Today decided to stay home, was not really feeling that well, mostly the cold. I decided to double down and catch up on my Daredevil posts after not doing much, I had a draft for both so was easier and less effort, right now Daredevil Born Again is my favorite show even though Im also watching MONARCH, episode 5 titled The Grand Design did not disappoint me at all. The episode opens with something completely new for what this season has been doing, because instead of throwing more action at you it pulls things back and decides to breathe, using this really clever aspect ratio shift that transports you visually into the Netflix era of the show, the colors go warmer, and suddenly you feel like you are watching Daredevil 2015 all over again, and it is such a dope move that I never though they would do but makes more sense with the mood of the series at this point. Foggy Nelson back in the screen was a cool touch, not necesarly because he is one of my favorite characters of the story but mainly because you forget how much that dude grounded Matt Murdock until he is standing there again in that old law office looking young and arguing about mercy for some lowlife nobody they were assign to defend when the dude clearly knows his future but Foggy know the guy and think if he had better options in life he might just be different, and it reframes the whole Matt and Foggy relationship without feeling like a cheap nostalgia grab for online aura farming. The flashback structure is really good with Matt and Foggy taking a case defending Leo McCoy, a guy who used to bully Foggy as a kid, someone who treated him like shit till the day, is the moral engine that keeps everything going for Matt in the present, it is that connection between past grace and present choice that makes the hour feel patient and earned rather than just a filler episode and the show does not try to rush that connection either, it just lets it build across the whole episode.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18923754/
- Platform: DISNEY+
[Source](https://www.disneyplus.com/browse/entity-85e7a914-c8e6-41db-95df-c740dc2cf1b7)
The Wilson Fisk side of this episode is tragic and I mean that because even when is the villain men that was a hard hit he got, because the visual work they do around Vanessa is some of the most thoughtful stuff this show has ever attempted, it really shows how much they love each other. The episode uses Vanessa seeing the Rabbit in a Snowstorm painting, that same painting from the very first season of the Netflix show that brought Wilson and Vanessa together at the art gallery and it runs parallel to the flashback that shows Vanessa before she ever met Fisk, back when she was just a woman working at a gallery trying to convince her boss to hang an all white painting that nobody wanted to show. Watching Wilson in the present it all what is happening to Vanessa while the story simultaneously shows you the exact moment their love story began is a very well thought piece of storytelling, the kind of mirror like situation you expect from something like very dramatic romance show but almost never get from a Marvel and D Onofrio does not even have to say much because his face is doing ninety percent of the work. His body language in the Vanessa scenes this episode is just quietly devastating, the way he pauses before answering people, they guy is really broke down, it is the kind of performance where you can feel the character processing grief in real time without the show having to spell it out. The episode also brings back James Wesley through the flashback, with Toby Leonard Moore showing up to remind you how tight that machine around Fisk once was and the way Wesley connects to both the McCoy case and the Fisk Vanessa meeting is clever writing that ties the past to the present without feeling forced.
There were moments in the episode I wanted more of but the show simply does not go there, one clear example is how Karen Page shows up at the end of the episode and has zero lines, she is basically just there when Matt brings Bullseye to the hideout and the episode closes on her face seeing what Matt has done, I was expecting her to flip out on Matt for him showing mercy to the guy he wanted to kill so desperatly, its that Foggy soul in him, this sets up an obvious future conflict between them but does not actually develop it in this episode at all. That story is coming for sure, you can feel it in the setup, but it is not played out here and I respect the show for taking its time with it rather than cramming it in. What the episode gives you instead is the Matt and Bullseye back and forward, Matt trying to save him and Dex wanting to die for everything he has done to Matt, he insist its just and equation, all this argument while on the run through the city, which is fascinating because Matt is dragging this injured psychopath through underground tunnels to a church, feeling responsible for keeping him alive, and Bullseye is sitting there bleeding out and telling Matt to just leave him to die, the conversations they have about whether people can change and whether mercy even makes sense for someone like Bullseye is the real philosophical meat of the whole hour. There is one moment where Matt chokes Bullseye after he mentions Foggy by name and you see exactly how much grief Matt is still carrying under all that catholic guilt and morals of his, it is a small thing but those small things are what this episode keeps nailing.
What this episode does better than most of this season is use its flashbacks to actually say something about the present rather than just being nostalgia service, I know there were moments that it felt the episode was giving Vanessa too much screen time but I think they were just trying to exploit Fisk suffering, and that is a harder needle to thread than it looks, I am thinking about shows that have tried this and ended up feeling like they were overextending their story instead of building something. The flashbacks to Matt and Foggy arguing the McCoy case, the guy Wesley was trying to have killed inside the prison system while they were defending him on the outside, those moments running in parallel because it shows you the same corrupt system use to operate back then is nothing new to what he is applying during his run in NY as the mayor, it has always been there, grinding people up quietly while the courts pretend to work. The pacing jumps around going from the warm orange tones of the past to the cold blue of Matt moving Bullseye through the city and the visual contrast between those two timelines did some real work for the story rather than just being a style choice. The debate this episode is really wrestling with is mercy and legal duty, whether Foggy defending his childhood bully as a kid set a moral standard that Matt is now forced to honor even when the person in front of him is Foggy's killer and that is a way more interesting argument than any big fight scene could have delivered. The best part of this implementation during the episode is that the episode does not try to resolve it neatly because it does not have a clean answer to what is more important if mercy or moral.
I am giving this episode a 8 out of 10 and I do not feel bad about it at all because this is the kind of hour that reminds you why tv series can still do things movies cannot pull off possibly because there is way more time to pussh and hold the throttle, it gives you space to sit with characters and let their choices accumulate over time. Wilson Fisk is losing his grip on everything he built because the violence he used to control the world has now consumed the one person who made him human instead of the monster that he is, and watching D Onofrio carry that grief while the show throws back to the moment Vanessa first walked into his life is sad and that on top of Fisk suffering is just pure good drama. Matt is on the run through Hell Kitchen keeping a murderer alive out of some sense of righteousness that even he cannot fully explain, and Foggy is there in the past reminding him what it means to believe the system can work even when it obviously is not. I go back to when Karen watch both arrive its just mind blowing how she would feel, for comparison like when Matt lost it for a second when Dex mention Foggy, you can feel that whole confrontation building from a mile away between Karen and Matt, its not going to be easy to settle and I think things are going to flip now where Matt choose to be merciful DareDevil and its Karen who seek revenge at all cost. This episode is proof that Born Again Season 2 is not coasting on nostalgia and action sequences, it is actually trying to say something real about these people underneath the masks and the violence.
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