Review: Daredevil: Born Again, “Shoot the Moon” | Season 2, Episode 2
A scattered episode checks in on seemingly every corner of New York City
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The Netflix run of Daredevil had a real sense of a homebase. There was the Nelson and Murdock office to anchor the law half of the show and Matt’s loft apartment for the vigilante side. And even when the show switched up its structure in season three, it recentered Matt at the basement of Clinton Church and Fisk in his penthouse prison. Those spaces didn’t just give the characters a familiar place to return to; they served as thematic anchors for the kinds of stories the series wanted to explore. Everything spun out from them like a spiderweb with a clear center. When Karen took a job at the New York Bulletin, it was clearly building off the Nelson and Murdock anchor-point. When we followed Benjamin Poindexter as he went to stalk a woman, it was stemming from his job guarding Fisk’s penthouse.
Now, however, it feels like Born Again doesn’t really have centers anymore. There’s no homebase where we can expect these characters to return to in their “default” state, and I don’t have a sense of which storylines are building off one another. Last week’s premiere already felt a bit overstuffed with how many supporting players it brought back in their own individual storylines, and now this episode continues to add to that tally. Dex is back. Hector Ayala’s niece Angela and his wife Soledad are back. Hector’s killer Officer Cole North is back, after somewhat improbably surviving Matt’s apartment explosion last season. Oh and Cherry survived his heart attack too, so we’re not even down a player.
Plotwise, it’s easy enough to follow what’s happening with these characters and why they’re returning. But, emotionally, the structure of the season is pretty unmoored. This episode jumps between characters at random in a way that keeps things lively (you literally never know where it’s going next), but also makes it all feel a bit chaotic without the homebase to anchor us.
