In the opening minutes of Daredevil: Born Again, Matt Murdock, Foggy Nelson, and Karen Page leave their law office and lament the changes to their New York neighborhood.
“Hell’s Kitchen nostalgia is running pretty thin with you guys,” Karen says as they walk down the street. “You realize that, right?”
“Not nostalgia,” Foggy replies with a laugh. “Reverence for the past, yet hope for the future.”
The cold open of the revival series, which comes more than six years after Netflix’s Daredevil concluded with its third season, is all about honoring the original series while carving a new path for its successor. At the end of the Daredevil finale, the trio of friends were considering starting up their legal practice again, with Karen—and her ace investigative skills—as a partner this time around. Born Again begins by showing that they followed through with their plan and that they even still visit their beloved watering hole Josie’s, just as they did during the good old days.
But what starts as a joyful, nostalgic scene at Josie’s soon segues into the tragic event that sets Born Again in motion.
While Matt, Foggy, and Karen are celebrating the retirement of veteran NYPD detective Cherry (Clark Johnson), Foggy gets a call from a frightened client named Benny whom Foggy has hidden at his apartment for his safety. As it becomes clear that Benny is in danger, Murdock throws on his other suit—while the old Daredevil theme swells in the background—to rush to his aid. Except the call turns out to be a trick to lure Daredevil away from the dive bar, providing Benny’s attacker—Daredevil’s sharp-shooting rival Bullseye, a.k.a. Benjamin Poindexter—with the chance to take his shot at the vigilante’s friends. And true to his name, Bullseye doesn’t miss.
Poindexter hits Foggy in the chest, guns down two other men who run out of the bar, and takes aim at Karen. Murdock returns just in time to stop him from shooting her, too. Daredevil and Bullseye take their fight into Josie’s, in a one-shot action sequence that pays homage to the long takes that Netflix’s Daredevil thrived on. While there appears to be a bit more reliance on CGI than there was in the Netflix series, it’s still an impressive sequence that also makes good use of sound, as Murdock listens in on Karen and Foggy in the distance. Foggy’s heartbeat acts as a metronome throughout the scene, raising the suspense as his death looms ever closer.
When Foggy’s heart finally slows to a stop, Karen lets out a scream, and so does Matt on the roof of the bar. Even though he’s already defeated Poindexter, Murdock pushes him over the ledge, sending him crashing into the pavement, feet away from where Karen is sitting with Foggy’s body. Before the cold open bleeds into the title sequence, Matt drops his Daredevil helmet off the roof, allowing Cherry—who had climbed the stairs to the roof when he heard the struggle from below—to see him unmasked.
Born Again begins by saluting the legacy of its predecessor and affording fans of the original series the chance to witness a mini-reunion and gain some closure. But showrunner Dario Scardapane is also letting the audience know that this series represents a new chapter—and that not all of the old faces are coming along for the ride.
Born Again debuted on Disney+ on Tuesday with a two-episode premiere, the first one directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson and the second helmed by Michael Cuesta. As the series’ nine-episode first season proceeds, we’ll recap each installment, leading with some big-picture thoughts before breaking down each week’s caseload, spotlighting a notable supporting character, and ending with a smattering of Marvel-style Easter eggs. With two episodes to tackle today, let’s start with one supersized recap.
The Brief
Following the series’ traumatic cold opening, the premiere picks up one year after Foggy’s death. Murdock has started a new firm with former assistant district attorney Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), and he’s left his crime-fighting days as Daredevil behind. Matt has also moved out of his spacious penthouse apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, while Karen has left New York City altogether to begin a new life on her own in San Francisco.
At the courthouse, Matt and Karen have a brief conversation after Poindexter’s sentencing. It’s clear that their relationship is beyond repair, the grief and emotional distance between them too great for them even to remain in touch. “I refuse to believe that a tragedy had to destroy everything,” Matt says to Karen.
“But it did,” she replies.
Meanwhile, Wilson Fisk has returned to the city after experiencing some trauma of his own—and he has a clear-eyed vision of the man he must become. After dueling a pair of archers and receiving a pretty rude Christmas gift—a gunshot to the face—from Maya Lopez at the end of Hawkeye, Fisk spent several months physically recovering before taking time to heal emotionally as well. He reunites with his wife, Vanessa—who has been running her husband’s criminal empire with tremendous efficiency in his absence—by interrupting a meeting of the so-called Five Families that she’s arranged. (One of these crime organizations is the Tracksuit Mafia from Hawkeye.) Vanessa is Fisk’s greatest source of strength, as well as his greatest weakness, in every universe. Yet their relationship has grown complicated, not unlike Matt and Karen’s.
As Vanessa demands answers from her estranged husband, who disappeared after she stayed by his side during his convalescence, Kingpin tries to explain himself. “I was broken,” he says. “Shattered. You know, for months, I had to put myself back together. And as I did, two things shone bright and clear inside me. Beacons of who I was and who we could be. The first was … my undying love for you.”
“And the second?” Vanessa asks.
“What we could do for this city,” Fisk replies. “I would have to step away, and anything I was involved with could never be perceived as illegal.”
Dating back to the first season of Daredevil, Fisk has consistently claimed that he wants to build a better future for New York City. Instead of trying to achieve that goal from the shadows as the Kingpin of Crime, Fisk is taking a public approach in Born Again. This time, he has his sights on becoming mayor.
After Murdock hears Fisk declare his candidacy on the news, he decides to meet with his old nemesis. By the end of Daredevil, Fisk had discovered that Murdock was secretly the same devil-horned vigilante who’d been making his life a living hell. In the series finale, Murdock sent Fisk back to prison but spared Vanessa from suffering the same fate for ordering the death of an FBI agent, after Matt forced Fisk to promise that he’d never hurt Karen, Foggy, or anyone else again.
All these years later, Murdock’s and Fisk’s lives have completely changed. They meet over coffee and tea at a diner, exchange some awkward pleasantries, and each dance around the question of whether the other is still up to his old ways. Fisk claims that he’s a new man, and Murdock talks about how he gave up his alter ego the night Foggy died, going so far as to admit that he tried to take Poindexter’s life.
“It’s hard to come to terms with a violent nature,” Fisk tells Murdock. “Hating the power that it has over us.”
Their meeting ends the only way that it could have: With each warning the other to stay in line or suffer the consequences. At the conclusion of the episode, Matt is on a date with Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), a therapist whom Kirsten set him up with, when they hear the news that Fisk has won the election.
The Born Again premiere, “Heaven’s Half Hour,” seeks to connect to its characters’ pasts and recapture the spirit of the original Netflix series—and it succeeds in doing so. Through two episodes, Born Again’s tone is darker than that of any MCU series before it, in terms of both its graphic violence and its subject matter. (Moon Knight was pretty dark, too, but the series used Steven Grant’s dissociative identity disorder to convey gaps in time, merely suggesting his most violent actions rather than displaying them.)
Born Again is just the second MCU series with a TV-MA rating, after Echo, which didn’t pull its punches the way Moon Knight did. Like Echo, Born Again uses the additional creative freedom that comes with the rating to re-create a world that feels more grounded and true to life than what we usually see from Marvel Studios. In the opening minutes of the second episode, Kingpin references Spider-Man during his first address as mayor, but it still feels like Born Again is set in a different universe, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Born Again also builds on some of the central themes and narrative threads from the original series. Daredevil was always a story that belonged to both Murdock and Fisk, drawing parallels between their “violent natures” as they aimed to serve the city in their own ways. And Episode 2 of Born Again, “Optics,” further highlights the similarities in their current journeys.
As Fisk confronts the bureaucratic nature of his new job, he quickly becomes frustrated by all the red tape that’s preventing him from imposing changes immediately. So he simply cuts through it. Whether it’s skipping a lengthy approval process to get a hole filled in a road or blackmailing a disgruntled police commissioner to keep him in check, Mayor Kingpin wastes no time applying the same sort of tactics to overcome obstacles or manipulate enemies that he used in his former line of work.
Murdock, by contrast, does a better job of resisting his urges to extend his reach beyond his capacity as an attorney—at least at first. When Matt returns to the old 15th Precinct headquarters for a DUI case, he overhears a man named Hector Ayala being beaten by a cop in another room, as the corrupt police officer tries to force him to sign a confession. Ayala, played by the late Kamar de los Reyes, is shown toward the beginning of the episode, when he sees two guys roughing up a defenseless man on a subway platform and decides to intervene. Ayala more than holds his own despite being outnumbered, but when one of the two assailants trips over him during the fight, the attacker falls onto the tracks just as the train is arriving, and his blood splatters across Ayala’s face. As it turns out, both of the attackers were undercover cops.
In Ayala, Murdock finds an innocent man caught in an impossible, life-altering predicament, just for trying to do the right thing. Matt uses his superhuman hearing to determine that Ayala’s story about the events—which the police are wildly skewing to hide their own wrongdoing—is the truth. Except he can also tell that Ayala is withholding an important piece of the narrative. Murdock takes his case nonetheless, and he later sends Kirsten and Cherry—the latter of whom has been serving as Matt’s investigator—to Hector’s apartment to speak with his wife, Soledad. Cherry discovers Hector’s secret: He’s the vigilante known as the White Tiger.
We’ll dive deeper into the White Tiger’s origins as Hector’s case develops in subsequent episodes, but the vigilante wears a mystical amulet around his neck to enhance his physical abilities. Hector didn’t have the amulet or his costume on the subway platform that night, so he reasoned that his secret life of crime fighting was irrelevant to his case. At least, that’s how he tries to explain the omission to his lawyer when Murdock confronts him about his alter ego during visitation hours.
Matt manages to convince the judge assigned to Ayala’s case to disallow any evidence related to his client’s vigilante activities, so as not to distract the jury from the incident in question. But the circumstances hold special significance for the former Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Murdock used to turn to his other half when the justice system was failing, and as he tackles a case involving crooked cops who’ve abused their power, he finds himself slipping back into his old ways.
Near the conclusion of “Optics,” Murdock follows the other undercover cop who fought with Hector that night—Officer Powell—and overhears him on the phone as Powell discovers the location of the man he and his partner were attacking on the platform, Nicky Torres. As Powell and another cop go to Torres’s home to tie up a loose end, Matt beats them to the punch, getting his key witness out of the apartment just in time. Of course, Powell and his associate don’t take too kindly to Murdock’s intervention—or his devilish, mocking smile—so they take out their frustration on him. Matt endures every punch, but when one of them pulls a gun on him, he finally releases that violent nature he had been working so hard to suppress. With swift, brutal precision, Murdock dispenses justice in short order, breaking bones and smashing skulls. And just look at Charlie Cox’s face in this scene:
Now that is a man with some inner demons. After he’s successfully knocked both dirty cops out cold, Murdock grabs his now-broken shades and lets out one of his primal screams just before the credits begin to roll. Daredevil is back in a major way.
“Optics” pushes Born Again further away from Murdock’s Netflix past as the series settles in around its new characters and relationships. But that history is still woven into the fabric of this story. Born Again intersperses vignettes from The BB Report, a series of man-on-the-street-style interviews conducted by journalist BB Urich (Genneya Walton) as she carries on the legacy of her late uncle Ben. (Not that Uncle Ben.) And even as Murdock and Fisk try to move forward and forge new legacies in a different era, they still find themselves gravitating toward their old ways and bending the law to their wills.
Supervillain Spotlight: Bullseye
Although Poindexter’s screen time is limited in the series premiere, Bullseye is still a worthy villain for our first spotlight.
Wilson Bethel reprises his role as Dex, who returns in Born Again following his memorable introduction in the final season of Daredevil. Dex first appeared as a disturbed FBI agent; after Fisk noticed his combat skills in action, Kingpin used him to his advantage. Fisk manipulated Dex into helping him in his eternal war against Murdock, dressing Poindexter as Daredevil to commit crimes that would tarnish the vigilante’s name and likeness.
In the Netflix series, Poindexter never dons the kind of bullseye-themed getup that the character sports in the comics or that Colin Farrell’s version wears in the 2003 Daredevil film. (On second thought, Farrell’s was less a costume than a bullseye carved into his forehead.) But the very last scene of the series ends with Poindexter waking up in the middle of an experimental spinal surgery, as the camera dramatically zooms into his eye to reveal the lights reflected in the shape of a bullseye.
Given Daredevil’s sudden cancellation in 2018, the series never had the opportunity to follow up on its closing teaser. And so Born Again begins by picking up that loose thread and showing Poindexter in his final form as Bullseye. Foggy’s death is a stunning event to open the series. It also tweaks a bit of Bullseye’s comic book history: In Daredevil no. 5 (1998), Bullseye uses Daredevil’s signature billy club to kill Karen Page. Although Born Again could have easily re-created this iconic moment, it seems likely that this change was made to give Murdock the opportunity to start a new practice, while justifying some distance from Karen to clear the way for new characters and dynamics.
Poindexter survives his near-fatal encounter with Murdock, so the door remains open for the villain to return, even if he now faces life in prison. Whether or not this is the last time that Bullseye appears, the villain’s return helped start the new series with a bang.
Easter Eggs
While the first two episodes of the season feature several references to characters from Marvel movies (Spider-Man) and TV shows (the Punisher), along with allusions to the comics and beyond, I’ll close out this week’s recap with one image that contains a trio of Easter eggs:
Times Square, the perfect place to hide Easter eggs in the form of billboards. On the right, there’s a “Happy New Year” message from the Pym Van Dyne Foundation, run by the Wasp herself. (In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it seemed as if Hope Van Dyne had been doing wonders with her organization, but her marketing team couldn’t come up with something, I don’t know, a little flashier?) On the bottom left, we have an ad for Rogers: The Musical, the Broadway experience introduced as a gag in Hawkeye that has now appeared as an Easter egg in four MCU projects. But most interesting of all is the billboard just above it, for Harlem’s Paradise.
The Harlem nightclub is an important setting in Netflix’s Luke Cage. It was once run by Mahershala Ali’s villainous Cornell Stokes, and Alfre Woodard’s Mariah Stokes after that. But the show’s second and final season concludes with Harlem’s Paradise gaining a new owner: Luke Cage himself. It’s possible that the billboard is just a nod to the character—or setting—now that he’s joining the same cinematic universe as the Avengers, but its inclusion could also portend the arrival of Luke Cage and the rest of the Defenders.
Daredevil: Born Again is off to a promising start, and if it can continue to build momentum and draw MCU fans back into its streaming world, it might not be long before we see more superheroes from Netflix’s Marvel TV era follow in Daredevil’s footsteps.
