To be taken seriously as a superhero you need certain attributes that will endear you to the public. A cool costume and some enviable abilities is a good start, but an underrated talent is the ability to bounce back from an almighty beating and someone who has taken more than their share share of beat downs is Matthew Murdock.
As of late, Matt’s not exactly been on a winning streak after failing to stop a massive bombing of Hell’s Kitchen and finding himself framed for both this and a mass shooting of local police officers, all courtesy of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime, so if anyone could use a helpful face from their past, it’s the Man Without Fear. However, anyone familiar with Murdock’s past will know that even the people who helped him hone his senses and trained him to whup ass aren’t the most supportive people to have around you in a crisis. It’s time to meet Stick, possibly the most abrasive, harsh, dismissive, gruff authority figures in comics and he’s calling on his student at possibly the worse possible time.
With his crime fighting alter ego denounced as the Devil Of Hell’s Kitchen in the press and framed for every shitty thing that’s happened to the city recently, Matt Murdock is still trying to find a weak spot in the criminal empire of Wilson Fisk by going after the only lead he has left. However, after facing down Fisk’s money man, Leyland Owlsley, Matt’s luck proves to be getting even worse when, after getting distracted by a mystery man, he’s tazed by his quarry who promptly gets away. However, the mystery man proves to be Stick, the grizzled, blind man who schooled Matt twenty years ago when he was a child living in an orphanage but who abandoned him during a formative time during his training so the blood between them is still notoriously bad.
We’re treated to a raft of flashbacks that shows Stick’s bullshit-free, tough love brand of martial arts training and he keeps maintaining that he’s training young Matt to be a secret weapon for some sort of war that’s been raging in the shadows and apparently it’s this same war that’s ultimately brought the cantankerous old bastard back into Murdock’s life.
Meanwhile, Karen and Ben are still plugging away at taking down Fisk’s empire from a more legal stance, but after there’s another attempt on Karen’s life, she’s rescued by an unlikely savior in the form of Foggy, who she subsequently brings into her little cabal of justice. But while this slightly enhanced group of do-gooders continue, the target of their endeavours is having a slight problem with one of his co-conspirators, the usually reserved Nobu is making some demands about a super secret weapon he’s trying to smuggle into New York that has the rather sobering name of Black Sky. Of course, this is the exact thing Stick has recruited Matt to help him destroy, but when Murdock discovers what Black Sky actually is, it seems that his recent string of losses is about to continue.
Before we start digging in the minutiae of the episode, I feel I need to break character a bit when it comes to reviewing Stick. You see, while I’m going through Daredevil with the air of someone watching it for the first time, I obviously first watched it back in 2015 when it first dropped. However, while all the episodes of the first season are all directly pointing to the climax, Stick is the only one that hints that other, possibly bigger things are waiting beyond the thirteenth installment into the then-unknown realms of a second season. As a result, the episode hits a little different now than it did then mostly because we’re two subsequent seasons and a Defenders show later and without any obvious pay off, this seventh episode felt a little like a bottle episode that suddenly started rambling on about ancient, shadowy wars and secret weapons called Black Sky that seemed to have precious little to do with anything the season had been leading to thus far. Yes, it proved to be a spot of MCU style pandering to stories that didn’t even exist yet, but thankfully there was something in the episode that stopped it feeling utterly out of place. Stick.
Anyone in on their Daredevil lore knows that the elderly, tough as nails Stick was Matt Murdock’s booze swilling, borderline abusive Yoda who taught him to use his super heightened senses and fight like a demon and while previous live action attempts of the character had to wait until 2005’s dire Elektra movie (although Terence Stamp did a good job), here we manage to get a more accurate take. All the guff about secret societies and the search for a human weapon to turn the tide of a mysterious battle is still present and correct, but where the episode really excells is possibly the show’s best flashbacks so far that sees the unfeasibly grizzled likes of Scott Glen fill the role of the abusive old fuck with glee.
Aside from watching a renowned actor treat a blind, impressionable youngsters like crap, the relationship also serves to spell out a lot more of Matt’s serious issues, especially when Murdock was already one father down and Stick upped and abandoned him when he discovered that the future Daredevil had started looking up to him as a,surrogate parent.
Flash forward and the almost derisive spark between Matt and Stick is palpable, especially seeing as his scornful teacher has chosen to suddenly turn up while Murdock is at a pretty low ebb. However, as the show seems wisely set on twisting our hero’s dials as spitefully as they can, it seems that Matt is due yet mouthful of shit to attempt to digest has his career as a fledgling vigilante goes even further down the toilet. When Stick isn’t taking swings at him with a string of sardonic, toxic jibes, he’s taking actually swings at him with his fists and enlisting his bitter pupil into a battle he has absolutely no clue about.
If couse the big twist is that Black Sky turns out to be a small child who has been chosen to be trained to be some sort of terrifying future engine of destruction, but even Matt’s demands that Stick doesn’t kill are dashed to pieces when he finds out that his mentor simply went off and killed the child anyway after their initial, disastrous attempt. It’s yet another metaphorical knife in the ribs for Murdock who really can’t seem to catch a win right now and even though the bulk of the story has no real bearing on the rest of the series, it all seems to be trying to seriously turn the screw on Matt’s no kill rule in the face of multiple fuck ups.
Due to a slightly shifted focus that suddenly pulls an entirely different plot out of its arse, there’s a strong argument to be made that Stick is Daredevil’s weakest episode so far, however, due to some great flashbacks that further flesh out Murdock’s past, some deliciously bitter chemistry between Charlie Cox and Scott Glen and the sense that we now know where all this Black Sky stuff eventually led means that this episode has aged far better than you’d imagine. Yes, it probably has its eye cast too far afield to the future much in the same way that Iron Man 2 was way too focused in signposting The Avengers, the fact that it adds so much from Daredevil’s history means that the episode really managed to stick it to us.
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