Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Gets Trapped In Plot Purgatory
Hell is waiting for things to get going.
When Daredevil: Born Again ended its first season with a supercharged cliffhanger teasing a citywide battle against the vigilantes of New York City and Wilson Fisk, you’d expect the highly anticipated second season to immediately follow through with that promise. And Daredevil: Born Again does…eventually. But the problem with Season 2, as with Season 1 of the Disney+ revival and most of the Netflix seasons, is that it takes a long time to get there.
And by the time it does, it makes you wish that Season 1 hadn’t wasted all those episodes trying to deliver that “lighthearted” courtroom drama that the Born Again revival was originally envisioned as.
Daredevil: Born Again takes a few episodes to finally start getting good.
Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 picks up six months after the events of Season 1, with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) now fugitives from the law after Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) enacted his “Safer Streets” Protocol. The new law, which outlaws vigilantism, essentially puts the city under martial law and gives Fisk’s new Vigilante Task Force impunity in their mission to capture New York’s masked heroes. But half a year later, and…New York is essentially unchanged. People are going about their daily lives, mostly happy that the streets are safer — at least, according to the cheery “man on the streets” broadcasts from BB Urich’s BB Report. Wilson Fisk’s militant governance is still operating as usual, with Fisk even preparing for a charity boxing match to raise funds for his task force, which is still violently rounding up vigilantes, masked and unmasked alike.
The only signs that things are wrong are the occasional glimpses of “RESIST” graffiti sprawled on buildings and bus stops, and the Anonymous-style reports released on the dark web that tell the public what Wilson Fisk is really up to. And, of course, Daredevil’s been on a one-man tear through Red Hook, the illicit seaport that Vanessa Fisk (Ayelet Zurer) managed to get under Fisk’s control. It’s there that Daredevil discovers a ship carrying tons of military-grade weapons and arms for Fisk, and which Matt and Karen know could be the secret to bringing Fisk down — if they can pin it on him.
Why run a city when you can murder a man in the ring for charity?
The great thing about Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is that it seamlessly continues the superior second half of the Season 1 story arc, in which Fisk’s rise to power forced Matt Murdock to don the mask once again. But Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 suffers from two major storytelling blunders that have become more prominent in the streaming era: a lack of follow-through, and the cardinal sin of stretching out too little story over too many episodes.
The six-month time jump only accentuates the former, with the “army” that Season 1’s cliffhanger promised ending up being little more than Karen Page operating out of an attic. It’s the same kind of halfhearted follow-up to an explosive cliffhanger that can be seen in Netflix’s Stranger Things, which set up a world-shattering event, only to reveal it was only a mild world-rumbling one. But that’s not totally the show’s fault — it’s simply the culmination of the rushed rehauling of the revival by showrunner Dario Scardapane after he took over from Matt Corman and Chris Ord. As you wait for the action to get going again in Season 2, you start to wish that this storyline had been one season from the start.
Jessica Jones is back! All too briefly.
But Born Again Season 2 is not without its thrilling highs. Charlie Cox is clearly reveling in getting to stretch his action chops as the Man Without Fear again, and even gets to bring back some of the Catholic angst that Matt Murdock struggled with earlier in the Netflix seasons (yes, Matt Murdock crying in a church is back, baby). While it’s nice seeing Matt and Karen as a duo again, the show’s insistence on them as a romantic duo is one thing this writer can’t totally buy (sorry, Karedevil fans). But while that’s one leftover from the Netflix series that doesn’t totally work, most everything else does: Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones is as acerbic and terrific as ever, while Wilson Bethel’s Bullseye gets the most complex and satisfying arc in this season — his hostile dynamic with Daredevil rivaling Matt and Frank’s interactions in Season 1 (almost). While the Punisher’s absence is sorely missed, at the very least, it feels like the disparate Netflix vs. Disney elements are finally starting to gel — Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James) and retired cop Cherry (Clark Johnson) feel like essential allies and not hangers-on, while on the Fisk side, comms director Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini) gets to play out a riveting saga of morally gray compromises.
There are some tiresome subplots that need to be resolved, and some ambitious sociopolitical metaphors that don’t quite work (or, with the Vigilante Task Force literally putting people in cages, maybe a little too close to home), but Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 does end up delivering in its final stretch. The final two episodes, especially, are some of the best and most electrifying TV that Marvel has done. But that’s just par for the course for Daredevil — a show that has often been an all-timer at its best, and a slog at worst. Like many seasons before it, Born Again Season 2 is an occasionally thrilling, often frustrating, new chapter for the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
