As gut punch endings go, there’s not many that attacked the solar plexus with blunt force trauma so mercilessly as the final seconds of the previous episode of Daredevil: Born Again. After street level hero Hector Ayala (aka. White Tiger) was found innocent of a cop killing charge, it seemed that Matt Murdock’s faith in the law was ultimately justified after he outed his client in court to help his case. However, after Hector selflessly went out on patrol that night, he was suddenly executed by a shot to the temple by an unseen assailant wearing a very familiar skull t-shirt and as the credits rolled to the sound of the tide and a chirping tree frog (two sounds Hector loved from his favorite place on Earth) we had to sit in our shock over what just transpired.
Just how would Matt react to the blatent murder of his super powered client? Would he double down on the law that he’s devoted his life to, or will he once again feel the lure of Daredevil dragging him back to taking the law into his own hands. Brace yourselves true believers – the results are… somewhat inconclusive.
In the wake of Hector’s murder, Matt finds himself assailed from all angles by examples that the law is failing the very people it’s supposed to protect. Not only does he have to content with Hector’s niece, Angela, who is rightfully raging about the injustice her family has suffered, but the lawyer takes on a case that sees repeat offender, Leroy Bradford, facing jail time for petty theft, but stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty due to his jail time. Desperate to effect some sort of change, Murdock starts to look over the White Tiger crime scene either his enhanced senses and actually manages to locate the bullet casing that forensics failed to find – however, matters get yet more complicated when he discovers that it’s engraved with the logo of The Punisher.
Seeking out the man behind the skull, Matt tracks down Frank Castle to find that the murderous, but honorable, vigilante is innocent and that copycats and fan boys have been taking up his mantle to enact some street justice of their own. However, he also finds that his one time frenemy has a few words of blunt advice for the former Daredevil concerning his new outlook on life.
Meanwhile, Wilson Fisk is still trying to balance his stumbling marriage to Vanessa while juggling his job as mayor of New York, but it seems the cracks of being in the public eye are starting to show as his youthful aide, Daniel Blade, accidentally gets him some bad press. However, as the pressures from their new lives mount on both Fisk and Murdock, both show in their own way that their old habits still lurk under the surface and may soon rise to effect the streets once more.
In the case of Daredevil, it won’t be a day too soon as a masked serial killer by the name of Muse is starting to make his literal mark on the walls of New York.
For anyone hoping that Daredevil: Born Again would suddenly ramp up into high gear after the jaw dropping cliffhangers we got last week, there’s a chance that Sic Semper Systema may prove to be a little frustrating as the series spends most of its episode sticking to the more lawyer centric areas of Daredevil’s universe rather than seeing its title character immediately pull on the reds and start kicking ass. However, if you take a closer look at the episode, we find that it’s simply applying pressure to Murdock’s decisions to truly drive home how broken the law truly is. Yes, White Tiger’s murder was shocking, but it proves to be the slap in the face that opens Matt’s eyes (figuratively speaking) to how rotten the system is. Having to address Angela Ayala about the death of her uncle is truly bad enough, but his run-in with petty thief Leroy shows that constant injustice doesn’t just come with the big things like murder, it grinds down ordinary folk every day thanks to a cold, uncaring system that couldn’t care less about anything that isn’t firmly black and white.
Similarly, Fisk’s plot is also chugging along, satisfied to just give our villain more red tape to trip over as he attempts to clean up the streets in his own way. However, while his mayor stuff is business as usual – although Michael Gandolfini’s overzealous fanboy is starting to have more of an effect – his private life is hmthe part of him that’s getting extra spicy as couples therapy reveals that Vanessa had an affair with a man named Adam while Fisk was away last. Unsurprisingly, the man is missing, but as we know from bitter experience, the quickest way to piss Fisk off and bring out the Kingpin is to screw with his wife in any way and by the end of the episode, we find that that brutal streak the Kingpin is famous for is still alive and well – as is Adam. Sort of.
However, the episode goes from good to great with the welcome return of Jon Bernthal’s growling Frank Castle who pretty much cemented his status as the cream of the Punisher crop thanks to raw, vicious honesty thst comes with the actor’s performance. Still plying his trade in lethal justice, but laying off the skull iconography, Frank has some choice words for Murdock that invokes the passionate debates they had way back in the second season of Daredevil’s Netflix years. They proved to be a dramatic highpoint then and Bernthal and Charlie Cox guarantee that it’s a highpoint now as they once again lock ideologies and viewpoints in a way that makes you truly realise how much you’ve missed these guys. While the original plan for the series was to be more court based, it’s scenes like this that prove just how important it was to weave the Netflix characters back into the mix as their discussion about a fallen Foggy Nelson really drive the emotion home without a horned cowl or a skull-enblazoned kevlar in sight.
It does really seem like Born Again is racking up those shadowy threats because not only is there a secret cult of Punisher copycats patrolling the city (which addresses the real-like use of the Punisher skull with police and the military), but we get our first proper introduction to Muse, a masked killer dressed in white who drains his victims of blood in order to use it for his street art (Buffalo Bill meets Banksy, I guess) so I’m guessing the second half of the season will include more superheroics than the first.
However, as usual, we’re left with a tantalising glimpse of both our hero and our villain lapsing back into their own ways. For someone apparently so reformed as Fisk is, the revelation that he’s had Vanessa’s lover imprisoned and starved like an animal for months while he eats luxurious meals in front of him is textbook Kingpin at his most vindictive – hell, in an earlier scene he also utters the very familiar phase “when I was a boy…” and what can be more Kingpin than that? However, on the flip side of that coin, we find Murdock mulling over Castle’s bellows of wisdom and revisiting his armoury which includes various different version of his cowl and the final shots of him practicing with his tricked out billyclub hints that Daredevil’s rebirth could be occurring sooner rather than later.
The season’s dedication to the more legal aspects of Murdock’s existence is still admirable and adds some real world gravity to the MCU, but once again, it’s the more classic elements of the original show that prevents things from being (in Kingpin’s words) embarrassed in front of Vanessa.
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