In this week’s episode of Daredevil: Born Again, Mayor Wilson Fisk, a man with multiple felony convictions recently elected to powerful office, says “The rule of law must prevail.” Meanwhile, (presumably) a crooked cop sporting the Punisher skull murders a politically inconvenient man (who’s Puerto Rican by the way) on Fisk’s orders. By this point in the episode cops have already tried to murder a witness (twice) and successfully frighten him out of testifying when that fails. And oh yeah, the interview is given to an influencer, not the New York Times, mentioned and rejected by name in the influencer’s favor.
In other words, if you were wondering whether the first two episodes were a fluke and the rest of the series wouldn’t scream IT’S ABOUT TRUMP AND MAGA at you at full volume, wonder no longer.
It’s true, this episode is sadly fightless — when you got it, flaunt it, that’s my attitude — but it’s definitely violent. Early in the episode, a truck hijacking between rival mobs goes bad, and two men are brutally executed. Fisk catches the blame from his harshest critic: Vanessa, his estranged wife. Since he removed her from the throne of the empire she was running in his place, nobody’s wearing the crown, and the rival outfits are all jockeying for position. Fisk, whose eyes are on a bigger prize now, is content to let them wipe each other out, though Vanessa warns the winner will come for him in the end.
The execution of Hector Ayala, the heroic White Tiger, following his acquittal at the end of the trial that eats up the bulk of the episode’s runtime serves as a bookend to this nasty little moment at the Red Hook docks. Throughout the episode we’ve seen cops with Punisher tattoos try to interfere in the trial with lethal force. We’re deliberately not shown the face of the triggerman who kills Hector when he’s out on the prowl, but we can put two and two together.
Historically, the Netflix Marvel-verse of which Born Again is an outgrowth has had a hard time articulating a critique of the police without a heaping helping of we love those boys in blue mixed in, even though the balance leans toward the former rather than the latter. About the best you can say about the cops in Born Again so far is that some are reluctant to work for a mass cop killer and some are friendly towards masked vigilantes with magical amulets. In all other respects they’re just another mob, bigger and better armed than any other in the city. The mirrored executions are a way of driving this point home as viscerally as possible.
As for the courtroom drama that occupies the episode between those two points. there’s not a whole lot to say. Have you watched Law & Order? Imagine Daredevil was in it, and there you go. It’s unfortunate, in a way, that the Daredevil character is so tied to this genre by nature of his day job, despite how well being a lawyer works for Matt Murdock the person; it functions as a character trait better than as a storyline, you know what I mean? There’s really not much of a way for the show to retain its savage kinetic energy and pent-up Irish-American psychosexual angst (ahem) during the usual objection your honor/overruled/sustained/both of you, my chambers, now rigamarole. And that’s the stuff that makes the thing sing.
But writer Jill Blankenship and director Michael Cuesta do their best. Every time you see Hector, he’s just a little bit more beaten up, either at cop hands or on cop orders. Matt has a faceoff in the men’s room with one of the cops whose asses he kicked the other night, a fact the cop can’t reveal without ending his own career in the process. Actor Michael Gandolfini has a little moment when he stares down the Mayor’s more traditional advisor after he choses his influencer over her people at the Times that’s so good you could scream.
Best of all, in terms of conjuring a mood for the piece, are the aforementioned influencer BB Urich’s vox pop street interviews. Cut in throughout the episode and filmed on what looks like actual film stock, they serve as a Greek chorus cast a baleful eye on the condition of the city. (This device is straight-up swiped from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and like, if you’re gonna swipe, swipe from the best; Prince got the idea for the “ALL THIS AND BRAINS TOO” shirt in the video for “Batdance” that way too.) Through these segments, we meet gun-toting seniors terrified of “invasion of privacy” and people pessimistic even a superhero can get a fair trial if he’s Puerto Rican. These fears, some justified and some very much not, reflect real political fissures in the body politic. My favorite is the guy who stops eating his food long enough only to angrily say he doesn’t have the answers. Whaddaya want from me? is a very relatable sentiment these days.
But the episode’s high point, in terms of being absolutely crushing? The sound of the closing credits. Earlier in the episode, Hector confided to Matt that his fondest wish is to return to his home island of Puerto Rico and hear the coquí tree frogs sing to one another. We’re only seconds removed from his death when the sounds of the Caribbean waves roll onto the soundtrack, the coquí chirping atop them. Making it even harder to hear: Kamar de los Reyes, the actor who played Hector, died before the season debuted, giving it the same kind of art-imitates-death mournfulness certain moments in — of all things — Twin Peaks: The Return radiated. It’s layered, elegant, sincere, and deeply sad. That’s simply not something most superhero media is capable of delivering.
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.