Marvel Studios have made some game changing decisions since their inception – casting Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, plucking James Gunn from low budget obscurity to helm Guardians Of The Gallery, picking the guys who made You, Me And Dupree to spearhead some of the biggest movies in existence – however, after the last couple of episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, surely the choice to scrap starting the Man Without Fear’s adventures over from scratch has to rank insanely high.
I know I’ve prattled on about this before, but thanks to Born Again fully embracing the Netflix, it’s allow season 2 to go to some stunningly emotional places, which ultimately peak last week with a take no prisoners offering that put the season over the top. But wait, we’re not done yet, because as we pick up the pieces from that devestating ending, we’re about to plunge into the Netflix lore like never before.
The dust has settled and in the shocking wake of Fight Night, we find that the aftermath of the charity event hasn’t been all that charitable to those involved. After Wilson Fisk’s attempt to shield his wife from assassination from a vengeful Bulleye inadvertently left her with a shard of glass lodged in her temple, the Mayor’s wife is rushed to hospital. However, it seemed that Vanessa managed to score a bullseye of her own after managing to gutshot her attacker after he was spirited away by Daredevil. But that has put Matt Murdock’s alter ego in something of an awkward position as he’s now fighting to save the life of one of his greatest enemies and the man who slew his best friend, Foggy Nelson.
But while Murdock is locked in the latest of a long line of moral dilemmas and Fisk frets by the bedside of his wife, leak-happy Daniel Blake takes a drive with Fisk’s fixer, Buck Cashman out to Albany for a task that feels ever more ominous by the second. But while all these events are taking place, we frequently take trips down memory lane as past, previously unseen events conspire to plague our characters and inform their decisions in the present. As he agonizes over bringing the hated Poindexter to safety, Matt recalls back to Foggy and his days interning at Landman & Zack when they’re assigned a case concerning the no-good brother of Nelson’s childhood friend.
As the memory reminds him of how forgiving Foggy could be, Wilson and Vanessa each recall the events leading up to their first meeting and the fateful purchasing of the painting known as “Rabbit In A Snowstorm”, but when the Mayor’s wife wakens after her operation, it seems that Fisk’s fears won’t come to pass – but that’s the thing about the grand design, you don’t always get to control what happened next, even if you’re the Mayor of New York…
I’d be very surprised if any conversations comparing the Netflix and MCU eras of Daredevil were to ever continue after watching The Grand Design, because after watching this episode the two are now very much one and the same. It’s not just that the flashback allows for some cameos from characters who have since gone on to the great beyond, but the episode also references scenes and themes from the earlier series to irrevocably forge them into one, huge, super-epic unit. But beyond this, Born Again’s fifth episode literally does everything a post-shock episode is supposed to do and then some. For example, while we get plenty of Murdock/Poindexter action, this is a rare episode where they don’t actually brawl and instead there’s a neat – if fucked-up – buddy movie vibe going on as the two bitter enemies are forced to try and impossibly show empathy to one another. While Dex justifies his own hero complex abd is seemingly cool with dying as long as the “scales are balanced”, Matt is forced to delve into memories of his murdered friend to find ways to process the dilemma before him. This of course means that we get an extraordinarily welcome return of Elden Henson despite the fact he has to wear that terrible “early Foggy era” wig for the entirety of his return. However, with Henson returns one of the biggest themes of the Netflix era, the struggle of Matt Murdock to remain just and fair, even if the person who needs it is the man who killed the friend that embodied those very values. The result is a welcome and timely return to simpler, pre-Daredevil days that blends perfectly with the older stuff and as Foggy finds empathy for the man who mocked him as a child (Foggy the Fembot is hardly the most affectionate of nicknames), it helps Matt put his beef with Bullseye in perspective.
Elsewhere, Wilson Fisk gets the same treatment, but it’s here that the show decides to get a little bit sneaky. For a start, while it seemed there that Vanessa Fisk was an out and out gonner, the episode fakes us out by not only having her survive and even regain consciousness, but giving her flashbacks that sync up with her fretting husband’s. So we’re back to the art gallery again and we see the range of coincidences that led to them both meeting thanks to her fateful decision to display that infamous painting on that particular night. But while it’s nice to see Elden Henson come back, it’s a genuine surprise to once again spend some time in the company of Toby Leonard Moore’s Wesley. Even better, we find that there’s also a connection between Fisk’s past consigliere and his future one when Wesley hires Buck for a hit and watching all this connective tissue occur results in some classic callbacks (don’t think I didn’t notice Matt’s offhand mention to Bullseye of a doctor who is probably Claire Temple). However, it turns out that the Vanessa fake-out turns out to be a double fake-out after she worsens after her operation and after she flatlines, we’re left with a Wilson who is in a worrying mental state. Throughout the episode, Fisk’s fear for his wife leaves him in something of a near childlike state, and seeing the Kingpin of crime so vulnerable and emotional is actually quite unnerving and kudos have to go to Vincent D’Onofrio for making his monster seem so human precisely one episode after watching him savagely beat a man to a pulp in a boxing ring.
Rapidly approaching the peak of what Marvel Television has managed to achieve, it’s thrilling to watch a show that understands its aims so well – notice how, among all the flashbacks, the show remembers to.stick to its crime story roots by giving us a Goodfellas-style subplot about Daniel thinking he’s going to get whacked by Buck. Merging the present and past in ways that aren’t just cheap nostalgia, you could argue that Born Again’s efforts to make its past incarnation completely cannon are now complete. But with this conversation arguably now closed, it’s where Born Again goes from here that’s especially exciting.
Delivering a one-two punch over two weeks that stands among the show’s greatest moments, Daredevil manages to take an after-twist breather that somehow delivers just as many shocks and heartfelt moments as an episode with twice the amount of action in it. Heroes and villians unite, loved ones are lost and at the end of it, we’ve still got the return of Jessica Jones to come – superlative television.
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