Daredevil: Born Again isn’t as good as Andor. That’s okay — the vast majority of shows ever created aren’t as good as Andor. But as with Andor, and like the Netflix Daredevil and Punisher shows before it, watching Born Again gives you that same gleeful feeling of experiencing a show almost comically better than its peers. Written with genuine crackle and ferocity by David Feige and Jesse Wigutow, directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff with compositional wittiness and an eye for light, this week’s episode makes the show four for four so far.
This thing is funny, for starters. Actually funny, not “So that happened” funny. Like, almost funny in the same kinda way The Sopranos was funny? Maybe it’s just the presence of Michael Gandolfini and a “mob boss walks into a therapist’s office” subplot that puts the comparison in mind. But I really think the show is mining Vincent D’Onofrio’s big bald guy physicality for comical awkwardness in much the same way James Gandolfini could make you laugh just from watching him sit through a Meadow lecture or Melfi therapy-speak or church services or whatever. Watching Mayor Fisk grit his teeth through a middle-school chorus’s rendition of “We Built This City,” get shuffled to a Latvian cultural center without realizing where even is at first, then suffering through “We Built This City” again but in Latvian this time? I was roaring. (BTW, between this and Paradise, “We Built This City” is having a moment.)
Speaking of Gandolfini fils, he’s a goddamn delight as Daniel, Fisk’s Gen Z bootlicker-in-chief. Not that this position stops him from enjoying a lively nightlife, getting loaded at queer bars with his influencer pal BB Urich. This unfortunately causes him to leak info about Fisk’s plan to cede the city’s recycling program to a non-union outfit that sounds a bit like the greenwashing scam Kit Harington’s character was running in the most recent season of Industry. (The fact that anything in a Marvel show can be compared to Industry is frankly amazing.)
When the story breaks and embarrasses Fisk, he does he whole Pacino-as-Hoffa-in-The-Irishman yelling-at-the-whole-team bit, until Daniel falls on his sword and outs himself as the leak. “I went out to a club till 4:30 — maybe even 5!” he confesses. “In the spirit of total honesty, there was some ketamine.” K-holed zoomers running the government? Can you imagine??????????
Anyway, Fisk forgives both Daniel and his nominal boss Sheila, who didn’t rat him out and volunteers to take the fall for him. He appreciates the loyalty both staffers display, especially Daniel, who launches into a whole Luca Brasi “I pledge you my ever-ending loyalty” spiel. Maybe this will make Sheila more open to Fisk’s plan to bulldoze through the red tape and recreate the port of Red Hook in his image.
One person Fisk does not forgive, however, is Adam (Lou Taylor Pucci), the man with whom Vanessa had an affair while Wilson was away recovering from his deaf ninja protege shooting him in the head or something to that effect. In a series of scenes that, well, feel like they come from an actual drama and not a superhero widget factory, Wilson and Vanessa spar over the affair and how Wilson’s abandonment of Vanessa — scarred by her father’s similar behavior when she was a child — sparked it.
Matt’s therapist girlfriend, Heather, forces them to confront the infidelity and its causes and challenges them to decide whether they want to save their marriage or end it. At one point Wilson croaks “I couldn’t faaaathom a life of meeeaning without her,” D’Onofrio flipping his famously unusual elocution into something broken and vulnerable. And though Wilson insists he caused no harm to Adam, who’s been MIA ever since Fisk confronted him about the affair, Heather still pulls Vanessa aside to ask if she feels Wilson’s a threat to her safety. She says with patronizing sweetness that the mayor is capable of a lot of things, but hurting her isn’t one of them. This much is true. But it doesn’t apply to Adam, whom he’s secretly keeping in a dungeon where Fisk goes to do a little The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover homage with gourmet food while the man begs for mercy. The head of government sentencing innocent men to indefinite detention in a hellhole? Can you imagine????????????????????
As for the Kingpin’s nemesis, Matt Murdock has a long, hard day. He takes on the pro bono case of a guy named Leroy Bradford (Charlie Hudson III), a walking misdemeanor generator who gets arrested for stealing five boxes of Fiddle Faddle. (I get it, man. I get it.) The DA has the poor guy dead to rights in every possible way, but he insists on demanding probation rather than copping a plea and getting a brief jail sentence.
So Matt works his Irish wiles on the harried prosecutor, Sofija Ozola (Elizabeth A. Davis). It’s an odd scene, insofar as this woman is stunningly beautiful for some reason, like to the point the whole episode seems to stop, I’m talking Cameron Diaz’s introduction in The Mask levels of physical charisma. But this is Charlie Cox we’re talking about here, a hunk who can easily hold his own. He successfully bargains her down to ten days, which will amount to seven or so in the end.
Not good enough, Leroy says, and then explains why. Every single time he gets pinched, it has a cascade effect. Even a short sentence can lead to his benefits getting cut off if he misses an appointment. This means begging for change and dumpster diving for food until his benefits restart. (It should be noted that crippling the bureaucracy to ensure snafus like this happen routinely is exactly the state of affairs the Musk administration is attempting to engineer on a nationwide scale.) This means fiending for something delicious for a change, goddammit, which means stealing a few boxes of Fiddle Faddle, which starts the process all over again.
“They’re willing to spend five times more to lock me up than they’re willing to spend to feed me,” Leroy says, in a monolgue delivered with lacerating precision and devastating sincerity by actor Charlie Hudson III. “And you come in here and tell me that’s a gift? That I should thank you?” Matt has no answer other than to tell the man he’s right.
It’s an echo of a conversation he has the night before. While talking to the coroner about the murder of Hector “White Tiger” Ayala, Matt runs into the man’s devastated niece, Angela (Camila Rodriguez). To her, it’s obvious that her uncle was murdered by the NYPD. “I hate them, Mr. Murdock,” she says. “I hate this city. No one is doing anything about it, and no one’s ever gonna do anything about it, because he was just Hector from the Heights and they’re the fucking cops.” The way actor Camila Rodriguez leans on that last bit makes it one of the most savage denunciations of police fascism you’re gonna hear on TV this year, I suspect. On a Marvel show!
Though Matt uses his super-senses to clear the crooked Officer Powell of Hector’s murder, that doesn’t stop Powell from threatening Matt with murder again. And when Matt discovers a Punisher logo on the bullet casing he finds at the scene of Hector’s murder (again using his super-senses in a cool way), he makes the connection with the similarly branded cop gangs out there.
So he pays a visit to the original article. By now, Frank “The Punisher” Castle (the great Jon Bernthal) is a bearded and bushy-haired hermit who lives in a building manager’s office in an abandoned apartment building, drinking and plotting his next kill. He disclaims having any responsibility for what his cop fanboys do in his name, a position that makes Matt snort with derision. (NB: Marvel has done jack shit to prevent cops and the right wing generally from using this legally actionable logo all over the place. Daredevil: Born Again is actively mocking this as total bullshit!)
He also goes to work on Matt, who he knows is Daredevil. Naturally, he doesn’t respect Daredevil’s flashy, nonlethal, masked-superhero methods, his decision to retire from the game even less, and his refusal to lethally avenge his best friend, Foggy Nelson, by murdering his assassin, Bullseye. But the invocation of Foggy’s name reminds Matt of his friend’s innate decency, leading him to reject the Punisher’s murderous encouragement.
At least so it seems. But after Matt returns home to bed down a concerned but horny Heather, he winds up on the rooftop, training with his custom-made weaponry. He does this at the same time Wilson tells Vanessa he’s working on forgiveness, then eats dinner while psychologically torturing her lover. You tell me if this indicates Matt plans to forgive and forget.
The highest compliment I can pay this episode is that it took me fourteen paragraphs to get to the part where the freaking Punisher shows up. And I love the Punisher! Jon Bernthal’s performance as the penitent war criminal turned mass-murdering vigilante is the most complex and soulful depiction of a superhero since Michael Keaton played Batman back in 1989. Now, admittedly, Disney+’s decision to spoil his cameo in the thumbnail image for this episode kinda takes the wind out of his cameo’s sails, but even beyond that…he’s just not the most interesting thing about this episode.
What is? Well, the whole thing, pretty much. The embittered defiance of the petty criminal, the heedlessness of the young politico, the blend of comedy and brutality that is Wilson Fisk, the chemistry Matt Murdock has with every woman alive, the lighting for his rooftop phonecall to his partner Kirsten for crying out loud — all of it is dynamite, and all of it is in service to what is thus far a righteous screed against cops and authoritarians. Also there’s a new villain named Muse (he’s played Hunter Doohan and he was created by Charles Soule and Ron Garney) who does street art with people’s blood or something, like if Banksy’s day job was serial killer instead of co-founder of Massive Attack.
Daredevil: Born Again feels improbable, like the filmmakers are getting away with something, in the same way really great superhero comic-book storylines have always felt. It’s everything I want out of a superhero show.
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.