court room it sounds like he is dead.
I suppose you could could work it out that the feds let everyone think he was dead when they put him into WP including Karen and Matt, but that still leaves the problem of Karen not being in protection.
Also with Bullseye being sent to prison Foggy should have come out of protection (unless Bullseye was found to be working for someone else and they haven't figured out who yet).
Fingers crossed for Turk and Mahoney both! Probably no chance of the bigger Defenders names, but you never know. I hope we at least get some fun references to them at some point.
I think that a Daredevil show *could* work without Karen and Foggy, and if that's the story you want to tell, this was a decent way to write those characters out (other than Dex's attack not really having a clear motivation). But outside of actor availability / needing to use the footage already filmed without them, I'm not really seeing the benefit here yet. It feels like the show needlessly tying one hand behind its back to cut them both loose so soon.
The Fisk/Trump parallels are definitely the element of this new series that I'm most interested in seeing unfold. Well, that and the slim chance of a She-Hulk cameo, I suppose.
Reminds of Kung Fu Panda 4's late addition of the Furious Five and prior series villains (confirmed via Reddit AMA with crew member). It's to the point where you have to wonder, would it better to just not have them there at all then merely toss them in and spam them all over the marketing.
Read this without having watched, and my eyes just got so so so so wide. Why do this. Why.
Honestly, I feel like it's better to go in spoiled and soften the blow. It's such a bananas choice for the show to make.
Happy to read more of your coverage! I personally found Iron Fist to be the best Defenders series and really enjoyed your take on it.
Imo, the idea of the S4 premiere was to bridge the original show and the reboot. Like, the new crew had to work backwards and figure out - why aren't Karen and Foggy there anymore? What justifies this? Well, what if Foggy died and this broke up NMP?
Regarding cont-ty: I find it hard to believe that after all the stuff Fisk pulled with the FBI that he'd be allowed to run for office. But that's more of a 'fundamental conceit' issue really.
I kept Googling "can felons run for mayor" while I was writing this review! Apparently it varies by state.
"My big question is, who is this for?" Me apparently i.e. someone who didn't love the Netflix series and was looking for something more in line with the Disney Plus prerequisite shows like Hawkeye and She-Hulk (and presumably Echo which I haven't seen). Also I'm someone who finds Kingpin, and especially the Vincent D'Onofrio portrayal of Kingpin, to be far more interesting than Charlie Cox or Matt Murdock or Daredevil. So I was very happy to see another Daredevil show mostly based around Kingpin. In fact I would've been even more likely to watch the show if it was called "Kingpin" or "Fisk" or something and was explicitly about Kingpin as the protagonist in a sort of Disney Plus answer to the Penguin show on HBO. In addition I've always found Foggy annoying as a character so having him there at the beginning purely to establish that this is the same universe as the Netflix series but then having the guts to kill him was perfect for me.
Ha! Honestly, I love when a show winds up feeling like it was made just for me (I had that with a good chunk of Loki S2), so I'm glad you get to have that experience with this one!
Watching this episode was super jarring fresh off a rewatch of Daredevil and Punisher. The initial action piece with Bullseye attacking the bar was so weirdly shot - shaky handheld cam, uncharacteristically bright lighting, very clearly shot on a relatively small set, the CGI already mentioned - we were like "is this ... a play?", as if the camera would pull back and reveal this is all some kind of low-budget retelling for an in-world audience.
I'm willing to give the season a chance but damn. I agree with the review, what's happening in this episode is not emotionally justified yet. It's moving too fast - I understand they didn't want to drag out Fisk's election but still, it's not earned.
I honestly would've loved if the entire Daredevil/Bullseye fight was revealed to be a scene in Rogers: The Musical from Hawkeye.
I will never understand the impulse to write a superhero show around the premise "I don't want to be a superhero anymore". Give or take a Watchmen, it's a genre about wish fulfillment and "wouldn't it be cool if". Why do showrunners seem to want to begrudge the audience every little bit of pleasure they might take from seeing the heroes be super?
I understand a little better the appeal of Fisk and of D'Onofrio's performance and the desire to him around, but I'm still pretty exhausted by another season of Daredevil built around Kingpin. It's okay to let the good guys win and the bad guys lose full stop. You can always invent new bad guys for the next story.
All that said, Charlie Cox is still very good in the role and it's always nice to see Clark Johnson in front of the camera.
I always find it very odd that fans of a medium which endears itself to them through adherance to rigid Campbellian plot structures would balk at the "reluctant hero" trope. It's the first act of every fuckin thing, man. If you're going to question why *that* keeps happening, you might as well ask yourself why everything else is constantly repeating itself in the same way.
Yeah, no. Reluctant hero is a trope, sure, but it's by no means universal. Tony Stark wasn't reluctant. Peter Parker wasn't reluctant. Thor wasn't reluctant. Those guys were falling all over themselves to be heroes. And while you can point to reluctant hero phases in most of the MCU guys' stories 1) they only take up 20-30 minutes of a movie versus half a TV season and 2) Campbellian or not, those tend to be my least favorite arcs in those stories as well.
Besides, Daredevil already spent most of season 3 being reluctant. Thankfully She-Hulk fully got him off the bench. Killing Foggy just to put him back there was a lame move.
And let's be honest: Show runners do this to save money. If Daredevil is all in you've got expensive FX shots and fight choreography in every episode. It's much cheaper to film Charlie Cox sulking. I get that show business is a business and I don't blame them for trying to stretch a limited budget; I blame them for doing it in such a fun-sucking way.
You may well be right about saving money on going talky; that was the complaint the few people who watched the HALO show seemed to have about it.
I haven't seen She-Hulk and can barely recall the events of the Netflix series, so I can't speak to any arcs, and also wasn't expecting / kind of hoping I didn't need to be up on any to understand the beginning point. So what the show's put down has been fine by me, in that regard.
I do think Stark / Parker / Thor all went through their Campbellian points, and have done so multiple times. In truth the structural pattern doesn't necessarily require reluctance as such, but a preceding step of any kind: a lack of focus, maturity, confidence, or purpose. Circumstance gives them power, then a threat moves them toward selfless heroics. Stark gets kidnapped and gets a reality check, Parker realizes the city has bigger problems than purse snatchers, Thor takes his lot for granted until he's betrayed by his brother.
You can't have a Campbellian story without the "call to action", and you can't have a call to action without a hero who has to "step up", in some form or fashion, from wherever they start. They need to make an active decision to intervene. Or at least, they have to do so in a *well-told* story; it wasn't until the 80s that writers started to consider that heroes might not be perpetually hunky dory about getting involved in shit whenever it stirred, might not take to it like they're getting customer satisfaction scores at the end of the day.
More to the point, though, there isn't a superhero, at least none iterated on post-Alan Moore, who hasn't reckoned with the existential loneliness and potential futility (if not the self-destructive impulse) of being an individual hero after they've established themselves. They all struggle with longing to trade their swords for ploughshares in some capacity: Stark wants to stop churning out weapons and make tech that helps people; Parker wants to just be a college student with a girlfriend; Thor wants to be a good king to his people rather than an adventurer.
Cox's Daredevil is all about knowing that heroics aren't good for him on a number of levels, and yet. The calls keep on coming, and nobody else springs to action.
But the plots always suck them back in to what they do best... Or the property reboots... or the mask is passed to another character. Reluctance is just a means of getting the character to a place of heeding a call to action a second, third, or Nth time after the first.
I have the failing of not remembering a single Marvel plot after I’m done watching, so I went along with any discontinuity and dropped threads pretty easily. I did need to be reminded that Fisk knew Daredevil’s identity, though.
Everyone looked oddly different. I don’t know if it was just the passage of time, angles (there were some ODD choices), or field of view or something. People just looked like the AI-generated versions of themselves.
What even is Vanessa’s accent?!
My husband and I joked that the reshoots came about because the showrunners were about to kill off Karen instead, but someone thought they’d better not fridge yet another woman in Marvel so it was Foggy instead. Maybe they’re saving Karen for another Punisher team up (synergy!); I’d be game.
I couldn’t help but think that, if this show had been made a decade ago, there would’ve been more time spent on the buildup to the election - perhaps speaking out against it, trying to stop it, and so on. It’s the sort of thing that is usually paced out more, one, and also something that Attorney at Law Matt Murdock could have a public stance on.
But in today’s climate… yeah, the dude with a criminal record and a cult of personality surrounding him gets elected, tout de suite.
BB Urich is, in fact, Ben's niece.
Tbh, I was mild on these episodes, but:
1) "The big Heat-esque diner reunion between Matt and Fisk literally requires nostalgia to work" is not true. I would say that the only thing that any scene needs to work is good actors, and we obviously have those or else no one would have made this. Even then, I don't think the writing of the scene -- and it's not the best writing by any means -- requires Lore knowledge to plug into.
This is coming from my perspective as someone who barely remembers the Netflix show and has actively avoided the more recent Disney+ shows in which these characters have figured. I arrived with more or less the same ambient knowledge as anyone coming freshly into the fiction would have: The basic understanding of rivalry between two major characters who haven't crossed paths in a long time. That's all the scene needed me to know. It neither dragged nor lost me with demands for lore knowledge, or whatever.
I could tell there were references to other shows -- I assume somebody shot Fisk in the head on camera at some point -- and if they'd dropped names as though I should know them, it would have been different. But as it is, it works just fine: We've seen Murdock experience (allegedly) transformative trauma, such that he (allegedly) renounces his old ways. The attack on Fisk is mentioned to establish symmetry -- here's another guy who went through bad shit and claims to be changed. I don't need to know who shot Fisk, or even why, to understand why this conversation is happening. Or to enjoy it, frankly.
I'm as exhausted by continuity and lore shit in mass media as anyone, but I feel like there's an ever-increasing tendency for people to work themselves into caring about Lore to the point of exhaustion even when the text itself doesn't actually demand it. They've developed this death grip from texts that *do* demand diagrams and flowcharts (Westworld, etc) and have lost other sensitivities.
So there's this weird inversion, where people feel overburdened with their knowledge of context (ie, knowing where this specific story fits in relation to other stories), while at the same time feeling as though a story which doesn't have substantial context is unreal / unbelievable / insubstantial, but also that a story which has context but *doesn't* capitalize on it to the fullest extent possible is sloppy or full of holes.
I think that's what we're running into, here. Because I don't have an investment in / memory of either of the contexts being set against one another in this review (ie, the separate MCU and Netflix continuities) and I'm finding it kind of absurd to say the show is "wasting" Foggy and Karen, as though the story being told requires their presence and all the shit we're supposed to know about them, while at the same time claiming that the show is overburdened with another, unrelated context (which at this point I'm not feeling the weight of).
All of this is to say that this show is not a hard reboot, but it is a show that's taking its previous context and putting it more or less aside. DDBA takes where the Netflix show ended, shows that to us as the status quo, then breaks the status quo -- perhaps irrevocably, perhaps not -- as the inciting incident of the new series. You can obviously conclude that this new direction is less interesting than the old one, you can say that you miss the departing characters, but the story as presented isn't confused or committing formal malpractice in giving them the boot. This is in fact the way you traditionally tell a new story using old characters.
There is the obvious risk (one that I've seen murmured about in other pubs) that the show will start getting sucked into Tolkien-type epics-within-and-between-epics quicksand on the MCU side of things, but at this juncture, I just don't think it has.
2) I am always here for my man, THE man, Vinny "The Golden Man" D. CRIMINAL INTENT was the only good Law & Order. There will be no further discussions of this.
3) The CGI is really bad. Like THE ARRIVAL (1996) bad. Punishing to watch, more punishing than THE PUNISHER season two.
I definitely agree that the Fisk/Matt reunion doesn't require any lore knowledge to work, but I do think it's explicitly designed to get fans who watched the original show to say "Wow, I'm so excited to see these two great characters together again!" (which is what I meant by nostalgia). And if you were a new viewer who had never seen the original Netflix run at all, I'm just not sure that scene would work as well for you. Then again, I did always enjoy the implied history between Professor X and Magneto in the original 2000s X-Men movies, so maybe you're right that brand new viewers would enjoy the dynamics more than I'm giving them credit for.
And while I do agree with your point that there can definitely be too much lore focus in genre shows these days, in this case I actually think the show introducing Karen and Foggy again only to immediately send them away is just that! I feel like the showrunners overvalued lore/plot ("we need to explain why Matt isn't working with his old friends anymore") and undervalued emotional continuity ("let's just say they died/left and Matt got over it quickly"). If the show wanted to give Matt a fresh start, I would've preferred it just jump in with that.
(And, just to be clear, I don't think you need any knowledge of Fisk/Matt's recent MCU appearances for this show to work. My discussion in this review is just about the OG Netflix show vs. Born Again and how the show is handling the gap that has passed between them, which seems fair since this series is explicitly being marketed as a direct continuation!)
Agree about the undervaluing of emotional continuity. I was curious how Foggy’s death would be handled as the episode moved forward. In the next scene, it looks like Matt is preparing himself for a funeral, so I thought the show might actually tackle the processing… nope, cut to one year later! Thought that was cheap.
The Karen-Matt scene post courtroom, when those two hadn’t really talked since the death, was more loaded, at least, and one of the stronger emotional moments of the episode.
That's fair. I'm reticent to give the writers credit they have yet to earn (it is easier than it should be to imagine better thematic arcs than most TV shows go for), but you can see the potential for rhyming action that brings Foggy's death back into the narrative, bigly.
The show's pretty clear that Karen and (moreso) Matt are avoiding the pain of Foggy's death; that they avoid one another as part of this is emotionally legible enough. There's also an opportunity to elevate the murder from a flat pretense to reset Murdoch's emotional journey, into something knottier. Rather than being the last push on a long road to giving up DD, Foggy's death could be the *only* reason... Which is to say, the moment he dons the DD suit again must necessarily coincide with a moment of honest accounting with Foggy's death, and Murdoch's contributions to it. Otherwise it would be unbearable to wear, even for a practiced masochist like Murdoch.
(Worth noting that if Foggy hadn't had such strong misgivings about enabling Murdoch's vigilantism, Dex's decoy gambit might have been foiled, and Foggy kept out of the bullseye [pun intended]. No wonder Matt foreswore the persona in short order!)
Also, as wildly unethical as it might be to depict, Murdoch's new therapist girlfriend would be the obvious character to talk through these things with. Somehow I doubt it will all be as considered as what I'm imagining -- maybe Foggy really is fridged and gone, to be replaced by other concerns -- but I suppose we'll see.
Did Daredevil: Born Again pull a Last of Us Part Two on us?
I was shocked that Foggy died, but if Karen also stays away in SF, then I’m probably out ( haven’t watched ep. 2 yet). I have no interest in Fiske, or Matt and Fiske squaring off, and was only willing to put up with that if we also get our trio back.
I didn’t realize they had shot six episodes and then scrapped the concept, so if they are trying to work with that material, I can see why Foggy and Karen got sidelined. How infuriating that they put them at the forefront of the press tour, though.
I can’t remember, but does this take place in the same universe as the events of the MCU?
I always like the Daredevil series and this tracked with why I enjoyed it. I like Karen and Foggy, but I don’t need them in the series for me to enjoy it.
Yes, this is set within the MCU proper. Technically, the original Netflix show was too, but this one is even more officially/openly in line with the main MCU since it's fully in Disney's hands.