Before we can look ahead, we must go back. Specifically back to the final season one episodes of Marvel’s Daredevil, the season that kicked Marvel’s partnership with Netflix into high gear. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) spent an entire season unraveling the web of Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), battling his own internal conflicts and trying to keep his friends safe. It ended with the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen battered, well-tailored and triumphant. The one thing we learned about that final showdown between Murdock and Fisk: that Matt is no killer. He’s a man of justice, by day and night.
Season one of Daredevil was about establishing a universe — the street level grit of Hell’s Kitchen that would go one to serve Jessica Jones well, too — and establishing boundaries. While Matt Murdoch is far from being Bruce Wayne, his alter ego Daredevil, the costumed vigilante, is Marvel’s version of Batman. He’s a shadow-operating force who uses brutal hand-to-hand combat to give criminals a reason to think twice. But he’s not without his limits. Season one established this well by delving not just into Matt’s actions, but his faith as well.
Season two, which debuts on March 18, begins by testing all of these newly minted limits. We open with an investigation into the violent murders of several gangs within Hell’s Kitchen. The Irish, the Yakuza, and even some bikers have found themselves in the crosshairs of someone who doesn’t have the same limits as Daredevil. You know where this is going. And it’s a brilliant way to introduce The Punisher. He’s an agent of chaos, turning Hell’s Kitchen into a war zone and turning gangs into swiss cheese.
To say that the introduction of Frank Castle (The Walking Dead’s Jon Bernthal) provides an injection of violence would be an understatement. Instead, what new show runners Doug Petrie (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Marco Ramirez (Sons of Anarchy) have done is take the gritty tapestry that Drew Goddard and Steven DeKnight created in season one and covered it with blood. Oozing, dripping, splattered blood. If you were someone who watched Daredevil season one and thought, “I wish this were far more violent,” this season is for you.
It’s this sense of chaos and more that permeate season two’s first seven episodes, which was all Netflix chose to share in advance with press. Even with only half the episodes screened, we do get a good sense of what season two has to offer. It begins with the violent force of The Punisher wreaking havoc on Hell’s Kitchen and challenging Daredevil’s limits. This contributes to an upping of the action ante. If you thought season one’s Hallway Sequence was impressive, wait until you see season two’s wonderfully choreographed, much longer, bone-crunching Stairwell Sequence. While season two (thus far) is missing a charismatic and complex antagonist personality, it has traded up to the Force of Nature model in Bernthal’s Castle. He’s proper scary at first, later becoming a more well-rounded character who is exists very firmly as an anti-hero. It’s a very earnest take on both The Punisher and his relationship with Daredevil. Thanks to Bernthal and Cox, these are two characters that come alive when they share screen time.
So that’s the great. But what about the rest? This sense of chaos is something that, unfortunately, also permeates the show’s narrative momentum when Elektra (Elodie Yung) shows up a few episodes in to toy with her beloved “Matthew.” Upon her arrival, the show becomes a mess of two minds trying to work together. Daredevil’s relationship to The Punisher and the internal conflict about the limits of justice take a backseat to Matt and Elektra, past and present.
This isn’t to say that Elodie Yung’s Elektra is bad. She’s actually great. Considering the only other cinematic reference point we have for Elektra was whatever that was with Jennifer Garner in 2003, Yung is a breath of fresh air. Fierce and formidable, Elektra is the kind of disruption that you don’t mind, even as the larger narratives of the season seem to be spinning out of control. The problem is that season two, for a time, feels very unfocused. As if it doesn’t know what to do with a characters like Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson. An integral part of season one, Foggy becomes quickly relegated to a series of moments early in season two. And for a time, the same can be said for Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page. The show’s new chief creatives start out without a sense of how Team Daredevil should congeal, especially in the wake of everything they went through in season one.
I use a phrase such as “for a time” for a specific reason. By the end of the first seven episodes, I was reminded of something very important about Daredevil: it’s a 13-episode season that is meant to be consumed in its entirety. It’s designed for the binge, which means that it doesn’t have to overwhelm and hook its audience with every single episode. It’s the end-to-end narrative that matters most. By episode seven, threads begin to come together and the battle between chaos and order is gaining steam as the context expands. The multiple narrative threads — Punisher and Daredevil, Matt and Elektra, Everyone vs. Their Own Tortured Pasts — are beginning to come together to make something satisfyingly whole. It’s easy to forget that the best episode of season one, “Shadows of the Glass” (the one that really peeled back the curtain on Wilson Fisk), didn’t happen until episode 8.
In short, Daredevil season two is chaotic and violent, in good ways and in bad. And based on what was screened for us, it still has a lot of story to tell. A story that I personally can’t wait to see finish when the entire season hits Netflix on March 18.
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