Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again S1E5, “With Interest” (written Grainne Godfree and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff), and S1E6,” Excessive Force” (written by Thomas Wong and directed by David Boyd)
Marvel Studios released two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ Tuesday night, just as they rolled out the first two episodes of the new series. Episode 5, “With Interest,” was a sort of day-in-the-life action sequence centered on Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), while Episode 6, “Excessive Force,” tracks back onto the storylines featuring Murdock and his law career and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) as New York City’s mayor.
It was a curious move to release two episodes on the same night during the middle of a nine-episode season, and this move left many fans wondering why exactly this was done. Now, at least in this humble reviewer’s opinion, it has become clear why Marvel did not want Episode 5 released on its own and decided to pair it with Episode 6. My jaded thought is that Marvel did not want the bad taste Episode 5 left in the mouths of its fans for a week, leaving those fans with nothing but their keyboards, social media accounts, and Reddit threads to trash this episode for seven days until the next one came out.
It’s been a long time since an episode of television made me truly upset. But Daredevil: Born Again Episode 5 actually did just that. In a show that has had widespread rumors confirmed about pre-release reshoots, rewrites, and reconfigurations of plot and story, and arc, it was extremely clear that this episode was something thought of long after the initial filming of the show was completed.
While not quite a bottle episode, “With Interest” leaves the events of Episode 4 largely behind and happens primarily inside a New York City Bank, with a couple of characters only venturing a block or two outside of the bank on a couple of occasions.
Let’s start with the fact that the overarching story in Episode 5 has absolutely nothing to do with the broader storylines that have been evolving over the first four episodes of the show. Matt Murdock finds himself inside a fancy Wall Street bank to ask for a business loan (“With Interest”—get it?) for his defense attorney firm so that they can continue to represent the misguided, the unfortunate, and the disenfranchised of the city.
He apparently has been to several of these meetings, as the firm tries to become more cash-solvent, and is not surprised when the assistant bank manager denies him his request. But the assistant bank manager is not just any old New York City suit. The character is Yusuf Khan (Mohan Kapur) from Jersey City who is father to Kamala Khan, better known as Ms. Marvel (an MCU/Disney+ series that received mixed reviews. The Khan family also shows up in the movie The Marvels, which would have loved to have received something as good as mixed reviews).
Daredevil: Born Again, like many of its television predecessors, can’t help but try and tie itself to a larger, more cosmic story within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That means we spend a significant amount of time in this shortest episode of the season with Mr. Khan explaining to Matt Murdock who his daughter is, who Ms. Marvel is, what Ms. Marvel is doing right now (she’s in California visiting some friends, AKA recruiting the Young Avengers), and the fact that she has a new Funko Pop for anyone that might be a fan.
I somewhat appreciate the attempt to try and connect Daredevil to the larger MCU picture now that he is firmly implanted in it, but the episode already had nothing to do with what is taking place in this show. Now the showrunners and Marvel Studios are using a tangent episode to try and connect the dots between Marvel superheroes that reside in the general vicinity of New York City to some other grand mission that’s happening in places far away.
This is the thing that has become so trite and desperate from the MCU. They can’t help but try and remind us, the audience, about other things going on, and drop hints in case we didn’t watch every second of every MCU property. We get it, there is a larger story at play, but when you try and sell Funko Pops of Ms. Marvel in the middle of a Daredevil episode that looks misplaced anyway, it just seems totally and completely ingenuine.
That force-feed of information aside, the plot within the bank was nothing but a poor knock-off of the movie Inside Man. Everything seemed similar right down to its Wall Street location, a smooth-talking head bank robber, hostage negotiators, criminals who sneak out dressed like police, expensive diamonds that have shady pasts, and victims who break bad. Inside Man is one of my favorite heist movies, but this story just looks like it was trying to play the ESPN SportsCenter version of it.
(And don’t even get me started on the fact that the SWAT team burst in guns blazing after about 45 minutes of negotiations and after the bank robbers released two hostages.)
Murdock, with Khan’s help, predictably breaks up the heist and tracks down any of the robbers who had hoped to escape. And yet, he does so while using the full arsenal of Daredevil skills, but still manages to keep his identity hidden even though his costume and weapons are nowhere in sight.
However, the situation does require him to beat up on a couple of the Irish jabroni bank robbers (who decided St. Patrick’s Day was the best time to rob the bank?) to achieve the goal of saving everyone and protecting the prized diamond they were after. But Murdock almost looks like he struggles in these fights against mere men with no training. What would have normally just looked like rust after taking a year off of fighting when he hung up the Daredevil suits truly made no sense after he quickly dispatched the two crooked cops in the witness’s apartment in Episode 2, leading up to the trial of Hector Ayala.
Murdock easily defeating the dirty cops, and then besting Muse in Episode 6, made these fights seem misplaced. So far, the fight sequences and violence within the Disney+ version of Daredevil: Born Again are nowhere near the caliber of the Netflix show of nine years ago. The fact that Matt Murdock looked mortal fighting these goons was a distracting, unnecessary part of the story that makes us just want to know how long it will be before Daredevil dons the suit again and becomes the Netflix badass version.
Taking Episode 5 alongside Episode 6, I gain a little bit more understanding as to why they felt this story had to be told. We learn in Episode 6 that Matt Murdock is struggling to keep the rage and retribution that make up Daredevil hidden away. Murdock surely wanted law and order to work out the situation in the bank, but when that plus Murdock’s smooth-talking didn’t work, different, more drastic steps had to be taken.
That is all paralleled when Angela Del Toro (Hector Ayala’s niece, played by Camila Rodriguez) visits Murdock in Episode 6 and tells him she thinks her uncle, who was the vigilante White Tiger, was investigating a serial killer named Muse before he died. Muse is an artist/murderer who uses his victims’ blood to create a paint that he uses on his graffiti murals around the city. While the youth and all of social media think Muse is the next Banksy (I mean, what do they know?), the truth is Muse is responsible for upwards of 60 disappearances around the city.
After Murdock gives Angela the old “let-the-police-do-their-job” line, she takes it upon herself to visit the underground subway station where Muse is believed to be living.
Meanwhile, Mayor Fisk has learned from the sanitation department that they can’t clean the murals off the buildings because they are painted with a combination of blood and epoxy. Fisk calls in the police chief (the same one Fisk is blackmailing) and wants to know what can be done to find this vigilante serial killer. After not appreciating the chief’s answer, Fisk decides to create his own Muse task force.
He recruits every dirty cop in the city, praises them for how they get “creative results,” and activates them across the city to find Muse by any means necessary. This is all too little, too late, because Murdock, finally in the Daredevil suit again, has gone looking for Angela, and finds she has been taken hostage by Muse. He already lost one friend to a masked killer in Episode 1, and he isn’t about to let young Angela suffer the same fate (and also, she probably has work to do in the Young Avengers after she takes up the White Tiger mantle).
Daredevil is able to juuuuust avoid killing Muse while saving Angela at the same time, but it didn’t happen without the violent side of Matt Murdock coming out again. Maybe he will try to blame it on desperation of needing to find Angela, but the theme of this episode (and this season) is that you can never truly hide from what you are. Murdock is Daredevil. On one hand, that means playing savior, but on the other, that means violence. This is what the hallway fight scene from early in the first Netflix season shows so well.
Speaking of not being able to run away from who you are, Fisk has Vanessa’s once-upon-a-time lover locked in a cell in his basement. Adam, the artist who Vanessa hooked up with when Fisk was gone (tough time to be an artist named Adam these days), is given a chance to escape, however. Fisk hands him an ax and tells him he is free if he can best the Kingpin.
That doesn’t work out so well for Adam, as Fisk lets out plenty of built-up aggression by slamming him into brick walls over and over again (probably angry from too many meetings that could have been emails). His kill complete, Fisk sits down calmly with almost a satisfied smile on his face. Did shedding blood in a violent way effectively trigger the release valve that will allow Fisk to charm more NYC mega-donors again (including Jack Duquesne—Tony Dalton—who we know as The Swordsman from the Hawkeye series)?
It’s unlikely, as now that both Kingpin and Daredevil have a taste of the lives they tried to leave behind, they are surely headed towards a collision course with each other by the end of the season.
