By Herb Scribner, The Washington Post
This article contains spoilers – very bloody spoilers – for “Daredevil: Born Again.”
Don’t worry, you can breathe now.
“Daredevil: Born Again” wasted no time in delivering the shocks, punches and thrills in its premiere episode on Tuesday night, offering an intense bar fight, a major character death and a bone-chilling diner conversation that suggests the oft-safe Marvel Studios isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty with a mature television show.
“Born Again,” which premiered with two episodes on Disney Plus, centres on blind criminal defense lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), who moonlights as the masked vigilante Daredevil in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. The series brings us back to the world of Netflix’s “Daredevil,” a series that ran for three seasons between 2015 and 2018. In that show (set in, but thematically apart from, the Marvel Cinematic Universe), Matt and his friends Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) fought crime in the courtroom and on the streets. The main antagonist was Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), otherwise known as the Kingpin, a mob boss with a thirst for blood, who also makes a return in “Born Again.”
The new show is effectively the fourth season of the Netflix series. Need proof? Consider the intense, 15-minute scene that’s the centerpiece of the “Born Again” premiere, recalling moments from the earlier show, including a particularly jaw-dropping hallway fight that was as bloody as it was inventively fight-choreographed.
The “Born Again” premiere begins with Matt, Foggy and Karen all at a bar, toasting to another week’s work and playfully musing over lawyer stuff. Foggy gets a call and rushes outside. Apparently, a client of his, whom he stashed away for protection, is getting death threats. Matt races off in his Daredevil costume to protect the friend. Foggy is left vulnerable and, well, you know how these things go.
As Foggy bleeds out in the streets as Karen tries to save him, Daredevil finds the shooter – the villain Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) – goes round for gruesome round with him and ultimately beats him to a bloody pulp before tossing him off a building. His body splatters against the ground as Matt cries out into the night over his lost friend.
Woof. Okay, let’s take a breath.
We’re then treated to a series of table-setting moves that will certainly play out later in the show. Fisk, who has been on the mend after taking a bullet to the face in the 2021 Marvel show “Hawkeye” and failing at mentorship in 2024’s “Echo,” meets with his wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), who is charge of his criminal business. But Fisk has another plan in mind: He wants to run for mayor of New York City. Meanwhile, Matt has given up the Daredevil mask and has been seeking justice for Foggy’s death in court – which includes testifying to make sure Bullseye gets a life sentence. (The villain’s reinforced skeleton helped him survive the fall from the roof, apparently.)
The episode wraps with a diner conversation between Matt and Fisk, in which they warn each other not to cross the line as presumptive mayor or erstwhile crime-fighter. The episode ends with Fisk winning the mayoral race and the city beginning to riot in celebratory chaos.
Uh-oh.
We know the peace won’t last. The Netflix version of “Daredevil” hinged on the long-standing rivalry between Matt and Fisk. “Born Again” is that series – and it isn’t. “It wouldn’t be enough to try to make the old show,” said Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of television, streaming and animation. “We had to aim at a show that touched our memory of the show.”
When Disney and Marvel Studios announced in 2022 that Daredevil would return, the plan was to leave the connection to the old show unclear and vague. (Before Marvel Studios started making MCU series in-house for Disney Plus, it licensed characters such as Daredevil, Luke Cage, the Runaways and others to various platforms.) But around the time of the 2023 Hollywood strikes, the team realized it needed to make a change.
“We weren’t sure how much canon we wanted to absorb,” Winderbaum said. “The first version of the show was trying to have it both ways. It was trying to create a show that, if you watch the original series, it fit together, but didn’t really confirm it. It kind of sidestepped some things to keep it open.”
Winderbaum said they ultimately decided to follow the example of the comics, where two different series of a character can be connected. “When you pick up a comic book, you can feel the legacy of like 60, 70, 80 years behind it,” he said.
So Marvel retooled its production style to make it work. Not just for the new “Daredevil” show, but for all its projects. Originally, Disney Plus shows were designed to be an extension of the movies – which is why we got shows like “WandaVision,” “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “Loki” and “Hawkeye.” All of those characters were feature-film stars who crossed over to the streaming platform. With “Daredevil,” Marvel saw a chance to reset its production plans by bringing in a showrunner (Dario Scardapane, who wrote episodes for Netflix’s similarly dark “Punisher” series) and plotting out the show like traditional television, with individual episodes that can stand alone while also tying into a larger theme, according to Winderbaum.
This gave the “Born Again” team more freedom to build something that was similar to the Netflix series. Intensity included.
“We had to really push the plot forward in a way to honor what came before,” Winderbaum said. “From an intensity standpoint … and a dramatic standpoint.”
And also a character standpoint. After all, “Born Again” shares its name with one of the most celebrated arcs from the Marvel comics – in which Daredevil reemerges after being brought to his lowest point. We’ll see how low. Seven episodes to go.