“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” When Garth Marenghi — author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor — uttered these words, he spoke as a prophet. We live an era that has made the subtext text. This country re-elected a billionaire who’d previously, publicly tried to overthrow the government to once again run the government. He brought in an even richer billionaire, the scion of an evil foreign government (apartheid South Africa), to rule it for him; sometimes this second billionaire wields a chainsaw. They’re firing people for being women or Black or queer and not really pretending there’s another reason for it. They’re trying to legislate an entire minority group, trans people, out of existence. They’re handing over your Social Security and IRS data to neo-Nazi teenagers. The big billionaire gave a Nazi salute on stage, twice. These are all things that have happened or are happening now, in real life. Every conspiracist’s fever dream about America’s fall to sinister oligarchic forces has come to pass; most of those conspiracists just happened to vote for the oligarch(s) in question. No subtext required!

I say all this because, as a long-time writer about superheroes (comics, films, television), I used to think the “supervillain pretends to be nice and is allowed to take over the government” storylines were idiotic. “But Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin and everyone knows it,” I said about twenty years ago, during Marvel’s Dark Reign storyline. “I don’t care if he fired the killshot on the leader of a Skrull invasion and improved his public image — they wouldn’t just let him take over a major intelligence organization and turn it on his enemies. He’s a serial killer who dresses up in a Halloween costume and throws molotov cocktails at college students. He’s admitted it. If Charles Manson killed Osama bin Laden on live TV tomorrow, they still wouldn’t put him in charge of the CIA.”

Whoops!

Anyway, Daredevil: Born Again is a contractually creative fourth season of Daredevil, the first and best of the Marvel Netflix series from the previous decade. For me, that show was the best thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its TV annex have ever had going for it. It featured warm and winning performances from its trio of public defenders: Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, the blind ninja vigilante with the sly smile; Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, his funny but morally serious partner and conscience; and Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, a dogged fighter for justice whose chemistry with Cox’s Murdock was positively combustible. (It was even more intense when she guested with Jon Bernthal on The Punisher. Woo lord.) 

Daredevil also set an as-yet unmatched standard for physical combat in the MCU, though some of the other Marvel Netflix shows and the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier came close. With its trademark long-take hallway fights, it redefined what superhero combat could look like in a way not seen since people started optic-blasting each other through train-station walls in the first X-Men film, or before that when Michael Keaton used his virtually immobile Batsuit to make himself look like an unstoppable ass-kicking machine in the first Tim Burton Batman movie. (Daredevil is, in fact, second only to that film in my ranking of live-action superhero projects.)

Best of all? Very literally the single best thing in any live-action Marvel project? The voice of Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk, the hulking mob boss and polished aesthete who sees his fortunes and those of “his city,” New York, as synonymous and coterminous. I know a lot of people who don’t like the way his voice stops and starts at unusual intervals, growling its way across dramatic pauses as if every word pains him; like writers who use subtext, they’re all cowards. D’Onofrio’s Fisk voice is the only genuinely weird thing in the entire MCU — not “weird” in the James Gunn/Taika Waititi way, even though superhero fans talk about those guys like they’re John Waters and David Lynch, but really weird, as in unnecessary, as in distracting, as in divisive, as in risking the disapproval of an audience that truly believes art must be crafted according to their whims. Perhaps alone out of every actor ever to take a Marvel paycheck, D’Onofrio risked alienating that audience, to his great credit and to Daredevil’s great benefit. 

Anyway, Fisk is Donald Trump now.

I mean, writer Daria Scardapane, who co-created the show with Matt Corman and Chris Ord, is truly not trying to hide what’s going on in this episode. After a frankly astonishing 15-minute cold open in which the crazed marksman called Bullseye in the comics (played by Wilson Bethel) straight-up assassinates Foggy and kills about ten other people at random to make Matt/Daredevil pay for his perceived crimes against him, the episode is about Fisk’s rise to power as mayor of New York City. Again, this barely strains credulity anymore, even if you put aside the current occupants of the White House: The next mayoral primary in NYC is shaping up to be a face-off between the extremely indicted current mayor, a corrupt ex-cop who cut a deal with Trump to keep his ass out of the clink in exchange for sacrificing the lives of undocumented immigrants, and the extremely disgraced former governor, a sex creep who colluded with Republicans to keep the leadership of the state divided and who has the blood of a lot of nursing-home covid victims on his grabby hands.

Anyway! Fisk’s supporters wear ugly baseball caps with an infantile slogan on them. They talk about his ascension to power strictly in terms of how badass it is and how stoked they are about it. The fact that it’s relatively well known that Fisk is a gangster who once crushed a man’s head is held up as a selling point for his candidacy by some. The many crimes he committed with indisputable audio-visual evidence to prove it — a shootout on a major bridge in which multiple cops and civilians were killed, for example — with are barely so much as mentioned.

Also, hey by the way, Wilson is pretty obviously estranged from his glamorous foreign-born wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer, with whom D’Onofrio has a whole lot more chemistry than the disgraced former host of Celebrity Apprentice has with Melania). In addition to running his crime empire better than he ever did, she’s been having an affair while he was out of commission from an injury incurred in some other Marvel TV show I didn’t bother watching.

But none of this prevents Fisk from winning. Indeed, it ensures it. “You get shit done!” enthuses an over-eager campaign staffer named Daniel, played by Michael Gandolfini in an inspired bit of casting. “You made things happen for yourself, now you’ll make things happen for New York,” he says. “I mean, ‘Mayor Fisk’ — that’s the coolest fucking thing on the planet!” The fascist cult of action for action’s sake, the desire to see government run like a business (whatever that means), the sheer fuck-em-all thrill of supporting a more or less open degenerate: It’s all right there.

Matt Murdock has the same response to all this that basically any sane, thinking person who cares about the welfare of others and the future of our country and the planet has had to the past several months: He alternates from grinning and bearing it to nearly collapsing from the sheer disgusting horror of it all. Since Foggy’s death, he and Karen have become estranged, and she’s moved across the country. But he’s formed a new, more lucrative firm in partnership with a high-powered ex-prosecutor, Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), and possibly a new relationship with her therapist pal, Dr. Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva). Even so, every time it seems like he might feel successful or happy, his chemically-mutated super-senses detect some sign or other of Fisk’s rise to power. 

Eventually Matt forces a sit-down with Fisk — two former rivals, older and wiser, being basically cordial to each other at a diner. This is a scene where you really see how much Cox and D’Onofrio bring to the table as actors: Outside Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, this “we’re not so very different, you and I” dynamic always feels screenwriterly and forced, but not here. Both seems willing to at least entertain the other’s assertion that their “dark sides” — Daredevil and the Kingpin — have been retired in favor of Matt Murdock, attorney-at-law, and Wilson Fisk, man of the people, even if it all ends in veiled threats of retribution should those dark sides resurface.

But on Election Night, their détente appears to end. As he walks arm in arm with Heather after a date, Matt is inundated by the sounds of Fisk-supporting revelers celebrating his election. Matt’s world has been turned upside-down — everyone’s has — but date night goes on. Once the date comes to a close, though, he’s left alone with the sound of his fellow citizens celebrating their own surrender to a tyrant in waiting. As he gazes up in despair, Fisk (who has just told Vanessa he’s aware of her affair, but that he won’t kill the guy because he’s a new man and all) looks down at the city that’s now his.

This very entertaining episode’s directors, Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, do a lot to ensure that the show looks and feels like its predecessor. Having basically the entire original cast return helps a lot, obviously, but so does the use of soft, impressionistic lighting; the treatment of New York City as part its real self and part Gotham (there are some spotlights-on-tall-buildings shots that feel very Burton); and that absolutely batshit battle back and forth through a bar and the building in which it’s housed at the beginning. 

In a way, though, the show’s a victim of its own success: It’s such a hoot in general that its weaknesses really stand out. They start with an undistinguished theme and derivative, overemotive score by the Newton Brothers, much of it feeling like an unsuccessful Ramin Djawadi riff. Like all the Marvel shows set in New York City, it has confused politics regarding cops. While basically all of these shows have used corrupt, abusive, murderous police as antagonists at some point, the gist is still basically that bad cops get in the way of all the good work that Good Police do — beating up protesters, failing to deliver protective orders to abusive exes, standing around shrugging when you tell them your bike got stolen, et cetera. There’s also no sense that cops form a major part of Fisk’s power base, as they do in real life for both President Trump and Mayor Adams.

Even so, the show’s true strength is a script that feels determined to meet the evil and absurdity of our current moment, however imperfectly. We really are ruled by the worst of us. They really are criminals. They really mean to harm us. They don’t dress as well as Fisk, unfortunately, but otherwise? Spot on. And so life for us feels like life for Matt Murdock: a constant bombardment of sensory information our brains wish we could reject. But we can’t, not if we want to win the fight for the future of the place we love.

PS: Rather infuriatingly, the opening credits contain the line “Based on the Marvel Comics,” a grotesque erasure of the actual human beings who made those comics and created and refined these characters and concepts. There’s no such creative entity as “Marvel” — that’s a brand name and a place that cuts paychecks to certain Disney employees. Brian Michael Bendis, Gene Colan, Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Stefano Landini, Stan Lee, Alex Maleev, Frank Miller, John Romita Sr., Charles Soule, and Marv Wolfman, just to name a few, are the artists and writers who made this show possible. They deserve to be honored for it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.