Daredevil: Born Again: Heaven’s Half Hour
March 4, 2025 8:03 PM - Season 1, Episode 1 - Subscribe
Matt Murdoch gives up the mask. Wilson Fisk has his sights set to new heights.
Now streaming on Disney+.
Now streaming on Disney+.
Yeah. A little too on the nose for right now.
posted by kokaku at 5:26 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]
posted by kokaku at 5:26 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]
Speaking of catching up, this 15:54 YT video does the job admirably by recapping the Netflix show and other appearances of the cast (Defenders, Punisher, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Hawkeye, Echo, She-Hulk).
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:58 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:58 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]
me: "ok, I enjoyed DD previously and the world sucks now, but hey new season"
Then foggie is killed and I'm like "OK RERUNS OF THE LOVEBOAT IT IS"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:27 PM on March 5 [12 favorites]
Then foggie is killed and I'm like "OK RERUNS OF THE LOVEBOAT IT IS"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:27 PM on March 5 [12 favorites]
But I stuck with it and the conversation between Fisk and Matt was fantastic. Two great actors just chewing the scenery and embodying their characters so very well. So similar, yet so different! Plus there's clearly something about Murdock that pisses Fisk off and I can't wait to see that play out.
I've been avoiding violent media for a while, but this first episode makes me realize be I've been doing that because it often seems gratuitous. This story feels like the violence is part of their nature and character and it's clearly something they both wrestled with and will continue to do so.
Still not happy about Foggie, but the acting, characters, and direction is this first episode is really good, makes me want to stick around.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:03 PM on March 5
I've been avoiding violent media for a while, but this first episode makes me realize be I've been doing that because it often seems gratuitous. This story feels like the violence is part of their nature and character and it's clearly something they both wrestled with and will continue to do so.
Still not happy about Foggie, but the acting, characters, and direction is this first episode is really good, makes me want to stick around.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:03 PM on March 5
Yeah, I thought Elden Henson was looking a little too handsome and clean and buff to be long for the show - no point in gaining the weight for Foggy's baby face if it was only going to be the one episode, y'know? (Watch, the credits are a fakeout and some mysterious Lo-Pan energy shit brings him back for the rest of the season. I'unno, shit happens. I've made bad guesses before and I'll make 'em again.)
And while I liked what they were trying to do with the opening fight (it felt like a single take? But I'm not going back to check.), but a lot of the stuff they did to both obscure the CG tricks and or make the CG tricks fit into a television budget, some of it was kinda ropey as a result.
But yeah, I'll watch Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio chew the scenery for hours - the vigilante stuff isn't really what brings me to this world. I mean, it didn't hurt that the vigilante shit was really well done 10 years ago, but I've always thought that writers manage to give Kingpin better justification than is usual or necessary for the format.
posted by Kyol at 7:27 PM on March 5
And while I liked what they were trying to do with the opening fight (it felt like a single take? But I'm not going back to check.), but a lot of the stuff they did to both obscure the CG tricks and or make the CG tricks fit into a television budget, some of it was kinda ropey as a result.
But yeah, I'll watch Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio chew the scenery for hours - the vigilante stuff isn't really what brings me to this world. I mean, it didn't hurt that the vigilante shit was really well done 10 years ago, but I've always thought that writers manage to give Kingpin better justification than is usual or necessary for the format.
posted by Kyol at 7:27 PM on March 5
::sigh:: I really loved the Netflix Daredevil, and it was always best when Matt was either fighting to defend the good people of Hell's Kitchen, being a lawyer, or thinking about his immortal soul. Based on this first episode, I'm guessing Kevin Feige is not giving us much of any of those.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:28 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 6:28 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]
Well:
- The first episode correctly notes that Hell's Kitchen is pretty well gentrified; in fact, it really was well before the Netflix show premiered. Portraying it as a decaying slum was a throwback to how Frank Miller experienced NYC in the seventies when there was still a lot of urban crime. There's still crime in NYC, of course, but probably for that neighborhood it wouldn't be a matter of him crouching on a rooftop on any given night and listening for a couple of minutes and inevitably hearing a mugging in progress a few blocks away.
- Likewise, rents in the city are such that Nelson & Murdock couldn't have kept the storefront open for very long unless someone kicked in a lot of money on a regular basis. I'm pretty confident that Matt will still do a significant amount of pro bono work.
- I don't know what to tell you, except to point out that the subtitle of the series is literally "Born Again."
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:37 AM on March 6
- The first episode correctly notes that Hell's Kitchen is pretty well gentrified; in fact, it really was well before the Netflix show premiered. Portraying it as a decaying slum was a throwback to how Frank Miller experienced NYC in the seventies when there was still a lot of urban crime. There's still crime in NYC, of course, but probably for that neighborhood it wouldn't be a matter of him crouching on a rooftop on any given night and listening for a couple of minutes and inevitably hearing a mugging in progress a few blocks away.
- Likewise, rents in the city are such that Nelson & Murdock couldn't have kept the storefront open for very long unless someone kicked in a lot of money on a regular basis. I'm pretty confident that Matt will still do a significant amount of pro bono work.
- I don't know what to tell you, except to point out that the subtitle of the series is literally "Born Again."
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:37 AM on March 6
Between Ben Urich, Maria Hill, and now Foggy, I’m getting really tired of Marvel TV killing off these really useful non-super background characters from the comics in order to get cheap shock value.
Maybe I’m just spoiled by the way Jonathan Hickman’s “tell good stories, but don’t screw over future creators; leave characters in better shape than you found them” ethos has influenced the comics in the last 5-10 years. So many really good stories from other corners of the shared universe that are now harder to do, though!
It also feels like the show is trying to speedrun the DD/Bullseye relationship in a way that really doesn’t earn the stakes it wants to have. I was expecting some pretty heavy modification of the original story in order to do it in the MCU, but this first episode has me braced for a Secret Invasion-level misfire of an adaptation.
posted by FallibleHuman at 8:37 AM on March 6 [6 favorites]
Maybe I’m just spoiled by the way Jonathan Hickman’s “tell good stories, but don’t screw over future creators; leave characters in better shape than you found them” ethos has influenced the comics in the last 5-10 years. So many really good stories from other corners of the shared universe that are now harder to do, though!
It also feels like the show is trying to speedrun the DD/Bullseye relationship in a way that really doesn’t earn the stakes it wants to have. I was expecting some pretty heavy modification of the original story in order to do it in the MCU, but this first episode has me braced for a Secret Invasion-level misfire of an adaptation.
posted by FallibleHuman at 8:37 AM on March 6 [6 favorites]
Between Ben Urich, Maria Hill, and now Foggy, I’m getting really tired of Marvel TV killing off these really useful non-super background characters from the comics in order to get cheap shock value.
Hard same. It just doesn't seem like Marvel Studios understands that killing off these background characters is eating the seed corn, in a sense. These minor characters are the ones you can afford to have do cameos in 8 different movies and 4 different TV shows; it's the characters, not the obscure plot points or MacGuffins, that gave the early days of the MCU that "it's all connected" feeling. Killing off these background characters is how you destroy the connective tissue that kept the MCU a universe rather than merely a collection of media. Killing Phil Coulson just to justify the team name of the Avengers was the earliest example of this, so in some ways it's the MCU's "original sin". Granted, Coulson didn't stay dead...but Agents of SHIELD ending up being ambiguously non-canon was in a lot of ways the first big fracture in the "it's all connected"-ness of the MCU, and I don't think that's a coincidence after Coulson was the first piece of connective tissue they killed off. At the time they had plenty of other minor players, but man they've been chewing through the roster of bit characters a lot faster than they've been replenishing it, lately. (I'd even include Emily VanCamp's Sharon Carter in the list; an undercooked heel-turn ain't much better than a cheap death.)
Maria Hill was absolutely the worst one, though, just for the shitty gender dynamics of fridging a woman this far into the 21st century. Soured me on Secret Invasion immediately and nothing else in it was good enough to recover. Daredevil, two episodes in, is much more promising, though it helps a lot that Wilson Fisk is arguably the best work Vincent D'Onofrio's ever done -- and that's a pretty high bar.
It also feels like the show is trying to speedrun the DD/Bullseye relationship in a way that really doesn’t earn the stakes it wants to have.
FWIW, Bullseye (played by the same actor, no less) was a major part of Season 3 of the Netflix Daredevil; the enmity between the two of them is the one part of the show (so far) that has relied the most heavily on folks having watched the prior show.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:49 PM on March 6 [4 favorites]
Hard same. It just doesn't seem like Marvel Studios understands that killing off these background characters is eating the seed corn, in a sense. These minor characters are the ones you can afford to have do cameos in 8 different movies and 4 different TV shows; it's the characters, not the obscure plot points or MacGuffins, that gave the early days of the MCU that "it's all connected" feeling. Killing off these background characters is how you destroy the connective tissue that kept the MCU a universe rather than merely a collection of media. Killing Phil Coulson just to justify the team name of the Avengers was the earliest example of this, so in some ways it's the MCU's "original sin". Granted, Coulson didn't stay dead...but Agents of SHIELD ending up being ambiguously non-canon was in a lot of ways the first big fracture in the "it's all connected"-ness of the MCU, and I don't think that's a coincidence after Coulson was the first piece of connective tissue they killed off. At the time they had plenty of other minor players, but man they've been chewing through the roster of bit characters a lot faster than they've been replenishing it, lately. (I'd even include Emily VanCamp's Sharon Carter in the list; an undercooked heel-turn ain't much better than a cheap death.)
Maria Hill was absolutely the worst one, though, just for the shitty gender dynamics of fridging a woman this far into the 21st century. Soured me on Secret Invasion immediately and nothing else in it was good enough to recover. Daredevil, two episodes in, is much more promising, though it helps a lot that Wilson Fisk is arguably the best work Vincent D'Onofrio's ever done -- and that's a pretty high bar.
It also feels like the show is trying to speedrun the DD/Bullseye relationship in a way that really doesn’t earn the stakes it wants to have.
FWIW, Bullseye (played by the same actor, no less) was a major part of Season 3 of the Netflix Daredevil; the enmity between the two of them is the one part of the show (so far) that has relied the most heavily on folks having watched the prior show.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:49 PM on March 6 [4 favorites]
Yeah, that was definitely a "wait, who's this?" moment in the first episode for me. The IGN video that Halloween Jack posted was good for getting caught up - damn I had forgotten how good that era of the extended MCU was and how much it has kind of fallen apart lately.
posted by Kyol at 8:13 AM on March 7
posted by Kyol at 8:13 AM on March 7
Maria Hill was absolutely the worst one, though, just for the shitty gender dynamics of fridging a woman this far into the 21st century. Soured me on Secret Invasion immediately and nothing else in it was good enough to recover.
Secret Invasion was such a badly-conceived and horribly-executed show; it was as if the ugly AI-generated title sequence was put there to warn people away from it. They also got rid of Ben Mendelsohn's Talos, who was one of the most fun and charming characters in Captain Marvel.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:29 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
Secret Invasion was such a badly-conceived and horribly-executed show; it was as if the ugly AI-generated title sequence was put there to warn people away from it. They also got rid of Ben Mendelsohn's Talos, who was one of the most fun and charming characters in Captain Marvel.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:29 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
me: "ok, I enjoyed DD previously and the world sucks now, but hey new season"
Then foggie is killed and I'm like "OK RERUNS OF THE LOVEBOAT IT IS"
Saw "shocking death!" headlines, checked to see who died, decided not to come back to watching this show now.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:27 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]
Then foggie is killed and I'm like "OK RERUNS OF THE LOVEBOAT IT IS"
Saw "shocking death!" headlines, checked to see who died, decided not to come back to watching this show now.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:27 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]
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posted by Halloween Jack at 8:17 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]