Whoo… I got a little worried there for a second…
Basically, I was starting to get concerned that Daredevil’s thirteen episode series might have included one or two episodes too much and thus was veering dangerously into filler territory as it rounded its final stretch as the previous episode didn’t seem to much to offer beyond a major plot twist at the end. However, now that the show has finally seemed to reached its limit on aggressively shitting on every aspect of Matthew Murdock’s multifaceted life, it’s time for healing to finally begin and the final push to start. There’s certainly some nasty surprises still to be had and a shock death that I’m not entirely sure is a wise choice in the grander scheme of things – but as we stand on the threshold of the season finale, it seems that the show is in rude health as the showrunners continue to tighten the screws on both the good guys and the bad.
It seems like everybody is having a bad day in Hell’s Kitchen these days no matter which side of the law they’ve chosen to stand. While blind lawyer slash black clad vigilante Matt Murdock’s trials and tribulations are well documented by this site, his countless beatings and being outmaneuvered at almost every turn has cost him his friendships, his piece of mind and rather large quantities of blood that he’s spilt all over the city. Conversely, those affiliated with him have also been feeling the pinch with all the recent troubles that Karen Page has been suffering lately cresting with her commiting murder in self defence which is leading to the receptionist of Nelson & Murdock experiencing extreme guilt.
However, it’s not been all sunshine and roses for the brutal antagonist known as Wilson Fisk either, who has seen a sizable reversal in fortune after his love, Vanessa, was recently poisoned and his number two, Wesley, suffered a fatal case of being shot repeatedly in the chest by Karen Page. Blissfully unaware that Vanessa’s poisoning was a plot by his partners Madame Gao and Leyland Owlsley to get his head back in the game after the distractions that love has brought him, Fisk is determined to lash out at someone. He finds it when reporter Ben Urich, sick at all the corruption at the newspaper he writes for, has decided to quit a splurge everything he knows about Fisk’s dark childhood onto the internet.
However, while the Kingpin turns his frustrations on Ulrich, Murdock seeks to finally get his shit together and target the drug end of Fisk’s empire that’s run by the sinister Madame Gao and her cult of blind workers. Desperately in need of a win, Matt strives to do some damage that Fisk can’t easily shrug off, but Wilson isn’t out of the game yet and Ulrich is about to tragically find that out the hard way.
While I still feel that you could have brought Daredevil’s first season in at a tighter, taunter, ten episodes if you eliminated some of the more unnecessary sprawl, it’s still a great relief to see that the furious wheel spinning practiced by the previous episode wasn’t a lost cause. The poisoning of Vanessa may not have been the most elegant of methods to take Wilson Fisk’s eye off the ball, but it worked well enough to keep him occupied for our heroes to grab a belated foothold. Similarly, the shock shooting of Wesley at the hands of Karen gave the character more to chew on than just ragging on Ben Ulrich to pursue the Fisk story and heightens the fraying tension that’s continuously plagued the trio of staff working at Nelson & Murdock since episode 1. Well, with only one episode left before Murdock and Fisk presumably settle their differences the old fashioned way, it’s time for our main antagonist and protagonist to fortify themselves and build some momentum before the classic, superhero showdown rears its head. Of course, it wouldn’t be Daredevil if the two major players didn’t resolve their issues in vastly different ways.
Seeing as Matt has already managed to outlast two fractions of Fisk’s cabal of criminal confederates, he aims now to take out a third after persevering over the Ranskahov Brothers and roasting Nobu to a crisp and that means it’s time to target Madame Gao’s Chinese drug arm. While it seems weird to watch our hero essentially start again from scratch twelve episodes in, it also acts as a way to get battered old Matt back on the criminal thwarting horse and snap his head back in the game. In fact, watching a costumeless Murdock using his super hearing to track a car while he sprints across the rooftops in his everyday garb is the reset the character needed after the entire season seemed determined to smash his face in. Better yet, watching his vigilante guise take Gao’s operation apart is the win we needed to see him have – and although Gao escapes after displaying some funky martial arts moves of her own and the reveal of her self-blinded workers taints the win a little, it gives the pre-horned horn head the boost that he so desperate needed. Plus it also helps that after weeks of strain, he finally breaks in front of Karen, denouncing Stick’s insistence that to do the things he does, he needs to be alone. Hey, it’s all healing, people.
Elsewhere, Wilson unsurprisingly takes a more villainous route to straighten up and fly right, and when he isn’t beating underlings to a pulp for imagined indiscretions he manages to trace Wesley’s death, via his mother, back to the wrong source – Ben Ulrich. What follows is almost the kind of tit for tat killing Sean Connery hinted at in The Untouchables and while it is the perfect twist to double down on Fisk’s villainous leanings, using such an important character to the Daredevil mythos as Ben Ulrich to do it feels like something of a major waste – it also doesn’t help that they hired a black actor to portray him either only to have him killed off by being throttled to death. Still, if it’s shocking with side order of tragedy the showrunners were aiming for, they certainly nailed it, but I guess it all helps make Fisk all the more hissable.
With the majority of the episode focusing on our leads scrabbling to maintain some semblance of order, every one else has to score their moments where they can; Owlsley and Gao reveal that it was they who were responsible for Vanessa’s poisoning before the latter kisses New York goodbye for a pastures new; Foggy corners ex girlfriend Marci in order to get him the inside track on Fisk’s dealings with her law firm and Matt makes a tenuous alliance with possibly the only honest cop in the entirety of Hell’s Kitchen with the return of Sgt. Brett Mahoney.
However, with only one episode left, Daredevil seems to be holding a lot of cards to its chest. There’s no further word on his actual superhero costume (don’t get me wrong, I like the black, but it’s high time for the red), Fisk and Matt seem to be no closer to staging a bludgeoning showdown and Foggy still hasn’t made up with his battered buddy yet which suggests that the final instalment has a fair bit to get through. However, when it comes to my hopes that the show can stick it’s landing like its hero pulling off a double flip off a car, I feel much like Daredevil himself – in essence, I feel I am also a man without fear.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 
One comment