Daredevil ratchets up the bloody intensity in Season 2

The Binge — Jessica Zafra

DAREDEVIL, the vigilante of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, is not the biggest badass in this season of the Netflix series that bears his name. He’s not even the second. More like the fourth or fifth. However you may feel about comic book adaptations — and there are people who will not watch comic book adaptations because they have fixed notions about grown-up behavior — you will find yourself agreeing that Daredevil has the best and most brutal fight scenes in the business. They’re not just cleverly choreographed (by Philip J. Silvera) or wonderfully photographed (by Martin Ahlgren) or thrillingly edited, they look like they hurt.

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Every punch, kick, blow that makes contact with Matt Murdock’s flesh, even in his leather armor, causes him pain. Murdock is human. His extraordinary senses compensate for his blindness, but they don’t protect him. He can hear the click of a gun’s hammer or the whisper of a blade, but if he doesn’t react fast enough, he will bleed. Every night he drags himself home, a network of bruises, and when night falls he will go out for another beating. To raise the stakes further, Matt Murdock/Daredevil is played by the British actor Charlie Cox, who is so lovely and well-mannered, you do not want him to get hurt. He will win most of his battles, but the cost keeps getting higher. This is the gritty poetry of Marvel’s Daredevil, existentialism with hand to hand combat.

Why does he do it? This was the question answered in the first season, where Daredevil’s war against the crime kingpin Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) was interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood. The scenes in which young Matt does his homework in the kitchen while waiting for his father, a middling boxer, to come home from his fights, have a melancholy sweetness. As a man, he discusses his compulsions with Father Lantom (Peter McRobbie), a no-nonsense priest who dispenses practical wisdom. He shares his secret with his best friend and law partner Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), who mostly supports his crusade.

The friendship of Murdock and Nelson is seriously tested in the second season as an unpleasant aspect of Murdock’s personality emerges. He has stared, metaphorically, into the abyss too long, and it has turned him into a jerk. His personal philosophy is questioned by a fellow vigilante, Frank Castle, whose methodical elimination of rival crime gangs has earned him the tabloid nickname, The Punisher.

Yes, it’s The Punisher, and in the first few episodes Jon Bernthal (he was the hero’s treacherous best friend in The Walking Dead) makes us think the show is called Marvel’s The Punisher. Unlike Murdock, Castle believes that criminals belong not in prison, but in the ground. “The people I kill need killing,” Castle declares, as if he were running for president of the Philippines. “You’re one bad day away from being me,” he tells Murdock. Unfortunately the debate between these opposing viewpoints is presented as a literal debate, with the two men arguing on a rooftop. Lazy writing has no place in a show of such visceral intensity. The new showrunners Marco Ramirez and Douglas Petrie might also cut down the cheese factor of the dialogue — it may work for comics, but causing the viewers to giggle ruins the show’s mood.

So The Punisher is the biggest badass of this season, not because he executes criminals without due process, but because he is so tough he cannot be stopped. Riddled with bullets and stab wounds, his face one massive bruise, he can still eliminate a gang. Badass number two is Murdock’s ex-girlfriend Elektra, who turns up in New York and enlists Murdock in a mysterious cause, of which I will only say: Ninjas! Apart from her wondrous fighting skills, Elektra as played by the French-Cambodian actress Elodie Yung can convince nearly any man that to die for her would bring him happiness. Badass number three is a character presumed dead; number four is Stick (Scott Glenn), the blind mentor who trained both Murdock and Elektra to fight.

There are many bad guys, but no out-and-out supervillains: Daredevil, The Punisher, Elektra, and Stick are basically on the same side, disagreeing only on the finer points. One of the baddies, at least the one whose hair we want to pull out, is the ball-busting District Attorney Reyes (Michelle Hurd) who tries to bully dear Foggy. “We control the narrative,” she tells her deputy at the scene of another mass murder. In Marvel’s Daredevil, everyone is trying to seize the narrative.

Foggy is the real-world hero of Daredevil: a lawyer who just wants to help the oppressed, whose bravery and quick thinking more than make up for his unintimidating presence. When he berates Murdock for his arrogance and foolhardiness, we are solidly on Foggy’s side. He is joined by their legal assistant, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), whose earnestness and tenacity win her some strange allies. Karen is the naïve, perky blonde you expect to hate, especially when she starts mooning over Murdock, but the writers have given her greater dimension if not complexity. Naturally there is a love triangle, mercifully cheese-free. Make that a love rectangle: Rosario Dawson reappears as Claire Temple, the highly resourceful night nurse (But not, apparently, Night Nurse from the Marvel comics). Various characters from other Netflix-Marvel series turn up, reminding us that this is not just a cinematic universe but a successful business model.

This is Marvel’s superpower.

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