From the first seconds of its first episode, watching Daredevil: Born Again feels like coming home. Contrary to the shiny digital nowheres of so many superhero shows and movies, Daredevil’s Hell’s Kitchen feels truly lived in, with its brownstone buildings snaked by creaky fire escapes and bustling rain-slick streets, lit by streetlamps and strobing police lights. It’s a sense of place that’s even felt inside Josie’s Bar, the rowdy Irish joint filled with grumbling cops and gossiping lawyers, including our hero Matt Murdock, a.k.a. Daredevil (Charlie Cox), and his two best friends, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll).
This general feeling of “we’re so fucking back” gets dialed up even further when Matt’s sharpshooting nemesis Poindexter (Wilson Bethel) comes crashing into the bar. The fight scene that follows is everything that Daredevil was known for: a crunchy, kinetic fisticuff marked by brutal choreography and captured in long, wide shots, so as to ensure that we feel the weight of every blow. Then there’s the hook of us being able to hear what Matt does as he uses his enhanced hearing to search for the sound of his friends while Poindexter bloodily dispatches bystanders. Thus the violence has an emotional impact as well as a physical one.
In short, Born Again picks up right where the original Netflix series left off. The mix of superhero story and legal drama remains a winning formula, ensuring that Matt’s adventures are action-packed even when he’s wearing a non-super suit. The new Disney+ series even finds a clever way to bring its two halves together by having Matt defend another costumed hero in court. And Matt himself remains one of the most complex and compelling characters that the MCU has at its disposal: a gutter-born Bruce Wayne with a great dollop of Catholic guilt.
The broad strokes of Born Again’s plot perhaps hew a little too closely to those of the previous seasons. After the brawl at Josie’s Bar, Matt retires his alter ego to ruminate some more on the morality of his vigilantism. Meanwhile, Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) returns to again serve as the show’s main antagonist and, in truth, its other main character. He’s running for mayor this time, but he’s still roughly following the same character arc as before, with Fisk emerging from the shadows and winning over the masses with promises to make the city great again. After so many missteps, the MCU doesn’t mind shuffling back over a few footsteps and retracing a few others while it figures out how to move this story forward again.
For his part, Fisk remains just about the greatest villain that Marvel has managed to put on screen. Now in his 60s, D’Onofrio doesn’t have the same physical presence that he once did, but his Big Bad still makes for a captivating villain, mixing a thug’s brutality with the delicate sneer of an aristocrat and the awkward cruelty of an overgrown child. It’s no wonder that Marvel has been shoving him into shows left and right while Daredevil was off the air, but the character only really comes to life in Hell’s Kitchen. An early episode of Born Again features a Heat-style diner sit-down between Fisk and Matt where we can feel the full weight of their history together—that delicious mingling of resentment and respect. It’s a richer, more interesting conflict than so many of the MCU’s world-ending CGI showdowns, and it all takes place over a cup of coffee.
Born Again also does a vastly better job than most recent MCU properties of connecting with other parts of that universe, with cameos from and references to other series that always feel organic and unobtrusive. A journalist named BB Urich (Genneya Walton) does pop-up interviews that punctuate the season’s episodes, asking passersby how they feel about the costumed vigilantes in their midst, and all of this enhances the sense of Hell’s Kitchen as a real place where superheroes have become just another part of daily life.
And Born Again knows how to have fun with its identity as a street-level drama set in a world within an ever-expanding multimedia enterprise that’s now full of aliens and magic—like when one vigilante mentions the mystical amulet that gives him his powers and is met with the weary sigh of people who are getting pretty sick of magic amulets. Or when Matt has to politely but firmly explain to a client that “it wasn’t me, it was a Skrull” probably won’t fly in court.
Much of Born Again’s storyline feels familiar, but the climax that it builds to offers an exciting foundation for the next season. While so many recent Marvel projects give half their runtimes over to setting up other characters and storylines, in order keep the universe expanding, Born Again simply tells its story, episode by episode, building clearly from one chapter to the next.
In the end, Born Again by itself won’t save the MCU at large, which remains a tangled mess of half-told stories tugged across multiple dimensions. But saving whole worlds isn’t really Daredevil’s style anyway, and this wildly entertaining new series is exactly the sort of smaller, self-contained victory that Matt and his friends are always striving for.
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