Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again S1E7 “Art for Art’s Sake” (written by Jill Blankenship and directed by David Boyd), S1E8,” Isle of Joy” (written by Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead), and S1E9, “Straight to Hell” (written by Heather Bellson and Dario Scardapane and directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson)
Much like the dual identity of Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Daredevil, two parts of the same person, this first season of Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ had two seemingly different personalities. There was the “before times” law procedural of the week before Marvel Studios intervened and ordered rewrites and reshoots. The fingerprints of these episodes still remained. The Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes) case. The man with the long rap sheet who steals the Fiddle Faddle. And the trial of Benjamin Poindexter, or Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). There were also the darker, more violent sections of the season. These sections saw the descent of Murdock and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) as they take the forms they desperately wanted to avoid. These were the sections that connected familiar emotional notes to the original series, and were the parts added later when showrunner Dario Scardapane took over production.
Fortunately, the last three episodes of the first season were strongly in the second category, and it allowed the season to end on a very high note.
After the mid-season interlude of the standalone episode “With Interest” and the hunt for Muse in “Excessive Force,” Matt Murdock finally relents to his darker self and accepts the Daredevil role the city needs him to play. It becomes more and more clear as the season wraps up that just as Kingpin needs the city to achieve his plans for authoritarianism, the city needs Daredevil to play his foil once again.
Much of the criticism of this season was that Daredevil: Born Again was missing some of the classic Catholic guilt that made Matt’s struggle so interesting in the original Netflix series, and also provided a unique backdrop for exposition. I would argue, however, that it’s Matt’s guilt after certain events in the first two-thirds of the season that led him to don the Daredevil mask one year after promising himself he would never wear it again.
Fisk, of course, is furious that Daredevil has returned, considering they warned each other in the diner scene in Episode 1 that the two will essentially be running checks and balances on the other one. A Daredevil return would trigger a Kingpin return, and vice versa. He also has mixed feelings about Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) running the underworld business without him as well as sleeping with an artist while Kingpin was out of New York.
They try and resolve their differences through therapy with Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), Murdock’s girlfriend. But that just ends with them mutually killing the artist boyfriend, murdering members of the underworld who dared to cross Fisk, and both of them trying to establish their own personal city-state at the Red Hook Port, which is exempt from all local and federal laws based on an old city charter.
This port is to become the new hub of crime for Kingpin and his associates. They can legally launder money, set up casinos, and smuggle priceless art and artifacts into the country without being taxed. And while this consolidation of power is one Kingpin’s ultimate goals, how he will protect his assets is through the newly formed Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF). This dark army of sorts is the worst of the worst among NYC’s police, basically “every bad apple in the barrel.” Their uniforms, tactics, and methods are essentially the same as Frank Castle’s (Jon Bernthal) The Punisher, but this group gets permission from Fisk to operate with impunity as they track down all vigilantes in the city.
Meanwhile, Matt Murdock finds the day-to-day defense attorney life meaningless after becoming Daredevil again, so he begins to track down the trail that went cold in Foggy Nelson’s murder one year earlier. He learns that Foggy found out about the Red Hook charter and was set to expose it as a crime hub before Bullseye killed him outside of Josie’s bar. Murdock, desperate to find out if Fisk was behind the hit, confronts Bullseye in prison and learns it was actually Vanessa who (we learn in a flashback in Episode 9) allowed Bullseye to be released from prison following the events of Daredevil Season 3, and gave him Foggy as the target to kill.
Proving once again he makes a much better Daredevil than a lawyer, Murdock’s abuse of Bullseye in prison directly leads to his being able to escape. Bullseye tracks the Fisks to a fundraiser ball where he plans to shoot Kingpin. But at the last second, Murdock jumps in front of Fisk and takes the bullet, sending him to the hospital, and sending Kingpin to enact his Safer Streets initiative, which adopts a city curfew and martial law throughout the city. He promises to clean the streets of vigilantes by all means necessary.
Fisk’s AVTF tracks Murdock to his apartment, but when there, finds Daredevil and The Punisher because Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) came back in town when she learned Murdock was shot and enlisted Punisher to help protect Daredevil. The two of them rough up everyone there, including Cole North, the officer who killed Hector Ayala.
While Page and Murdock go to try and find the legal, documented way to bring down Fisk, Castle is having none of that. He infiltrates Red Hook and kills countless AVTF members before they finally subdue him and put him in chains with a host of other vigilantes and Fisk enemies. One such enemy, however, is Police Commissioner Gallo (Michael Gaston), and he doesn’t quite make it to the cages. To make sure the police are completely under his control, Fisk literally squeezes his head until his face rips off, meaning the last hope of taking Fisk down from the inside is gone (although I still have hope that BB Urich (Genneya Walton) can find a way to take him down from within).
With Punisher in chains and Fisk seemingly in control of the entire city, Daredevil begins to assemble his own army. The season ends with Daredevil talking to a small band of honest cops, his pal Cherry (Clark Johnson), and a couple of Good Samaritan citizens ready to fight back, as Daredevil urges them to “Resist. Rebel. Rebuild. Because we are the city without fear.”
A mid-credits scene shows Frank Castle manipulating some dumbass AVTF member before breaking his arm, which will surely lead to his escape and the Punisher one-off special that is coming to Disney+ in 2026. With Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again now also officially confirmed for March 2026, it will be just under a year until we learn if Daredevil’s mediocre army is enough to take down the most powerful force in New York City.
