It’s a blue rose case.
The opening image of this week’s Daredevil: Born Again is taken straight from the iconography of David Lynch, in the form of the blue-colored flower used to designate paranormal investigations in the world of Twin Peaks. When the image resolves, we see it’s a flower in a garden, but that the garden is surrounded by the bars and towers of a prison yard. This feels like a play on another famous Lynch image, that of the verminous insects writhing beneath the pristine red roses and green lawns of the all-American suburb in Blue Velvet. This time, however, the darkness is on top. Maybe that’s appropriate these days.
This isn’t the only Lynchian moment in the episode. Several times, as we follow the mass-murdering marksman nicknamed Bullseye as he’s transferred to general population in prison, escapes, and arrives at Mayor Fisk’s black-and-white ball, the screen takes on a blue tint. When Matt Murdock takes the bullet Bullseye intended for Fisk, the screen is hypersaturated with red. It’s reminiscent of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, respectively.
Lynch’s work ties to what writers Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead are up to in this episode only in the loosest possible sense. Maybe you could stretch and say the dual personae of both Murdock/Daredevil and Fisk/Kingpin are just the superhero genre’s way of exploring the same fissures in identity that Lynch’s Hitchcockian doubles did in the two aforementioned horror masterpieces. Or maybe Vincent D’Onofrio’s raspy stop-and-start voice reminds you of Robert Loggia growling his way through Lost Highway as the similarly, let’s say, romantically possessive gangster Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway.
But I don’t think you need to be doing the same kinds of things David Lynch did to borrow the tools he used to do them with. Indeed, that’s where many soi-disant “Lynchian” films and TV shows go wrong — aiming for his thoughtful, sensual surrealism and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “whoa, that was weird” at best. Why not stick a blue rose at the beginning of a TV show about a blind lawyer’s blood feud with both a gangster the size of Shaquille O’Neal and an assassin who can spit out his own tooth hard enough to put an eye out with it? Why not do big beautiful things with color just because they’re big and beautiful things you can do?
Matt’s not handling things particularly well in this episode. Though his girlfriend, Dr. Heather Glenn, is rebounding from killing one of her own patiences after he put on a scary costume and tried to bleed her to death, Matt is upset to learn she sees Muse, the masked killer, and Daredevil, the vigilante who tried to save her from him, as functionally identical figures — “undereeveloped boys hiding behind masks” who “were both out there for themselves.”
Matt’s even more aghast when he deduces that Heather has Wilson Fisk as a client. He knows that the Mayor only would have selected her as a way of getting to him, but telling her so without also telling her why — that he’s Daredevil, Fisk’s archnemesis, and that Fisk knows it — only makes him sound crazy. Actually, telling her that stuff might make him seem just as crazy, albeit in a different way.
Over in the Fisk camp, Wilson comes clean to Vanessa and, there’s really no way to sugarcoat this, reveals that he’s been keeping her lover in a dungeon for months. But rather than free the man, she kills him, which for these two constitutes renewing your vows.
With this happy event behind them, they can now stride boldly into Fisk’s gala black-and-white ball, where he’ll be shaking down New York City’s rich and powerful one at a time. And I do mean boldly: In a clever bit of costuming, Vanessa is in bright red when she arrives on Wilson’s arm, standing out in the monochromatic crowd the way she stands out in Fisk’s own eyes. She’s a bit like that blood splatter on the white painting he keeps in the dungeon, which has factored into their relationship since he bought it from her gallery in the show’s first Netflix season, which in turn is a bit like the blood splatter on Fisk’s white-on-white tux when Matt gets shot saving him from Bullseye. I told you it was clever costuming!
At the party, Fisk holds court behind closed doors, threatening the rich vigilante known as the Swordsman (he’s the guy played by Better Call Saul’s Tony Dalton) unless he ponies up to support Fisk’s big Red Hook development project. Fisk’s newly minted Deputy Mayor for Communications, Daniel, acts like a creepy reptile toward his now-former boss Sheila, then does a whole all-is-forgiven routine with his friend BB Urich, whom he threatened last week. They’re simple notes to play, but actor Michael Gandolfini makes them resonate.
For her part, BB makes a connection with the disgruntled Commissioner Gallo, who’s slinking out of the party horrified after watching Fisk’s lawless cop task force literally deep-fry a photographer’s hand. BB calls them “Fisk’s SS,” which is an appropriate comparison to make about security forces sworn directly to a strongman. Just saying. Unfortunately, this little meeting goes down in front of a task force member’s watchful eyes.
By the time Matt arrives at the party, he’s pieced together something that’s been bothering him. Why would Fisk have Bullseye moved to gen pop, a death sentence given the gunman’s law-enforcement background, if the killer’s assassination of Matt’s friend and partner Foggy was about settling old scores? Matt figures out that Foggy was on the verge of winning a big case before he was killed, that Bullseye was hired to silence him, and that Vanessa did the hiring him, since the killing took place when Fisk was out of commission and she was running his empire for him.
As the two couples intermingle and dance around the ballroom floor, Matt asks Vanessa if Wilson knows she was responsible for Foggy’s killing. She asks Matt if Heather knows he’s Daredevil, something Fisk is hinting at while he speaks with Heather just a few feet away. Then Matt hears the cock of a hammer and throws himself in front of the bullet aimed at Fisk by Bullseye, who dresses as a cop to escape prison and crash the party.
A superhero show for our time, Daredevil: Born Again is very good at capturing the bully-boy swagger of people who think they’re above the law, and may even be right to think so: politicians, the rich, cops, corrections officers, killers, various overlaps between the categories. When Matt gives his concerned partner Kirsten Mcduffie the litany of cosmic unfairness that has him so messed up at work, it’s not hard to see why he feels that way. You put on a costume and go out there and give it your all every day, and for what? So someone you love can tell you that a man who stands for everything you hate is actually right and you’re wrong? So the people who’ve gone out of their way to ruin your life and the lives of the people you love can basically escape consequences? So the powerful can keep grinding up and spitting out the powerless? So people with badges can kill people without them?
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.