Hogan Reviews

While this is indeed Season 1 of “Daredevil: Born Again” this is also Season 4 of the Daredevil show that started on Netflix, still my favourite superhero TV show of all time, so to say I was happy to hear about this would be an understatement (ignoring the months when it sounded like a reboot with no connection to the prior series, thank goodness they went back on that!) While this season hasn’t reached the peak that was Season 1 of the original series it does fit nicely with the rest of the original show, it’s still “gritty” and violent with a good message at its core and a fantastic cast. So let’s take a look!

Although a continuation of the original series the opener wastes no time in creating a new status quo as Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox), Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) are all hanging out in a club celebrating a good day in court when Benjamin Poindexter/Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) arrives and goes on a bit of a killing spree, starting with Foggy. As Daredevil Matt gets so upset that he throws Bullseye off the roof we then swiftly cut to a year later where Karen has moved away and Matt is now working with a woman called Kristen McDuffie (Nikki M. James) in a new law firm, having retired as Daredevil. So although it brought back the old main cast it swiftly moved on to a new one! That being said Murdock’s greatest nemesis Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) returns to New York and is once again the central villain in his life… ish. You see although he returns to the city and finds his wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) continuing his work with the underground gangs he wants an end to it because he’s decided to run for Mayor of New York. Vanessa is upset as she was enjoying being the new Kingpin she goes along with it and thanks to promising to be a breath of fresh air and a tough guy who’ll clean up the city and make it … like it was in its prime (I’m not going to say “great again”…) Kingpin ends up winning and becomes Mayor.

Kingpin truly lives up to his name… that barely anyone ever uses, but hey-ho…

So yeah, Born Again is essentially giving us a world where a convicted criminal who has no background in politics has been elected due to having a slogan that appeals to a certain unintelligent demographic, in other words the current Trump Presidency. I could do without it right now honestly, but D’Onofrio is so damn good as Fisk that I’ll forgive it. His campaign crew is made up of actual politician with experience Sheila Rivera (Zavryna Guevara), enthusiastic young twat Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini) and Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) a hitman who is framed as Kingpin’s assistant. Rounding out the main cast are the new people in Matt Murdock’s life as alongside McDuffie he has retired cop Cherry (Clark Johnson) digging up dirt on people involved in his cases (and who found out he was Daredevil in the same rooftop incident at the start of the show) and Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) a therapist who is not only Matt’s new love interest but also Fisk and Vanessa’s therapist when they decide their relationship needs help, not that Matt knows this for most of the season. It’s a good cast, great cast even, but the central performances of Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio are enough to carry any show even if they weren’t!

The first half-ish of the show basically shows us how Matt gets pulled back into the game and suits up again. He represents a superhero called White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes) after he accidentally kills a dirty undercover cop in a fight and despite being labelled a “cop killer” Matt manages to pull it off… only for Tiger to get shot in a head shortly afterwards by a cop wearing Punisher gear. This leads to the triumphant return of Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle / The Punisher as Matt confronts him about it, but Frank says its just “fan boys” and not him, before egging Matt on about the rage inside him and how Foggy’s death is haunting him the same way his family’s death also motivates him, but he leaves Frank behind in a huff, most likely because he knew he was right. After a fun but strange “bottle episode” where Matt stops a violent bank robbery (which includes Mohan Kapur’s Yusuf Khan character from Ms. Marvel in one of the only non-Daredevil cameos in the show) The tone shifts a to be a bit more focused as a new villain called Muse (Hunter Doohan) appears, who drains his victims blood and uses it to pain murals. While Fisk creates his own group of cops with special privileges specifically to tackle vigilantes and dangerous criminals like Muse Matt finally suits back up when White Tiger’s niece ends up being captured by the criminal and he goes to save her, beating Muse up good but letting him escape as he saves her.

Muse was an interesting villain for an episode or two, but they were right not to make him a central focus.

It’s then revealed that Muse was a client of Heather’s and as luck wouldn’t have it he goes crazy in her office and tries to make her his next victim. Daredevil arrives and saves her, though she ends up being the one to shoot him, but Fisk makes sure his taskforce, who arrived a few minutes too late, get all the acclaim. This leads to some tension between Matt and Heather when she says how much she dislikes Daredevil and vigilantes in general, as a psychologist she feels hiding behind a mask to do violent things being just as big an issue as Muse himself. I’ll talk about the meat of the final two episodes in the spoiler section, but there are some other fun bits throughout the show, like Kingpin holding a man who Vanessa slept with in a cell underneath his house just to beat on whenever he’s upset, and the introduction of BB Urich (Genneya Walton) who is doing the “out and about” streamer thing and is clearly aware the Fisk is the man who killed her beloved Uncle Ben (not that Uncle Ben… ) from the first season of the original series. I’ll admit though the cut-aways with BB footage during the show was actually quite annoying, but they were brief, so never mind.

Frank and Matt have a friendly catch up.

In the penultimate episode Fisk and Vanessa reunite by the latter shooting her former lover dead in her husband’s cell and as part of their reconciliation Fisk has Bullseye moved to a regular prison wing so he can get beaten to death by other inmates to tie up a sudden loose end. Poindexter reaches out to Matt to get him free and during their confrontation (that includes Matt slamming his friend’s killer’s head into the table violently) Bullseye refuses to tell him who hired him to kill Foggy that night unless he saves him, but Matt refuses. This then leads to a double-whammy of Matt accompanying Heather to a special ball hosted by Fisk and Vanessa, and Bullseye breaking out of prison and heading to the same ball with the plan to kill Fisk. It’s here that Matt figures out that during the time Foggy was killed Fisk was out of town (being shot at by Echo I guess…) and that therefore it was Vanessa who hired Bullseye to take out Foggy, but in the heat of the moment Matt ends up taking a bullet for Fisk in a sudden cliffhanger for Episode 8.

I’ll also mention again both the more mature storytelling and real violent action scenes and how it’s nice to see Disney not pull back on those things given its now on their watch.

Overall Thoughts:

Hey look! It’s Daredevil, and it seems he has been born again!

Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 was a satisfying return for the Netflix era cast and the more down-to-earth and mature story telling along with the more violent action. While it hasn’t reached the height of Daredevil Season 1 (or the first half of Season 2) it fits in well with the “still really good” rest of the show, and frankly Cox and D’Onofrio could hold pretty much any script together with their interplay. I’m already looking forward to more next year.

In the finale things hit the fan pretty quickly as Fisk not only decides to flat out ignore doing things by the book but he also sends Buck to kill Matt in his hospital bed as even though that would mean framing him in a positive light “a dead hero is better than an alive vigilante” and in order to do this he cuts the entire power to New York, with the added “benefit” of unleashing his Taskforce on rioters to gain more publicity. Matt obviously escapes and heads home where he finds the Punisher waiting for him, and after a chat, a high octane action sequence of crooked cops being brutally killed and a second chat about morals that ends with them jumping out of a window to avoid an explosion they meet up with Karen Page, who was the one who called Frank Castle back into Daredevil’s life. After a catch up chat Matt and Karen go to Foggy’s old storage bay to look for why Vanessa Fisk would want him dead while Frank just “nopes” out of helping any more… until he hears where the Taskforce is operating out of and he goes there alone only to get captured (after killing a bunch more Force members, obviously) There the Taskforce talk about how much they all idolise him and despite everything want him to join them and lead them but obviously Frank just gets annoyed and says they don’t understand him and what motivates him, leading to a classic Frank Castle getting beaten sequence and the man getting locked up.

Hey look, it’s the Punisher! It seems he’s … never gone away but just quietly killed criminals in the background this whole time.

Matt and Karen meanwhile discover that the dock where they’re based in is technically not part of New York or even the US, which is how Foggy was going to get his case dismissed but obviously the Fisks didn’t want this going public and thus the killing. Uncharacteristically for something like this though the two arrive at the dock and see just how many people stationed there and Matt is quickly convinced that going in there would be suicide so they both head back to the city. The power is restored, Fisk announces martial law (after privately crushing the non-corrupt police commissioner’s head in with his bare hands in what was one of the most visually unpleasant scenes I’ve seen in a good while…)  and Matt and Karen begin to gather together an army of their own to take down Fisk and his men… in Season 2! Then in a mid-credits sequence we see the Punisher begin to break out of his cell, just for an added tease.