DAREDEVIL IS BACK.
Kind of.
My original plan for this review was, if I thought the new show hit the mark for a triumphant return of Daredevil, to title it “Marvel’s Given Up Sucking For Lent!” As you can see from the title I’ve gone with, the reality is too complicated for that. While there is a lot to like in the first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, there are also some missteps that I’ll address, first in a few paragraphs of non-spoiler thoughts, then a more in-depth, well-marked spoiler section, and then an equally well-marked non-spoiler ending.
“Heaven’s Half Hour”, written by Dario Scardapane and directed by Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson, dropped us back into Matt Murdock’s life a couple years after the events of Netflix’s Daredevil series, and introduced us to two terrifying developments: Fisk is running for Mayor of New York City, and Matt’s trying to date a regular human woman who isn’t a ninja. The second episode, “Optics”, was written by Matt Corman & Chris Ord and directed by Michael Cuesta. Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio return as Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk, and a few familiar faces crop up amongst a new cast of friends and love interests.
Does it work? Has our beloved lawyer by day, vigilante by night truly returned to us?
Well… yes and no.
Grace
Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio are still excellent. The face off between the two in the diner felt a little too light—if Fisk laughs at one of Murdock’s jokes, I want it to scare me—but also the spark between them is undeniable.
One of the two action setpieces is fantastic, and manages to be both grounded in who Matt is as a person, and appropriately brutal.
I loved how they brought the old color themes back by the end of the first episode, bathing Matt in red light on a dark street as Fisk stares down at his city from a penthouse roof in glowing white light.
I also like the overall setup of machinations between Fisk, the police, and Matty’s scrappy lawyering. I think this could be a good foundation for the rest of the season.
I liked the use of music! Using Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms” to underscore Matt’s emotions might be a bit much, but I really loved hearing TV on the Radio’s “Staring at the Sun” and The Vines’ “Get Free”—and I love that if you look at the comment thread under the videos, it’s a bunch of people yelling about Daredevil. This also raises the question: Is Matt Murdock the indie sleaze hero we need?
I think Clark Johnson’s Cherry is a solid addition as a retired detective who now works as a kind of P.I. for Matt. (I mean, I wish it was my beloved Jessica Jones, but Cherry seems cool.) And I enjoy Michael Gandolfini as Daniel Blake, the smarmy, dorky Gen Z political consultant who’s jockeying to be Fisk’s next pseudo-child. (I would advise him to look at Dex and Echo and reassess his life choices.) And the late Kamar de los Reyes is fantastic as Hector Ayala, who is also the vigilante hero White Tiger.
Finally this could just be my love of The Brutalist talking, but I really enjoyed the contrast of Matt’s apartment, with an incredible view of the Empire State Building, and cutting over to Fisk, where we see a swooping shot that frames him with an upside-down Chrysler Building.
Retribution
It feels thin. There were many scenes that felt like sketches that needed to be expanded into longer scenes, and lots of moments—increasingly common on TV these days—of people doing an interesting thing, then commenting on the thing they’ve just done.
The other action setpiece, which I’ll get into more below, felt a bit rushed, and a bit like they were using shadows to obscure some of the choreography.
Fisk doesn’t feel as menacing to me as I wanted him to. By the end of the Netflix series, he was practically THE DEVIL, and even in last year’s Echo his appearances felt unpredictable and menacing, even when all he was doing was bringing Maya Lopez Levain cookies from Manhattan. Here he feels a little too unsure of himself. But also that could be the arc they’re creating, as Fisk tries to convince himself he can be a good man.
I’m really not sure how I feel about all the new characters yet! Nikki M. James is great as Kirsten McDuffie, a lawyer working with Matt, but their friendship didn’t feel lived-in enough yet. Margarita Levieva is also solid as Heather Glenn, Matt’s latest love interest, and I’m intrigued by the plot the show seems to be setting up for her. But it’s a little weird to watch Matt try to have a regular, dinner-and-a-kiss-on-the-front-stoop relationship after seeing him flirt with Elektra via MMA moves. And on the one hand I liked the addition of Ben Urich’s neice BB Urich (Genneya Walton), as an independent Gen Z journalist, but on the other hand her one interaction with Fisk felt a little forced.
And finally my biggest problem is simply that a lot of the scenes felt too short to me. I know, I know, no one has an attention span these days, but I think the people tuning into this show, who gleefully watched Matt and his priest talk about the theological issues that cropped up during Rwandan genocide a couple years ago, can settle into longer conversations and more nuanced dialogue.
How We Got Here
(Spoilers ahead for the Netflix series.) A lot of the stuff I had issues with is clearly the result of this show’s tumultuous history.
Netflix’s Daredevil adaptation was created by Drew Goddard, and played out over three dark, violent seasons from 2015 to 2018. The first season is, I think, one of the best adaptations of a comics character’s origin stories ever. Season two was bumpier for me, but had some great moments. And season three is simply one of the best pieces of longform television I’ve ever seen, an incredible example of the strengths of “prestige TV” being applied to a comics adaptation. I rewatched the whole series recently (along with The Defenders mini-series) to prep for the return of Matt Murdock, and I’m pleased to say that the show really holds up. (Especially now, as so many Marvel and Disney projects have the same flattened, washed-out, over-CGI’d look, Daredevil’s tone, with its rich reds, stark minimalist whites, and dingy fluorescent yellows, feels like a classic noir from a bygone era.)
Season one had Steven S. DeKnight as showrunner, and it had the fucking HALLWAY FIGHT. It introduced us to Matt Murdock, his friends, enemies, and long-suffering priest, and the show’s hilarious version of Hell’s Kitchen—where it’s always somehow the 1930s, the 1980s, and “Now” simultaneously, the neighborhood is so huge and important that it warrants its very own multi-section newspaper, but it’s also, apparently, trapped in some kind of wormhole that makes leaving to go uptown to Columbia an Oregon Trail-esque trek rather than like, a half an hour on the C train. It grounded Matt’s arc in his struggle between “letting the Devil out”, i.e., beating the shit out of bad guys, and being a decent, upstanding, Catholic lawyer who let the law do its job. It also put a lot of weight on his friendships with Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, and his obsession with stopping Wilson Fisk, who spends the season becoming The Kingpin.
In season two, Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez took over as showrunners. To my mind the season was overburdened by the need to introduce both Matt’s ex, Elektra, and The Punisher. Rewatching it I was way more into the Matt/Elektra relationship that I was the first time; Charlie Cox and Élodie Yung do a fabulous job of calibrating their attraction to each other—and just how destructive that attraction is to their identities. I also found myself sympathizing with Frank Castle more than I did the last time around, but, I mean, it’s been a weird couple of years. And of course every scene with Fisk is riveting.
The Defenders mini-series brought Elektra back, and attempted to make a “street-level Avengers” team out of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist, and alas, it mostly did not work. The chemistry between the four was great, and watching all of their various sidekicks and love interests meet was fun, but the main plot about the Hand trying to fight a cosmic war was underbaked, and very much fell into the “Could somebody call Captain America or Iron Man, already, since the world’s literally ending?” trap. It ends with Matt seemingly dead under a building… but more crucially under Elektra, as he chooses death with his doomed love over a life without her.
In season three, Erik Oleson came on as the new showrunner, and, much like how Iron Man 3 is really a sequel to The Avengers, the season spent a fair amount of screentime dealing with the aftermath of The Defenders, Matt’s suicidal depression, and whether or not he can bring himself back to life—but it dealt with it through incredible action sequences. I still have a very clear ecstatic memory of watching the Parking Lot Fight at that year’s New York Comic-Con with my beloved colleague Emmet Asher-Perrin, as the two of us furiously wrote up the panel. I remember the roar that went up in the crowd when Oleson told us they’d topped The Hallway Fight. And they fucking DID. (The Prison Escape is still so breathtakingly good???) The third season resolved a lot of Matt’s ongoing tension over whether/how much to involve his friends in his life. It gave us a Foggy who was a great lawyer in his own right rather than just being Matt’s sidekick. It gave us a GREAT, tough, realistic look at Karen Page’s backstory. It wasn’t afraid to lean into Matt’s tortured relationship with Catholicism. And it grounded all the drama in the relationships between the principle characters.
I forgot just how much I care about all of these characters.
Daredevil: Born Again has walked a crooked path. Initially when the show was announced Matt Corman and Chris Ord were the head writers, and they and the initial directing team completed most of the filming for six episodes of a planned 18-episode season (the Netflix seasons were each 13 episodes long) with Cox and D’Onofrio returning as Murdock and Fisk, but the other supporting roles were either cut or recast. However, when filming was halted for the strikes in 2023, Marvel decided to start over… again. Dario Scardapane, previously a writer on The Punisher, was brought in as a new showrunner, and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who directed for Moon Knight and Loki, were brought in to direct all the remaining episodes. They brought back Deborah Ann Woll, Elden Henson, Wilson Bethel, Ayelet Zurer, and Jon Bernthal as Karen Page, Foggy Nelson, Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter, VANESSA, and Frank Castle, respectively. While they kept some of episodes created by the original team, they rearranged some stuff and re-shot. And now, finally, in March 2025, we’re getting nine episodes.
And there’s the rub!
Born Again
(Spoilers ahead for Daredevil: Born Again) But do the first two episodes work, Leah?
The first episode, “Heaven’s Half Hour”, feels a bit like a Frankensteined creature, like it was a darker vision grafted onto a very different show. It gestures toward the grittiness of the Netflix series, but also, well, there’s no way around this: KILLING FOGGY NELSON 15 MINUTES IN??? A bit cheap, I fear.
It feels a bit like crossing items off a to do list. If they’d given us half an hour or 40 mins of the band being back together, then pulled the rug out from under us, it would have worked better.
Likewise the fight felt too much like a mashup of things from the Netflix series, like the show was reminding us of why we loved the action ten years ago. This got to me a little, because there were some cool ideas in this fight! The staging of the fight, as Daredevil literally chases Dex from Josie’s on the ground floor, all the way up to the edge of the roof, only to hear Foggy’s heart stop? Perfection. Dex treats the other people as obstacles, either as objects in his way, or as clutter he can use to throw at Matt and slow him down. But we see Matt try to dodge around them to protect them, and in one instance, leap to catch a woman Dex has just hit, and lay her carefully on the ground before he runs after him. It’s a perfect way to show their attitude toward human life. Best of all, I think, is that by the time he gets to the roof Matt is bristling with knives Dex has thrown, but he just keeps coming.
I think I just wanted the show to slow down a bit and trust us to come with them as they let the action play out, so we’d feel each of those knives when they hit Matt. So we’d feel it when Foggy’s heart stopped.
It felt like shock for shock’s sake. But at least they didn’t drop a refrigerator on his head?
The scenes of Nelson, Murdock, and Page together feel a little off, the banter is a bit stiff. It feels like a set up, if that makes sense. Dex actually shooting Foggy, and Karen trying to do CPR while Matt chased Dex down, worked for me. But the fight between Daredevil and Bullseye felt rushed and over-choreographed compared to terrifying fights they had in season three. The long tracking shot was a good idea, but it was hard not to notice how often smoke, distance, and darkness were used to obscure the action. And to have Matt, after all those seasons of anguish over morality, simply push Dex off the roof—well, in a way it’s GREAT. After all this time the thing that finally gets him to snap is the death of his best friend. But it’s also so quick and rushed that I didn’t feel it the way I needed to, and then to have Dex’s eyes fly open like he’s Michael Meyers, while Foggy’s lying there glass-eyed and Karen’s sobbing in shock… I don’t know, man.
I get what they were going for, but I’m not sure it landed. Dex certainly landed, but does the emotional punch?
The rest of the episode jumps ahead a year to set up Matt’s new law practice with Kirsten McDuffie, his first date with therapist and author Heather Glenn, and Fisk’s successful write-in campaign for mayor. But because they packed so much into the first fifteen minutes, the rest of it feels a bit rushed.
I actually preferred the second episode, “Optics”, in a way—although that one ends up being a little too light, at least until the final scenes. We meet Hector Ayala when he tries to break up a fight on a subway platform, only to have one attacker fall in front of an oncoming train, while the other attacker finally announces himself as a police officer, and arrest Ayala as the man that was being roughed up runs away.
Naturally, Matt ends up defending Ayala. Instead of digging up dirt on the man himself, he sends Cherry, who is now working as the firm’s private investigator—you know, like a normal lawyer would do. (The show does a good job of balancing this plotline, where Matt is defending an accused cop killer/secret vigilante, and Fisk’s arc, where he has to get the NYPD on his side if he wants to stay mayor.) But then he stakes out one of the crooked cops, and overhears the man planning to kill the witness. And like a shot Matt’s off to save the man, just like the old days.
And it was here, in the last moments of the second episode, that it felt like the new show came into focus. Matt races to save his witness. Naturally, when the cops show up and find Matt there, they beat him up. And he lets them! He tries to stick to his new way of life, right up until the moment one of them pulls a gun. And seeing Matt snap back into his old fighting form, and how goddamn brutal he was, it made my heart SING.
Fiorello’s Desk
And now if you want thematic thoughts with only light spoilers, here you go!
It’s pretty funny of the show to open with a conversation between Matt, Foggy, and Karen about how much Hell’s Kitchen has changed, as they charge into this new, very different, version of Daredevil.
I will say it’s a strange thing to be reviewing this show, at this particular moment in history, as a New Yorker. A mobbed up conman gets elected on a platform of draconian safety measures? With a pithy catchphrase, Fisk Can Fix It, a group of sycophants sucking up to him, mobs of followers screaming their support in monosyllables. I would say it feels too on the nose, but who am I kidding?
The blue caps that say “Fisk Will Fix It” might be a bit much.
I think I love the Wilson/Vanessa couples counseling arc? I’m still not sure. Part of me loves it, part of me thinks it’s kind of a cheap gag. I contain multitudes or whatever. But I do love that this is how the show complicates Matt’s relationship with Heather Glenn.
How’s Lent Going, Matty?
After the opening credits of episode one, we come back to Matt standing in front of a window with an incredible view of the Empire State Building. He’s listening to a song, and that song is Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms”. The opening line of that song is “I don’t believe in an interventionist God” and Matt does a subtle but just about full-body twitch at that line.
He also seems to tuck Foggy’s Mass Card into his jacket pocket as he leaves the apartment each morning?
In the second episode, “Optics”, he stands across the street from a church during Mass, eavesdropping on the crooked cop, but also focusing on the service just long enough to hear “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed”—the bit you say right before receiving Communion. Heh.
Quotes!
“If this city actually elects him, maybe New York’s getting the mayor it deserves.”
“You ask me, that’s pretty goddamn cynical, Matt.”
“…Or maybe I’m just wising up.”
—Matt and Cherry have a conversation that’s eerily familiar to me.
“That sort of person brings out the worst in other people!”
—a New Yorker commenting on Fisk’s triumph.
“I tried to mentor someone, but that’s the closest I’ve come.”
“Didn’t she shoot you in the face?”
[Both men laugh]
“This younger generation—what can we do?”
—Matt and Fisk discuss the problems of modern parenthood.
“New York’s what it’s always been.”
“I’m going to make New York a better future.”
—Matt and Fisk pick up their old argument, right where they left off. But with less hitting this time.
“Whaddya gonna do, move to Boston???”
—a New Yorker expressing resignation in the face of Fisk’s mayoral triumph.
“Did Fiorello LaGuardia sit here? He was a hero of my father’s…”
—Fisk on his new desk.
“You said we’d take on the hard cases.”
—Kirsten McDuffie, already used to Matt’s Whole Deal.
“Impossible odds work is what we do here.”
—Matt, seeing McDuffie’s bet and raising.
“Drakkar Noir, scent of choice for New York’s finest.”
—Matt, on the NYPD’s cologne.
Closing Arguments
At times Daredevil: Born Again feels, to paraphrase an Everything Everything song, “like a picture of a simulation”. There are times when it feels like an echo of the seasons that came before it. But I love these characters, and I’m excited for the potential knottiness of the cops vs. Fisk storyline, and I’m hoping as it rolls along the season gives more weight and depth to its arcs.
But enough from me! What did y’all think? Do we have our Matt back? Or was that opening episode a dealbreaker?
