Daredevil: Born Again

Marvel

Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again has been a whole lot of ups with very few downs, especially compared to the hacked-together first season that had to work with pieces that didn’t fit. Here, we saw a full, coherent vision come together, culminating in last night’s finale.

The first half of the finale was excellent. The court scene with Matt Murdoch trying to entrap Fisk while exonerating Karen was thrilling, all leading to the culmination of the reveal that he was Daredevil, something that has been brewing for five seasons now across two different shows. The bouncing his cane across the room to prove it was rather funny, but yes, it was a powerful moment and felt like an earned finale that wasn’t just Daredevil punching Fisk 50 times. He punched him…with words.

The second half of this episode? Very funny. And not on purpose.

What happens next is a sort of reverse January 6, where Daredevil rioters invade the courthouse with the goal of apparently trying to lynch Fisk, which seems sort of insane in its own right. But then Fisk presses his psycho button and starts destroying these civilian protestors, flat-out murdering many of them as he storms through the halls and ends up on the balcony before Daredevil pulls the crowd off and asks him to accept a “banishment” deal.

This deal was presented by the attorney general’s office that if he would simply resign and leave New York, he wouldn’t be charged or prosecuted for his incredibly long list of corruption-based crimes. That is somewhat bizarre enough, as even with his task force defense squad, it’s not like he has a nuke in the city as a negotiation point. Just go arrest him!

But the funny, entirely bizarre part is that this deal is still on the table once Fisk has straight-up murdered a bunch of protestors in the view of dozens, if not hundreds, of witnesses. He’s killed plenty of people before, but with no one disloyal enough to report that to authorities. Here, he’s on a murderous, brutal rampage we’ve almost never seen from any Marvel villain, given the usual PG-13 constraints.

And he still gets to…leave? Take off and go live on a beach somewhere, even though he could obviously have just been arrested and hauled back to prison, which is what happens to Matt instead? What?

I get that maybe the show didn’t want to do another prison arc with Fisk, and he’s not being written out of the show, which we know thanks to season 3 set shots, but it was hard to suspend disbelief here. Yes, yes, this is a superhero show, but you still have to operate within the rules the world has set up. This plot turn didn’t even try.

In any case, yay, Luke Cage, yay, season 3. See you then.

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