Not to keep going on about the fact that the resurrection of Daredevil fully into the MCU was made up of two attempts, but I have to commend the show thus far about how well it’s managed to conceal the joins between the first, more upbeat attempt and that far more brutal retake that brought the revival back in line with the Netflix original. However, it seems that this week, those joins are so visible that even Matt Murdock could spot them even if he didn’t have his enhanced senses as we hit the halfway point of the season with something that looks suspiciously like a filler episode.
Now, filler episodes are fine if they’re dropped in at the right moments of a season, but when you consider all the juicy cliffhangers gifted to us by episode four, suddenly shifting focus to a side adventure that could literally be skipped and have no bearing on the episodes around it might be a massive misstep for the man without fear.
After his typically blunt pep talk with Frank Castle last episode, we left Matt Murdock training once again with his billyclub and the prospect of him donning the reds once again to become Daredevil. However, as this episode starts, we find the devil of Hell’s Kitchen once again in his civilian garb as he spends St. Patrick’s Day in New York Mututal looking for a loan for his struggling law firm. While the bank manager is off that day, the assistant manager ends up being a familiar face (to us, anyway) as it turns out to be the affable Yusuf Khan, father of Kamala Khan who often moonlights as the teen superhero, Ms. Marvel. However, while such cross-pollination is all well and good, that doesn’t help Matt secure his loan as their business practice of taking on cases that bring in little money simply isn’t viable.
However, all this becomes moot when, after leaving, Matt’s super sensitive hearing picks up the heist that occurred not long after the minute he walked out the door. It seems that the criminal fraternities of New York are still acting up after Vanessa Fisk relinquished her hold on her husband’s former empire and this gang of Irish robbers are hoping to score some green on St. Patrick’s Day in order to pay off a debt.
Now that’s he’s far more receptive to once again playing the hero, Matt simply walks back into the heist and pretends to be your average, blind, hostage while he uses those heightened senses to get a lay of the criminal land, choosing to strike here and there in an attempt to gradually whittle down the robbers while keeping everyone, especially Yusuf, safe.
However, while bereft of his costume and his toys, can Murdock manage to pick this gang apart and figure out their plan before one of the gun totting thugs does something rash? Mid season? In a filler episode? What do you think?
You’d think that crafting an episode that’s essentially Die Hard in a bank featuring Matt Murdock using his skills to bamboozle a clutch of overconfident robbers would kick serious amounts of ass – or at least pop the odd kneecap. However, while that perversely satisfying example of gruesome limb manipulation does indeed occur in this episode, it soon becomes clear that while it might have made an awesome, R-rated movie or even a delightfully hard-edged, four-issue comic book arc, it ends up being a narrative cul-de-sac for a show that seemed to be about to shift into high gear. Literally nothing that fully concerns the main characters in this season is either addressed or built upon which feels like an extra kick in the balls considering the last episode left us with a reintroduced Punisher waiting in the wings and a full blown, masked serial killer in the form of Muse raring to go. However, not only do we get no progression on either of these two fronts, but the episode doesnt even include a single scene containing Wilson Fisk, which leaves sole, continuing theme being Matt still absentmindedly fingering his dislodged horn (steady now) from his old Daredevil costume as we take it to mean he’s still pondering a return.
The problem is, With Intrest doesn’t really address this matter either; Murdock seems to have no qualms suddenly putting himself in harms way to help innocents despite the fact that he’s been utterly torn for the past four episodes. There’s no moment of him fully weighing up his options and looking reluctant to bring the pain against a group of professional thieves with rainbow coloured masks; there’s not flash of torment that he could lose his soul if he loses control; nope – he just dives right in like he hasn’t been away and the lack of emotion this brings when we should be cheering us palpable. Still, at least things pick up when Murdock gets to work, right? Well, not really as the action feels a little stilted and the tension is strangely non-existent and it almost gives us a glimpse of how watered down the original take the series was going to have could truly have been – grotesque knee break aside, of course. In fact, the episode is so nondescript, you probably could have taken this episode out of its placement and dropped it into the midpoint of any Daredevil season you could care to name and it would almost fit aside from the occasional bit of dialogue here and there, which is practically what a filler episode is designed to do and it’s no surprise that it’s part of a two-episode drop this week.
However, as frustrating as it often gets, there are a few good things about episode 5 even if it has taken it’s foot off the gas at a vitally important juncture. The main one is the addition of Mohan Kapur’s Yusuf Khan in an extended cameo which further ropes Daredevil even tighter to the bosom of the MCU much in the same way we got Kat Dennings and Randall Park in WandaVision. OK, so the attempts to namedrop Kamala Khan into the show where admittedly heavy handed for a shoe that’s meant to be super gritty (a Ms. Marvel Pop Vinyl, guys? Seriously?), but you can tell that Kapur is totally jazzed to be there – although you wonder if Murdock will actually take Khan’s climactic offer of a family dinner seriously; I mean he showed up to She-Hulk’s one, right?
Cameo aside, the episode also tends to slide Charlie Cox slightly to the side while the lion’s share of the drama is provided by the salty back and forth between gang leader Devlin and Detective Angie Kim and I’m wondering if Marvel would have taken such a massive loss if they hadn’t chosen to include the episode at all. Again, it isn’t awful. It’s just an utterly unnecessary stop gap that slows the momentum of the show to a crawl when there’s far more important issues we could be focusing on.
Ditching Matt’s inner turmoil, a Punisher comeback, or anything to do with Wilson Fisk altogether in favour of mid-level thrills and an admittedly sweet cameo, Born Again finds that it’s speedometer is falling rapidly when it really should be forging forward. But even though this is Born Again’s weakest episode to date by a comfortable margin, hopefully this means that from here on in, we can leave the realms of a weirdly perky bank robbery and delve back into the dark shit that brought us all to the dance in the first place.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 