Matt Murdock is trying his best to leave his crime-fighting days as Daredevil behind. Through the first four episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, he’s been achieving this goal—for the most part, at least. Murdock has not worn his superhero suit since his friend Foggy Nelson died near the start of the series premiere, one year before the show’s story began in earnest. He did, however, recently beat the living hell out of two crooked cops while wearing his work clothes. But, hey, no one said moving on would be easy.
Born Again is nearly halfway through its nine-episode first season, and Murdock has yet to resume his role as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen in the show’s present timeline. As a result, the series has been light on action, which has allowed Born Again a longer narrative runway to establish its world and the characters who live in it before the show’s action eventually takes off. Even as Murdock continues to fight every urge to be reborn as Daredevil, the world is giving him every sign that his return is inevitable.
Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Episode 4 pushes Murdock ever closer to his breaking point while drawing parallels between his experience and that of New York City’s new mayor, Wilson Fisk. The former Kingpin of Crime is making an admirable effort to maintain the illusion that he has moved on from his past life, hiding his inner darkness while he plays by the rules. For now.
The Brief
The title of Episode 4, “Sic Semper Systema,” appears to be a play on the famous Latin phrase “Sic semper tyrannis,” which translates to “thus always to tyrants.” It signifies that tyrannical leaders will always be overthrown. By replacing “tyrants” with systema—or “the system”—Born Again calls for the system to be torn down instead.
Born Again dedicates its fourth installment to showing exactly how the system is failing in New York City and why changes need to be made to fix it—or dismantle it altogether. In the wake of Hector Ayala’s murder at the end of last week’s episode, Murdock’s plotline highlights the failures of the criminal justice system.
At the beginning of Episode 4, Matt takes a trip to the morgue to learn more about Ayala’s death. While he’s speaking with the coroner, they’re interrupted by Hector’s niece Angela, who pulls Matt aside and calls for justice for her beloved uncle. She asserts that police killed Hector after he walked free at the end of his trial and laments the futility of believing that anyone will be held accountable for their crime. Murdock responds with all the right things, saying that she has to believe someone will discover who’s responsible for Hector’s death, yet it’s clear that he doesn’t believe his own words. At least, not unless that someone is him.
Before investigating the White Tiger’s murder, Murdock deals with a new client named Leroy Bradford, who got caught stealing a box of caramel corn from a bodega. Bradford hopes to get probation—an unrealistic goal given his criminal record—but the best Murdock can get him is a reduced sentence, shrinking his 30 days of jail time to 10. Murdock tries to appease his frustrated client, calling anything below a 30-day sentence for someone with his rap sheet a “gift” and saying that 10 days is a “miracle.” But Bradford doesn’t buy it.
As Bradford explains, he’s spent his entire life trapped in a system that focuses more on punishment than on helping him improve his circumstances. For Bradford to experience even a small taste of happiness, he has few alternatives to breaking the law. “So why’d I get the caramel corn? I like that shit, and it tastes good,” he says. “And for that, they’re willing to spend five times more to lock me up than they are willing to spend to feed me. And you come in here and tell me that’s a gift?”
It’s a strong criticism of the prison-industrial complex in the United States, which seeks to profit from cases like Bradford’s, who will be charged for a crime labeled as “petty.” And Matt, for once, has nothing more clever to respond with than “you’re right,” before he proceeds to spend the rest of their visit together in silence.
When Murdock later visits the crime scene where Ayala was murdered, he quickly finds the bullet casing the police couldn’t, and he feels the Punisher logo emblazoned on it. Murdock uses this discovery as an excuse to pay a visit to an old friend, Frank Castle.
In what is one of the highlights of the season so far, Murdock and Jon Bernthal’s Castle reunite on-screen for the first time since Castle appeared in the second season of Netflix’s Daredevil. Castle is living in a hideout deep in the basement of a building, with a wide variety of guns and a crowded evidence board adorning its walls. When Murdock presents his former client with the bullet casing, it’s immediately evident that they both know it doesn’t belong to Castle.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Frank says with a sigh. “Bunch of bullshit fanboys, huh?”
“Yeah,” Matt replies. “And a lot of them cops.”
Although Born Again had previously teased some sort of connection among multiple corrupt NYPD officers—including Officer Powell in Episode 2 and a cop observing Ayala’s trial in Episode 3—by showing their matching Punisher tattoos, this is the first time that the series has openly acknowledged the existence of this faction of Punisher wannabes. Murdock had apparently figured it all out already, down to the identity of Ayala’s killer, who he believes is a rogue cop who chose to take justice—or at least, his idea of it—into his own hands, just as Angela had thought. While Matt may have visited Castle under the guise of following up on the bullet casing, Frank quickly picks up on his ulterior motive.
“I don’t think you came here for my help,” Frank tells Murdock. “See, I think you want my permission. You wanna get your hands on somebody, huh? Wanna hurt ’em. Maybe you’re a little bit scared. A little scared about what that means.”
Frank pushes Matt further and further, even citing Nelson—and the fact that Murdock failed to save him—as the real reason he’s stopped by. “That guilt, that shame, that’s my home, Red,” Castle continues, addressing Murdock by Castle’s pet name for his alter ego. “And I can see it on you. I can smell it on you. It’s all over you.”
Frank draws the pain—and the rage—out of Matt, if only for a moment, and Matt strikes Frank before apologizing for the outburst. Matt begins to break down as he tries to convince Frank (and himself) that the system worked this time, since Bullseye is serving life in prison for what he did to Foggy. But Frank sticks to his guns, as he always has, maintaining that the system is broken as long as someone like Bullseye gets to live while Foggy doesn’t.
As Murdock’s side of the episode explores the flawed nature of the criminal justice system from multiple angles, Fisk’s plotline highlights issues stemming from the mayor’s office and the city government. Fisk brings his team to Red Hook to present his master plan to transform its port into a bustling new district, and he seeks to hold a press conference about it immediately. However, his veteran adviser, Sheila, brings him back down to earth. She reminds her boss that there are protocols in place for such a drastic initiative to even become a possibility, and there’s all sorts of red tape in their path that needs to be handled before they can consider making a public announcement.
After Fisk relents and agrees to go through the proper channels, he spends the rest of his day dealing with the performative nature of his new civic duties. He is forced to sit through multiple renditions of “We Built This City,” including one from a (rough) children’s choir at a middle school, and these scenes are about as funny as anything we’ve ever seen with Vincent D’Onofrio as Fisk.
“Children have such talent,” he states stiffly at the conclusion of the kids’ performance, giving them a standing ovation while simultaneously attempting to escape the room before they can begin their second song. With zero warmth whatsoever, he goes on to tell the kids, “As they say, the city never sleeps,” while he puts on his coat to walk out the door.
As Fisk endures the second song at the Latvian Cultural Center, we can see his blood boiling because of the news he received on the way: Someone in his office leaked to the media that Fisk and his team would be meeting with a tech company about new ideas for recycling in the city that could decrease garbage output and work around existing union contracts. (As we saw earlier in the episode, that leak came from Fisk’s young protégé Daniel, who drunkenly bragged about the upcoming meeting while clubbing with journalist BB Urich.) Now, Fisk is being dragged on the internet for being a union buster.
Born Again comically times its transition between the performance at the Latvian Cultural Center and Fisk’s violent tantrum back at his office. In a tense meeting with his staff, he promises to find the leak. However, Daniel confesses on the spot and somehow manages to win back Fisk’s trust—and keep his job—in private soon after.
Although Fisk’s day at work provides Born Again with some rare moments of levity, the episode weaves in another segment from The BB Report to draw parallels between the city’s wider garbage issue on the show and the one that New York City faces in the real world.
“Mayor Fisk, you never see him,” a woman tells BB in an interview. “Every week it seems like he’s involved in a new scandal. I mean, look what just happened with the garbage. And look at all the garbage on the street, you know. How can we trust a guy like that who makes all of these promises to actually have our back?”
(Of course, any of this could easily have been about Eric Adams, as Fisk continues to remind us a lot of New York City’s actual mayor.)
The BB Report vignettes may be a bit heavy-handed at times, but they help make New York City a character of its own in the series, speaking through the voices of its residents.
Toward the end of the episode, Born Again underscores the similarities of Murdock’s and Fisk’s current experiences, providing a glimpse of their secret escapes into their past lives. As Heather sleeps in Murdock’s apartment, he sneaks away to his roof, where he stores all of his Daredevil gear. He breaks out his weapons to train, and there’s a prevailing sense that this isn’t the first time he’s done this.
Meanwhile, Fisk has something of a hideout of his own, where he keeps the iconic bloodstained white painting from the original Daredevil series, along with a special guest: Adam, the man Vanessa had an affair with after Fisk abruptly left her.
In the series premiere, Fisk promised his wife that he wouldn’t kill Adam—and, well, technically, he hasn’t yet. During another couples therapy session with Heather earlier in Episode 4, Fisk claimed that he didn’t know where Adam was. And here he is, trapped in a cage by Fisk, begging to be freed as the mayor enjoys one of his classic, fanciful solo dining experiences in front of him.
“Sic Semper Systema” concludes by teasing the show’s upcoming villain, a disturbed street artist who wears a creepy mask and goes by the name of Muse.
(We’ll dive into this character’s comic book origins in a future recap, but his emergence also explains the abundance of murals appearing across the city in each episode.)
Muse briefly appeared just before the episode’s title sequence began, carrying an unconscious man into the subway. Episode 4 ends with this mysterious masked villain returning to his secret lair as his victim wakes up, surrounded by horrifying artwork and bodies hanging from the ceiling. As Muse starts to siphon his blood, the guy screams in agony while the end credits begin to roll.
Not only is the system broken in New York City in myriad ways, but now there’s also a serial killer on the loose who will threaten to push Murdock and Fisk even closer to returning to their old methods.
Antihero Spotlight: The Punisher
Frank Castle is officially back, and the MCU is already better for it. Bernthal reprises his role for the first time since his Daredevil spinoff, The Punisher, concluded its second and final season in January 2019. And he hasn’t lost a step.
Castle is as angry, volatile, and broken as ever—if not more so. When Murdock advises Frank to devote himself to saving lives, Castle scoffs at the suggestion, claiming that he’s already done that and it got him nowhere. “You wanna go out there on the street, have at it!” Castle yells at Murdock. “But I do not have time for your candy-ass hero shit.”
When Murdock mockingly asks Frank whether he’s “plotting his next kill,” Castle replies, “You’re goddamn right.” The crowded evidence board on Castle’s wall—along with the scrapes and bruises across his face—certainly suggests that he’s been staying busy:
We don’t know much about Frank’s recent history, especially now that it’s been muddled by his newly established connections to the MCU. Given the show’s developing plotline involving the “bullshit fanboys” that he’s inspired in the NYPD, this might not be the last time we see him in this season of Born Again. But we do know that Frank is already set to return in a project of his own.
As more of Netflix’s Marvel heroes make their way back into the MCU, Bernthal is set to star in his own Marvel Studios Special Presentation. Bernthal is also cowriting the script with director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who will be helming the stand-alone TV special following their collaboration on HBO’s We Own This City.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Bernthal teased that this Episode 4 scene in Born Again is just the reintroduction of a character who has bigger things still to come: “I feel like it’s opened the door to getting closer to the Frank Castle that I really, really want to portray.”
Easter Eggs
Let’s close out this week’s recap with another pair of Easter eggs. The first one is something I mentioned in an earlier section, Fisk’s bloodstained white painting:
This painting, Rabbit in a Snowstorm, is an important recurring symbol for Fisk, dating back to the third episode of Netflix’s Daredevil. Kingpin bought it shortly after meeting Vanessa at the art gallery, and it was through its purchase that they got to know each other and fell in love. The splattering of blood on the painting belongs to Fisk himself, a result of his final fight with Daredevil in the series finale.
Finally, we have a rare reference to the wider shared universe of the MCU:
When Bradford was searching for a defense—any defense—that he could use to argue that he didn’t steal the caramel corn from the bodega, he suggested to Murdock that he could have been replaced by a Skrull. These shape-shifting aliens were the subject of Marvel Studios’ Secret Invasion, and the fact that they’re still out in the world, hiding among humans, is hardly ever acknowledged in other MCU projects. That 2023 series was an absolute train wreck for Marvel, but at least Born Again was able to get a good laugh out of it.
