Once again I'm breaking my rule about not writing a post about a show that I'm currently watching. But I've been considering the first three episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, and I'm interested to capture this moment and see where the show goes.
Obviously, I'm covering big spoilers, which come after the jump, so don't read on if you don't want to know what happens.
I was actually kind of excited when I first read about Born Again. I found out about it while I was watching the third season of the Netflix Daredevil show, but I was watching it so long after Netflix cancelled it that they'd already greenlit and planned out most of the upcoming new show. That meant I got to see in advance that they'd be bringing back Dex (whose identity as Bullseye I was very careful not to spoil for myself), as well as Wilson Fisk and the Punisher.
After finishing season 3 of Daredevil I lost track of Born Again, so I didn't follow the twists and turns behind the scenes, as they fired the original show runners and changed direction. Usually that's a bad omen for a show, but it seems to have paid off: at any rate, the Wiki page for Born Again suggests that the original idea for the show would have been lighter and less connected to the Netflix show, whereas this version essentially picks up where the previous one left off.
Almost literally, tbh - the first sequence has Dex in his full Bullseye regalia assassinating Foggy Nelson in front of Matt, who promptly throws Bullseye off a building. Somehow that doesn't kill him, despite his belly flop from a fifth floor rooftop, and the next we see of them, Dex is in court for the murder, Karen's not talking to Matt, and Matt's at a fancy new law firm. But he's not wearing the suit.
The show seems to be doing the time-honored streaming show thing of taking its own damn time to get Matt back into the suit (I love how the Slate article about the show references the Surf Dracula meme, which might as well have been called the Netflix Daredevil meme), but in the meantime it has someone else to get into a suit of their own: the White Tiger. There are early mentions of him, but the character becomes more central in the second and then third episodes, when Matt uses Hector Ayala's activities as the White Tiger to beat the murder rap he's accused of, only for Hector to get blown away by an unknown, Punisher-skull-wearing assailant in the final scene of episode 3.
My first thought when I heard the coquis singing against the end credits was that it wasn't quite on the level of Jim Croce's Time In a Bottle playing after the end of the seventh episode of Agatha All Along, but that's not strictly fair. The fact is, I've been thinking about it ever since I watched it on Tuesday, and the Slate article just crystallized my thoughts about it.
Anyway, that final image leaves us waiting with bated breath for what happens next. I know from the Wiki article I read way back, and from the trailers, that the Punisher will show up, and I have to say that I'm really looking forward to that. I thought he worked best when he was sowing chaos in previous seasons of Daredevil, rather than being shoehorned into a heroic role in his own show, and he promises to do the same again here. And I'm particularly looking forward to the carnage when he takes his revenge on the cops who are co-opting his symbol for their own extrajudicial killings: whatever you think of the Punisher, I like how much he hates when actual police copy him.
That gives us a nice segue into the other interesting thing about this show, which is how topical it feels, in ways that a lot of MCU shows and movies don't. Kingpin's run for mayor is pretty glaringly a comment on Trump, right down to the baseball caps with a catchy slogan and the polarized opinions voters have about him. Michael Gandolfini does a nice turn as the quintessential Trumpy young guy who works for Fisk, the kind of dweeb who'd have been turning out for Turning Point USA campus talks and harboring a really gross Twitter timeline.
Of course, we've all been under Trump's spell so long that anything that vaguely hearkens back to him feels topical now. This could have come out at any time since about 2017 and the election subplot would have hit the same. It's just the show's good fortune (if you want to call it that) to premiere right around when the chaos of Trump II is top of mind for everyone. Though I will say that it's handled a lot better than when DC made Lex Luthor the US in around 2001; that may have been poor timing, because Luthor at that time seemed like a better president than the one we had for real, George W Bush. By contrast, Fisk's mayoral administration seems to be drawn pretty clearly from Trump, which is an odd thing for Disney, of all companies, to make so explicit.
To sum up, I'm excited about the show. I'm looking forward to seeing Matt back in the suit sooner or later, though based on the trailer I'm thinking he won't be suiting up again for a while. As I said I'm also looking forward to seeing John Bernthal come back as the Punisher, and there are rumors that the other street-level heroes from the Netflix shows are on deck for the second season, like Luke Cage and Jessica Jones.
As far as the links with the MCU, the Netflix shows made it pretty clear that they were in the same universe as the movies, but I'm hoping that this stays at arm's length from the big stuff, albeit with a couple of fun cameos here and there (like Matt appearing in Spider-Man: No Way Home). Part of the reason the MCU has felt so bloated and unwieldy is the amount of stuff you need to be caught up on to understand what's happening in any given movie now. Captain America: Brave New World wasn't as bad as The Marvels on this score, but still, I like the idea of Daredevil, Jessica and the others scurrying around, doing their own thing separate from Iron Man, Thor and all the other stuff.
I look forward to finding out.
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