"Daredevil: Born Again" just dropped its two-episode premiere on Disney Plus last night. It's unequivocally the biggest show new to Disney Plus this month, so after I finished watching the "Paradise" season finale on Hulu, I powered up Disney Plus and hit play on episode 1 of the latest Marvel show.
Fast forward about two hours and I was left underwhelmed but optimistic.
The next chapter of the "Daredevil" story isn't without promise. Even better, the show genuinely got better as it went on, and the last scene of episode 2 was my favorite of the show so far.
But it has a major problem that frankly, the whole MCU suffers from.
Is this 'Daredevil: Born Again' or 'Daredevil' season 4?
In general, Marvel has a problem that it cannot shake, especially in more recent shows and movies. You feel like you need to have watched everything to understand anything that's going on.
Having to do homework to watch a show is annoying in general. But the MCU canon includes 35 films and 496 episodes of television — just seeing those numbers is exhausting.
Especially when not everything Marvel has produced has been worth watching. I cover this stuff for a living and even I haven't watched several of the films and shows due to quality concerns.
So with that problem in mind, Marvel had a choice to make with "Daredevil: Born Again." It could either make this a new show that people could watch whether they've seen all the MCU shows and movies, or they could make it a continuation of the beloved Netflix MCU show "Daredevil."
Annoyingly, Marvel decided to split the difference.
At first, it doesn't work. The show opens by introducing Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), Karen Page (Deborah Anne Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson).
Except it doesn't introduce any of them. It sort of just assumes you know them, though eventually, it does finally do some exposition work to explain who these people actually are.
But as the show goes on, it steers away from being "Daredevil" season 4 and into becoming its own show. It does this in a big way right out the gate, by (spoiler alert [skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to be spoiled]) killing Foggy and sending Karen to San Francisco.
From that moment on, we're left with a Daredevil who refuses to be Daredevil. When Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin, a man Matt knows to be evil, returns to become mayor of New York City, it forces Matt to reassess if he should stick to his choice to leave the vigilante life behind.
'Daredevil: Born Again' improves in episode 2
By the end of the second episode, we're finally left with a show that can stand on its own. This is the story of a man wracked by grief who must choose whether he wants to stick to his pledge to let the system work or to return to a life of vigilantism in the hopes it helps people when the system cannot.
At the core of this conflict are two characters: Mayor Wilson Fisk and Hector Ayala, who is secretly the vigilante White Tiger.
Mayor Fisk, on the one hand, represents a possible new path forward for the city. But that path is led by a man that Matt views as a monster, so he has to decide if he can trust the system if the system is led by someone so flawed.
Hector, on the other hand, is a stand-in for what can happen if Matt returns to a path of vigilantism and becomes Daredevil again. He also shows Matt what happens when Matt isn't Daredevil, leaving a vacuum in the city that other people feel obligated to fill, for good reasons and bad.
This all starts towards the end of the first episode and then really starts taking off in the second episode. After episode 1, I was concerned I wouldn't want to continue, but after episode 2, I felt I wanted to see how Matt/Daredevil's inner conflict plays out.
I also felt the action took a significant step forward in the second episode. This isn't a high-octane show — it's a brooding drama with violent outbursts mixed within. But in the first episode, the CGI/fight choreography of Matt as Daredevil looked bad.
The second episode ends with a fight that's much better though. Some crooked cops Matt has been tailing to find a key witness for a case decide to beat up Matt, and he resists fighting back until one puts a gun to his head.
At that point, Matt has no choice but to fight back, and he absolutely annihilates the crooked cops. The combat looks infinitely better in this scene and it ended the two-part premiere on a high note that left me excited for more.
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