A long time ago, in the somehow distant year of 2015, Netflix released the TV show Daredevil. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was just about ready to wrap up its second phase with Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) along with the much delayed and reworked Ant Man (2015), but at the time Disney wasn’t sure about entering with their own streaming service; it would be another four years before that happened. While the main franchise was concerned about creating an interconnected story, while Agents of Shield (2013) was struggling to stay connected to a larger plot that immediately undermined the basic premise of the show, there were Netflix adaptations of street level heroes that were separate from everything else. The character of Matt Murdock, aka the Daredevil, emerged as the most popular of those heroes, so it’s not surprising that years later Disney would bring him back into the fold.
What is surprising is the chaotic development that occurred on a show that wasn’t entirely sure of its own identity, despite having three seasons of content for inspiration, combined with Daredevil’s own appearances in other MCU properties. His initial return came in the form of a cameo, reprised by fan favorite actor Charlie Cox, and was one of the earliest examples of applause breaks to be seen in the Marvel franchise with Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). He fought alongside She Hulk, fought against Echo. Even Vincent D’Onofrio returns as the gravelly voiced criminal mastermind Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin, managing to find time to be the villain in both Hawkeye (2021) and Echo (2024).
If you read the comics you might assume that the suffix of Born Again to the rebooted Daredevil is in reference to the comics of the same name. Instead, what you’ll find here is a well meaning mess, a blend of two different shows from two different creative directions constructed from two different eras of Disney.
It was originally the creation of two head writers, Matt Cormon and Chris Ord, during a time when Marvel Studios decided they didn’t want showrunners in charge of their TV development. The idea was that they would treat the development of each episode like a feature film, but when you consider the fact that seasons of television often have different writers and directors it’s easy to see why their shows often have solid starts and weaker endings. During this time of development six episodes of the planned eighteen were filmed.
In 2023 Marvel Studios rebooted the reboot, bringing in Dario Scardapane as a showrunner, and under his guidance the show received a new first episode, two new last episodes, and reshoots to fill in the rest of the material. On one hand it’s remarkable that there’s any cohesion to the season, but that explains why elements of the plot introduced in the first episode don’t show up again until the last two.
The result of all of this rebooting and reshooting creates a show that’s about as inconsistent as you’d expect. The first episode that sets up the story is good, with a fantastic one shot fight scene that’s very reminiscent of the hallway fight in season one of the Netflix show, with its drama heightened as the camera slowly moves from the action to nearby characters on the brink of death and back. The build up to the newly returned Kingpin becoming the Mayor of New York City, a subplot promised at the end of Echo, is given a surprising amount of credibility with segments of an independent news correspondence investigating the word on the street.
After that first episode is over, however, the next six episodes of the show are a scattering of unrelated subplots. There’s police brutality and vigilantes on the streets! There’s a gang movement to thwart the Kingpin! There’s a serial killer! A bank robbery! The Punisher is there! He’s not doing anything!
There are also moments where you can see the seams where things were reshot, most notably at the end of the second episode. There’s a fight, despite Matt Murdock’s best intentions, and the episode ends very dramatically after he knocks the bad guys out, one of whom gets dropped vertically onto their neck. The following episode skips to the next day: Matt has left the scene, and the bad guys have left the scene and are just fine, with the exception of some mild bruises.
By themselves the subplots aren’t bad. The idea of the Kingpin putting his efforts into chasing down vigilantes makes sense considering his own trouble with various heroes, except the show doesn’t introduce more than two vigilantes to supplement the Daredevil and the Punisher, who does nothing until the end. A serial killer stalking the streets of New York makes for a great call to action for Matt Murdock to return as the Daredevil, only to lead to a villain that’s a bit silly and written out of the story just as quickly as they’ve appeared.
The middle six episodes of the show has more in common with classic television, with every episode acting as its own self-contained story. There’s an episode focused on a bank robbery in which a rogue gang, upset with the Kingpin, attempts to steal something very specific from its vault to hit Fisk financially. These characters are never seen again, nor is it clear if there’s even any fallout from the attempt at the robbery.
The final two episodes do a lot to save the show. The narrative thread that was spun from the beginning of the show picks up on some loose strands as the plot escalates the tension. The last two episodes make for a very suspenseful end that stops just before the precipice of the cliffhanger. It’s here that the last change of the reboot’s reboot occurs, in that it ends with nine episodes instead of eighteen. It’s an ending that doesn’t offer any resolution, but instead a bit of hope that maybe season two will show up with a more consistent approach to its storytelling, a more unified vision of what the season needs to be from the beginning.