Welcome, everybody! Every week, I’ll release a review corresponding to the available episode(s) of the nine-episode season of “Daredevil: Born Again” (2025). A week after the last episode airs, there will be an overall review of the season with spoilers at the end. There may be spoilers for anything that happened in prior episode(s) or the Netflix seasons. I’ve never done an episodic review before so thank you for coming along for my experiment!
“Daredevil: Born Again” is back, and Episode 5, which is the shortest episode at thirty-nine minutes, was like a standalone episode though it moves the needle on the will he or won’t he regarding Matt (Charlie Cox) resuming his vigilante ways. It feels like a reprise to the first season of the Netflix series with Matt using his quotidian persona as the disguise to beat the bad guys without the Kevlar suit for protection and branding. It is a reward for all the people patiently waiting for a fight who did not get one for two episodes, but it is a very back to basics though satisfying tussle. No “clown suit” today. The fight choreography is good, but director Jeffrey Nachmanoff disappoints with too much editing and cutting up the action. It feels like a waste. Writer Grainne Godfree did fine but missed opportunities to take tropes and develop the story in clever ways thus missing a chance to take it to the next level.
On St. Patrick’s Day, a Wednesday weekday (so the year could be 2027 or why not just make it a Tuesday) Matt goes to the bank to get a loan for his firm, which opens the door to Matt meeting a character from one of the Disney+ Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) television series and teases the possibility of a team up in the future between Daredevil and the titular protagonist of that show. Hint: the tone would be the equivalent of “Arrow” and “The Flash” hanging out together. One is all gritty and brutal while the other is sunshine and rainbows. Even though this character is adorable, the chemistry just did not work. Thankfully Matt gets turned down for the loan because he is a horrible lawyer with no business sense. His law partner, Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), is not even a voice on the phone though she is on the line. How long before her name disappears off the letterhead? She should have gone to the bank. She knows that she cannot trust Matt to do anything right.
Anyway Devlin (Cillian O’Sulllivan), a random Irish henchman for Luca (Patrick Murney) from Episode 1 and 3, reappears and officially gets more screentime than Kirsten as he wants to get into the vault and steal something to resolve the conflict from those episodes. Eagle-eyed viewers in Episode 1 will recall that Luca was bumping heads with Viktor (Gino Anthony) until Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) broke up their spat. In Episode 3, Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) tried to get them to chill since Vanessa is in time out with Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). This storyline furthers the idea that without Vanessa or Fisk in charge, the squabbles among the crime families are spilling out into the civilian world, which angers Vanessa and Buck so their reactions will be must see viewing in the next episode.
Do I care about Luca and Viktor’s conflict? No. It is a lost opportunity to not develop them or their henchmen as possible viable enemies to Fisk’s grab for respectability. Another ding for the episode is no D’Onofrio, and a day without D’Onofrio is rough. Devlin is only interesting in terms of raising the stakes for everyone else because he prefers killing over leaving loose ends so everyone in that bank could die. The bank robbery starts brutal, but after the dust settles, no one is bloody or bruised which is surprising because one woman minding her business got her head bashed into the bank counter, so it feels like a bit of a letdown when the action centers on Matt, not the real possibility of people getting hurt. There is a lot of cursing, not just a word here and there, so if you think Disney+ means kids, consider yourself warned. “Daredevil” was never a kids’ show.
Who owns the valuable in the vault? Apparently, it does not matter. Is the value its sole worth or does it have other significance? Probably not. There is a neat twist that I noticed early but disregarded until it was revealed. It could have been used to further develop the five families and create memorable henchmen. In the end, it goes nowhere and is just another missed opportunity. Also, a little bit of sexism critique to Matt: follow the money, not the man, but since the point was not for Matt to discover the threat of the Five Families or to develop them into a fearsome Fisk enemy, the potential is unrealized.
The point of Episode 5 is to see if Matt still has the stuff. Everyone comes to the “Daredevil” franchise because we love watching the tables get turned on bad guys who underestimate and would bully a blind guy. Daredevil could be the equivalent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the disabled community. It is a pretty standard heist scenario gone wrong complete with Detective Angie Kim (Ruibo Qian), Cherry’s friend, making a reappearance and forced to tell the worst joke ever that Devlin laughs at, which is the second unbelievable event in this season. It is so bad that hopefully Qian and O’Sullivan got paid extra for pulling a muscle by refraining from rolling their eyes. The other robbers are wearing brightly colored baklavas in red, yellow, blue, purple and green, which of course Devlin gets to wear.
It will be interesting to see how Irish viewers will feel about the episode. They lay it on thick. Sometimes it is cute (“before the big swim” as a term for immigrating from Ireland to the US is new to me) and some of it is so over the top it hurts, but Cox, a Brit with Irish heritage, gets to do an Irish accent. It mostly seems harmless, but it is a little weird to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by making all the criminals Irish. I defer to all of you because if I’m Irish, it is not enough to notice.
The bank robbers ask enough questions so Matt can prose dump his origin story for newcomers who never saw the Netflix “Daredevil” series, which already covered that ground. It feels a little late in the game and unnecessary to offer Matt’s biography, but I did laugh at one of the robbers describing him as a Dickens character. These are seasoned criminals, and it was disappointing that they did not observe how Matt did not crumble whenever they stuck a muzzle on his body. It would have instantly made me suspicious, and Matt was practically announcing, complete with whistling, that he was playing helpless, but wanted to be there. It would have been a fresh twist for someone to counter Matt’s schtick of “I’m just a helpless blind man” from the jump and made this episode a real reprise.
Episode 5 is enjoyable because Matt gets unleashed, but after the excitement fades, it is a filler episode that will end up being forgettable. The status of Matt’s last case is the loose thread that no one cares about, and the countdown for the shuttering of Murdock and McDuffie begins now because Matt will never make that firm solvent. Other than the fights, my wish list from Episode 4 is untouched. I never doubted that you could take the boy out of Hell’s Kitchen, but you could not take Hell’s Kitchen out of the boy. Hopefully in the future, the writers will see how much they could do with a filler episode: build on the mythology, increase audience investment in characters and storylines and make elegant reprises that surprise and reinvigorate the franchise instead of Throwback Tuesdays to feed the nostalgia and serve as a primer for the newbies.
