It’s a lovely thing to look at, this season finale of Daredevil: Born Again. Maybe that sounds weird, talking about an episode in which a man’s skull gets pulverized on camera and the Punisher kills the entire NYPD like Jason Voorhees at Camp Crystal Lake. But it’s true, and it’s worth talking about. In a genre that has so often relied on muddy CGI super-combat to provide a pale imitation of the comic-book source material’s visual thrills, directors Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson make this thing sing.
The prologue carries over the Lynchian blue tint from the previous episode. The nighttime feels like nighttime in a darkened city, black cut by the blown-out white of car headlights and construction lights. The mayor’s office is filmed in a way I swear to god evokes Barry Lyndon — long slow zooms, a sort of dim softness and lushness to the images. The portraiture is sensational: Vincent D’Onofrio, Ayelet Zurer, and Michael Gandolfini are all shot to look like the most evil people who’ve ever lived.
On the flipside, the camera caresses every curve and crag in the beautiful faces of Jon Bernthal, Deborah Ann Woll, and Charlie Cox. A smash cut brings us from nighttime to daytime. And, yes, the gore looks incredible too, as good as you’re going to see it on the small screen, while the fight scene between Daredevil, the Punisher, and the Kingpin’s cops is as visceral as anything in the history of this genre. The whole thing is a visual force to be reckoned with.
The plot fires on all cylinders as well. Maybe it’s because the Netflix Daredevil and Punisher shows had longer seasons, accustoming us to a certain rhythm, but this season felt short going into this week’s action. Without being backstage it’s hard to say who did what, but the at-times awkward overlay of showrunner Dario Scardapane’s vision atop that of the original creative team’s led to some strange substitutions and dead ends — Muse as a sort of monster-of-the-season figure, the marginalization of Karen Page and Frank “The Punisher” Castle, that bank robbery episode.
But co-writers Scardapane and Heather Bellson do a crackerjack job of making all of the season’s many moving parts feel like they moved in concert to get us to what happens throughout this episode. From Matt’s strained relationship with his anti-vigilante psychologist girlfriend Heather to the palace intrigue at the mayor’s office to the reemergence of Bullseye to the Red Hook subplot (it’s basically a sovereign port due to a 175-year-old legal loophole Matt’s slain partner Foggy was about to expose; the Fisks intend to use it to create their own “city-state,” in much the same way that the Trump administration keeps pretending it can “one weird trick” its way around the Bill of Rights), virtually every angle introduced over the course of the season pays off.
That this extends to Karen and the Punisher, who had maybe an episode’s worth of screentime between them before now, is kind of miraculous. At least it would be if you were unfamiliar with the chemistry between Woll and Cox, Woll and Bernthal, and Cox and Bernthal. Their character are such beautifully tortured souls, and the actors themselves are, frankly, so just plain beautiful, that you can almost see heat lines warping the image during their scenes together.
After Matt and Karen leave Frank to seek out Foggy’s files and prove a connection between Vanessa Fisk and Foggy’s assassination, there’s a whole conversation about how Matt could hear Karen’s elevated heartbeat around Frank, and Frank’s around Karen — and Karen’s around Matt himself. There’s no hiding how they really feel; it’s like they’re emotionally naked. Oooh-whee, that is hot stuff.
Also, a man gets his head graphically destroyed on screen.
That’s the murder of NYPD Commissioner Gallo by Wilson Fisk, in front of a handpicked selection of cops with an axe to grind. Fisk is using his assassination attempt — we still don’t know who if anyone hired Bullseye, who’s still at large — as a Reichstag fire. He has ConEd shut off the city’s power. He looses his ever-expanding Punisher-branded task force on the street with a license to kill. (A cop shoots a looter to death and uses a ski mask to frame him for being a vigilante after the fact.) He has Daniel shake down the City Council, taking names of dissidents and threatening criminal charges or worse if they don’t go along with Fisk’s plans. He gives an address declaring martial law and imposing an 8pm curfew on the city that never sleeps. And thanks to a tip-off from a tearful but, notably, still employed Sheila, he has Commissioner Gallo brought before this little audience of NYPD cops so he can kill the man with his bare hands. A new day has dawned for New York.
Fortunately for the city, many, many, many, many, many dirty cops will not be around to see it. The Punisher kills a truly staggering number of NYPD officers during this episode of Daredevil: Born Again. I’m talking an absolutely unbelievable number of uniformed cops with Punisher tattoos and tactical gear getting their fucking brains blown out and throats slashed open by Frank Castle on screen. I mean graphically. Huge gouts of blood! Horrifically broken bones! Holding a cop’s head down and pumping round after round into his skull! Even after he’s subdued, he tells the cop gang that they’re “a bunch of clowns” he wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. This is something Disney’s infamous legal department has never been willing to say to the character’s countless fascist fanboys in blue. But Daredevil: Born Again, now playing on Disney+, is ready to go there, alright!
And presiding over it all is Mayor Kingpin, a grinning thief who keeps his political enemies in cages, ignores all legal authority, and blinks idiotically into the camera after saying “I love New York,” as if the slogan has short circuited all further thought.
Just in case it wasn’t clear who this fascist piece of shit is supposed to represent — and in the interest of bipartisanship, if you’re in New York City you’re welcome to toss the current and likely future Democratic mayors into the mix — Daredevil gives a speech to rally people to his cause. Over an audacious needle drop, Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” Matt makes his case.
“This is our city, not his. And we can take it back together — the weak, the strong, all of us. Resist. Rebel. Rebuild. Because we are the city without fear.”
You, the person reading this, are not a blind ninja lawyer. You are not an ex-war criminal turned mass-murdering vigilante with a cool skull emblem. But nor are you a major NYC university kowtowing to tyrannical commissars, or a white-shoe law firm paying a bribe to a dictator, or a gutless senator voting to confirm the latest person appointed to burn down the country and loot the ashes. You are a human, and you derive joy from more than just the acquisition of wealth and power and the humiliation and torment of your perceived enemies. You’re better than these bastards, all of them.
Maybe that’s what superheroes are here for. Largely theoretically, I’m sorry to say — most superhero stories aren’t worth shit — but yes, when it comes down to it, I believe that’s the function they serve. They show us a version of ourselves that’s more powerful and less afraid, more colorful and less cowed. They are not perfect. They’re as flawed and fucked up as anyone else, more so more often than not. But they’re better than the bastards, and they’re willing to stand up and fight them. Daredevil: Born Again is wagering that you are, too. We can beat him.
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.