Review: Daredevil: Born Again, “Requiem” | Season 2, Episode 6

As post-mortem interviews about Born Again start to trickle out, I’ll be fascinated to hear if/how production was impacted by the reaction to the show’s first season, which aired alongside the first two months of season two’s five-month filming schedule. For most shows, that would be too late to make substantial changes to scripts that showrunner Dario Scardapane claims were “locked, loaded, [and] ready to go” before production began. Yet given the scrappy, improvisational way Marvel works, I’m not sure that’s entirely the case here.

I raise the question because these past three episodes have delivered such a phenomenal uptick in quality that it really feels like something shifted behind the scenes. So many of my early notes—like the fact that Heather is boring or that we don’t know enough about our new characters’ home lives—are directly addressed here, while flawed additions like Cherry and Kirsten have all but dropped out of the story lately. Whether or not that was the plan from the beginning or a mid-production swerve, it’s a thrill to see Born Again come into its own in this way.

It's also a thrill to see Jessica Jones (Jessica Jones!!!) casually re-enter this story like the Defenders universe never left our TV scenes. In fact, part of what got me thinking about the show’s production logistics is that her return here feels so casual that I wonder if she was originally supposed to appear at the very tail-end of the season, but the show decided that would be too long to wait and somewhat awkwardly moved up her sequences to get her onscreen a little sooner.