A thought that keeps occurring to me while watching Daredevil: Born Again goes pretty much like this: “Damn, there are SO many men in this show. Pretty much all of the main characters. The women, even the powerful ones, are foils that look pretty and talk fast. There’s no texture. Meanwhile, the men steamroll everything with their blinding light and pitch darkness. Where’s the nuance?”
Is this what all superhero media is? Men – in the writer’s room and at the illustration table – depicting other men doing unconscionable things that are, when rendered in a “super” way, undeniably cool? If so, it scares me.
Born Again Episode 6 brought these thoughts to a head. There is a lot of violence and many men acting with unparalleled agency alongside the explicit tokenization of the women in their lives. It makes sense, then, that this is the episode in which tensions start to boil over.
Beware SPOILERS ahead.
“Excessive Force”
Matthew Murdock starts this one out with a prayer for his old friend Foggy. it lands…pretty weirdly, if I’m being honest. Then, Murdock’s therapist girlfriend tells him that she wants to write her next book about vigilantes, and she floats the idea that he could introduce her to Punisher and/or Daredevil. Murdock blanches at the request. This sort of meta-narrative pressure from a masked crusader’s loved one is a classic superhero comic trick which still hits fine. It’s a decent wrinkle, introducing a subplot that I’m excited to see complicate Murdock’s life down the road.
Later, recurring character Johnny Santini – a career sanitation worker and bank hostage from Episode 5 – delivers a shocking report to the Mayor’s desk in a delightfully gregarious tone. The person tagging the city’s walls with thought-provoking murals about the Mayor and New York’s vigilantes is spray painting them in blood. This special paint and epoxy mixture makes the images nearly impossible to take down. Muse’s malice is revealed. He’s the cool villain with bloody eyes and a horror vibe. He’s responsible for over 60 disappearances at least. So that’s where he’s been getting all that paint.
Hector Ayala’s niece tries to give Murdock this information, telling the lawyer that her uncle was investigating the disappearances before his death. Murdock tells her to let the police do their job, and she walks out, cursing everyone who isn’t helping her, promising to investigate on her own.
Meanwhile, Mayor Fisk is tired of asking rich people for money to help with his port rehabilitation project. A leader from one of the gangs in his syndicate is also acting out, even having the gall to visit him at the Mayor’s office. Kingpin feels himself losing control and appears to grow physically in proportion to his pent-up rage, as his suit rips around the arms when Vanessa tries to help him put it on.
Kingpin then proceeds to go ham. I mean ham. He creates a task force of malicious cops and weaponizes them as the “Anti-Vigilante Task Force.” These hateful men have no rules, are absolved of wearing body cameras, and are given heavy weapons to help snuff out the city’s vigilantes – including both Muse and Daredevil – by any means necessary. They are Kingpin’s very own secret police unit.
The episode ends with Kingpin throwing an axe down by his wife’s former lover’s feet and challenging him to a fight. Kingpin then proceeds to beat the life out of Adam in one of the show’s most brutal and visceral scenes to date. It’s interspersed with Daredevil’s rescue of Hector Ayala’s niece.
Murdock dons his suit for the first time since Foggy’s death when he hears from the Ayala house that the girl’s gone missing. He finds her in Muse’s lair with a machine hooked up to her that is siphoning her blood. Daredevil and Muse fight it out, and Daredevil wins the day and saves the girl while Muse escapes.
Raging
Kingpin and Daredevil scream in unison as they batter their respective foes, but the men are not alike. Kingpin is a lot more petty. He yells “mine” just after delivering a killing blow to Adam’s cranium. This refers to Vanessa, who Kingpin obviously sees as property not to be tampered with by others unless they want to die by his hand. Meanwhile, Daredevil is just trying to save a helpless do-gooder who he initially refused while trying to do the right thing.
The episode is pretty smooth as far as Born Again goes. It’s overdone, sure. But seeing Daredevil back in the suit is cool, and Muse is a great villain, at once horrifying and cobbled together like dread itself. We also see Kingpin in his first physical altercation of the series. Overall, what we have here is a worthwhile furthering of the show’s plot without a ton of satisfying payoffs.
Episode Grade: B
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