Review: Daredevil: Born Again, “The Southern Cross” | Season 2, Episode 8
The show’s season finale is incredibly thrilling and also kind of dumb
Hey free subscribers—this is sort of the finale of our spring MCU coverage, but we're technically back next week for the Punisher special. But if you have thoughts on the end of the second season of this Daredevil revival of sorts, here's a preview of Caroline's review.
I recently claimed that five seasons in, Daredevil had already done basically every permutation of the Daredevil vs. Kingpin fight. What else could there be for the show to do? What hadn’t occurred to me, however, is that while the first and last season of the Netflix run both ended with Matt sending Fisk to prison instead of killing him, we’ve never actually seen Fisk on trial—much less with Matt questioning him. To finally uncork Charismatic Lawyer Matt vs. Smooth Politician Fisk is a thrilling way to end a season that’s been interested in interrogating the show’s past.
The trouble is, after that high point, the rest of this episode sits somewhere between compelling and incredibly stupid, which is also kind of a fitting capstone for the show’s legacy. One thing I learned from my years covering the original Daredevil run is that Matt’s morality will literally drive you insane if you think about it too hard. By the show’s logic, the lives of its main villains are absolutely sacrosanct and the lives of everyone else (henchmen, random New Yorkers, etc.) are basically irrelevant. That’s why the stakes of this finale hinge on the fact that Matt casually let a mass murderer walk free last week—a problem he solves by… letting another mass murderer walk free this week!
It's the sort of dumb comic book logic you either have to get onboard with or not, ditto the fact that this anti-ICE season was always going to end in an overtly pro-cop place because that’s just the kind of show Daredevil is. While I’ve spent gallons of digital ink trying to wrestling with that hypocrisy in the past, at this point in my relationship to the Defenders universe, I’m kind of just inclined to let it go and appreciate this world for what it is rather than what it could be.
