Marvel Studios’ Daredevil: Born Again recently concluded, spelling the end of the first season of a highly anticipated show which brought back the beloved Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock. Coming on heels of controversial TV projects which didn’t perform too well, like She-Hulk and Agatha All Along, Daredevil: Born Again had higher expectations than any other Marvel show yet. With Netflix’s Daredevil scoring an average of 92% from critics, and fans still upset with the media that Marvel produced after Avengers: Endgame, Daredevil had to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a vengeance. So the question is: was Daredevil: Born Again a worthy successor? Or was it better to leave the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen buried?
My expectations of the show were for it to explain where Matt Murdock has been for the past 7 years, and also explain why he has decided to come back as Daredevil now. The show does just that, but it also makes the bold decision to make it a sort of soft-reboot than a Season 4 of Netflix’s Daredevil.
Unfortunately, there is no way for me to talk about the way they handled the first episode without spoiling the biggest plot point in the episode, so if you have not watched Daredevil: Born Again and want to go into it spoiler-free, I highly recommend you skip the following paragraph.
The decision to kill off Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson was a brutal, heartbreaking, yet sensible decision. Not only does this define Daredevil: Born Again as a completely new chapter in Matt Murdock’s life, but it also is the perfect explanation to Matt Murdock’s abandonment of the Daredevil title. Another event that happened in the first sequence of the show was Daredevil attempting to murder Wilson Bethel’s Ben Poindexter, or more infamously, Bullseye. This action goes against everything that Matt Murdock believed in, which gives him another understandable reason to retire Daredevil. The first episode is a strong, heartfelt opening to the series, and I think it does a tremendous job hooking in the viewers.
However, I do admit that the middle episodes felt like they were missing many scenes. We are introduced to new side characters after the year-long time skip, but the show treats them as if we knew them for a while. This makes me (and fellow viewers) feel little connection to the characters, as their introduction to the show feels abrupt. One of the few characters I feel like they introduced properly was Kamar De Los Reyes’s Hector Ayala, where we feel empathy for him in his opening scene, and we can clearly see Matt Murdock’s motivation to pick up the Daredevil mask once more because of Ayala.
Another character they introduced that played his part perfectly was Hunter Doohan’s Bastian Cooper, better known as Muse. The serial killer is the final push Matt Murdock needed to become Daredevil once more, and comic book readers will be excited to see what they do with him in Season 2.
A major issue in Daredevil: Born Again has to be how quickly the show moves along. Perhaps due to the many reshoots the show reportedly went through, sometimes I felt like there was no time to flesh out a scene to build the characters we are introduced to. This leads to a couple scenes between the middle and the end where I couldn’t care less about the people in it. The fight scenes also felt a bit choppy and cut way too often compared to the more fluid fight scenes in Netflix’s Daredevil (a notable exception being the fight between Daredevil and Bullseye at the very beginning of the series). However, that doesn’t make the fight scenes bad if viewing Daredevil: Born Again as a stand-alone show — it just makes the fights average.
The middle episodes were a bit boring, having a couple of exciting moments but awkward pacing which sometimes felt rushed and at other times dragged. However, the same cannot be said for the final two episodes, where the show picks up and gets you hooked once more.
Overall, I felt the show was worse than all the other Netflix Daredevil seasons, but not by much. I would give it a 7.5/10. It’s well worth watching for Daredevil fans; however, anyone who has not watched the original Daredevil should probably watch all three seasons of the original Daredevil, before going into Daredevil: Born Again. With the next season of Daredevil already in production, I hope that Disney can learn from its mistakes and return Matt Murdock to his former glory.