The Right Way to Make a Superhero Human
This article contains spoilers through Episode 6 of Daredevil: Born Again.
For a character whose flagship show ended seven years ago, the blind lawyer Matt Murdock—better known as the vigilante Daredevil—has maintained a steady presence on Marvel’s roster. In the film Spider-Man: No Way Home, he impressed Peter Parker (Tom Holland) with his reflexes. In the TV series She-Hulk, he flirted with the titular heroine. And there he was again, this time in the limited series Echo, beating up goons with his nunchucks. Played by Charlie Cox, Matt became a fun, reliable go-to for cameos, often providing cheeky comic relief and memorable one-liners while getting other superheroes out of trouble.
This seemingly well-adjusted Matt Murdock is a stark contrast from the tortured Matt Murdock viewers originally met a decade ago, on Netflix’s Daredevil. And yet, Daredevil: Born Again, which is meant to function as both a revival and a continuation of that earlier series, makes sense of its protagonist’s evolution from brooding antihero to quippy role model. The Disney+ show leans into what made its Netflix predecessor a success, incorporating plenty of bone-crunching action. It also deploys a clever, deceptively simple mode of storytelling that’s rare among Marvel’s many interconnected and bingeable streaming offerings over the years. Born Again weaves smaller, episodic adventures into its larger, serialized story: The move allows it to balance the exposition required of a superhero-origin tale with the development of Matt himself, and of the world around him.
Born Again follows Matt as he sinks into an identity crisis over how best to serve justice: as the sensitive attorney who takes on pro bono cases for those in need, or as his angry, billy-club-throwing alter ego who uses his superhuman senses and reflexes to take down enemies. The show explores this tension by regularly shifting tones from one installment to the next and following an ensemble of Matt’s allies and adversaries who are similarly searching for direction. Some episodes offer a bleak examination of a character refusing to heal. Others study the human capacity for starting over; even Matt’s nemesis, the crime boss Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), is attempting to forge a new path as New York City’s mayor. And though Matt will always succumb to being Daredevil, Born Again probes whether his vigilantism is the best way to help the city’s people—or himself.
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Take the two episodes that premiered this week. In the first—the season’s shortest entry, at 39 minutes—Matt gets caught up in a bank heist. It’s a self-contained story in which Matt keeps a group of average New Yorkers safe during a subsequent hostage crisis, a classic comic-book scenario that draws clear lines between the heroes and the villains and ratchets up the absurdity. (It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and the robbers are Irish; the script is heavy on luck-related puns.) Though Matt's fellow hostages urge him not to get involved, he stops the crooks by surprising them with his skills. Fisk has vowed to destroy him if he ever puts on the Daredevil costume again—so Matt saves the day by outwitting and out-punching the robbers without ever suiting up.
The next episode, however, trades the playfulness for weightier stakes. Once again, there’s an extremely comic-booky villain: a masked serial killer who goes by the name Muse, because he uses his victims’ blood to paint murals. When Matt learns that Muse has captured a client’s niece, he feels he must intervene. Pushed to don his Daredevil getup once more, he ruthlessly pummels Muse when he finds him. Part of the scene plays triumphantly, with Matt clearly finding cathartic pleasure in cutting loose more aggressively than he can out of his costume, while managing to recover the kidnapped girl. But in a bittersweet twist, Muse gets away despite Matt’s efforts to stop him. All of that ferality, in other words, was for naught.
Where one episode is almost comical, the other is fully grim. In both, Matt’s flawed, core motive—his need to be someone else’s savior—drives the action. By emphasizing its protagonist’s emotional complexity, the show avoids the kind of wheel-spinning narrative bloat that has dogged each of the Marvel projects on Netflix. Matt is built to withstand contrasting interpretations: The writer Frank Miller’s run of the Daredevil comics offered a dark and serious (and arguably definitive) interpretation of him, for instance, whereas Mark Waid’s, in the early 2010s, placed the antihero in a more lighthearted context. The new Disney+ show shares the agility of those stories, adopting its Netflix predecessor’s somber visual style and electrifying set pieces while experimenting with the tone. These creative choices help reflect the character’s tumultuous relationship with his alter ego; being Daredevil can allow him to, in rousing fashion, protect people without relying on legal arguments and court cases. Yet it can also reveal a side of himself he fears.
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That said, reintroducing a superhero to an audience can be a limiting, even tedious exercise. There are a few too many glum monologues about the burden of wearing a mask. An ongoing subplot about disgruntled members of the New York Police Department is underbaked: Although the issue of police brutality, along with officers adopting the Punisher’s logo, echoes real-life occurrences, the storyline largely serves to force Matt and Fisk back into each other’s orbits. And the show can’t ignore that it’s a cog in the Marvel machine, giving screen time to vaguely familiar faces—a secondary antagonist from Hawkeye, a supporting character from Ms. Marvel—to wink at their shared universe.
But Born Again grasps the real appeal of a comic-book character like Daredevil, whose adventures happen not in CGI-ridden multiverses but on actual city streets. Even when back-to-back episodes look like polar opposites, they share the same function: examining Matt’s journey to rediscover his purpose. In the end, Born Again suggests, what makes Daredevil interesting isn’t his abilities—superpowered and otherwise. It’s how, in his ongoing quest to better understand himself, he’s as human as anyone else.