This week’s Daredevil: Born Again episode, “Art for Art’s Sake” was directed by David Boyd and written by Jill Blankenship. I wish I could say that the show turned a corner, and that the high of last week’s double episode continued, but I thought this episode felt rushed and much thinner than the previous two.
Let’s get into it below.
A Quick Recap with Spoilers!
Angela Del Toro is lying in a hospital bed having a nightmare that’s mostly scenes from the fight between Daredevil and Muse. The one where she was unconscious and actively dying, and couldn’t have seen any of this stuff from any of these angles.
Matt, as it happens, is having those same flashbacks across town as he takes a pensive post-Daredevil-fight shower. Heather joins him, notices the bruises, immediately touches them (which, OW?), and then Matt distracts her with sex before she can ask any questions. But this is a therapist we’re dealing with, and she comes back to the mental pin in her conversation as soon as they’re getting dressed. She attempts therapy talk, he teases her, and she comes out with the theory that he puts himself in danger (e.g. last week’s bank heist) as a form of self-harm.
Heather needs to go back and watch the earlier seasons.
Fisk and Buck talk about The City and Daredevil. Look, I get that you’re trying Buck, but you’ll never be HIM.
Heather has a session with Bastian Cooper, the troubled boy we met for five seconds back in episode one, which is intercut with Angie Kim telling Fisk their lead suspect is Bastian Cooper, and also intercut with Matt figuring out Heather is Muse’s next target. (I’ll talk about that below.)
Bastian reveals himself as Muse and credits Heather with allowing him to unleash his true personality. He knocks her out, and when she comes to he starts draining her in her office. He spreads a canvas out, presumably to wrap her in after he’s collected her blood—but how does he think he’s going to carry a body out in broad daylight? (And does this female therapist who meets clients in a private office not have a secretary, or any kind of backup?) Muse is acting erratic and panicked even before he hears sirens roaring up the street.
Then Daredevil breaks thru the window and they fight. The fight is harder than it should be, and ends with Heather shooting Muse to death before passing out herself.
So there goes this season’s main villain, I guess?
Daredevil “stabilizes” Heather—I have no idea how—and then bolts before the cops bust in—I have no idea how.
Daniel confronts BB over the “Mayor Garbage” leak, in a brief scene that’s scarier than all the Muse stuff put together. BB will now effectively be working for Fisk, whether she agrees with him or not.
Later, at the hospital, Heather’s traumatized by the fact that she shot someone, and baffled that Daredevil said her name. Fisk, now aware that Daredevil is back and working again, holds a press conference thanking his task force for taking down Muse.
Meanwhile, in another plot, Vanessa meets with Luka, who wants her to ally with him against Fisk. She later texts an address to him, and this alleged crime boss walks alone into the otherwise empty restaurant where Fisk is apparently dining alone, pulls his gun… and is immediately iced by Buck as Wilson calmly eats his dinner.
So either Fisk and Vanessa are working together, or Fisk expected Vanessa to send an assassin after him—too bad they can’t talk about it in session next week, since their therapist will probably be indisposed—but either way Luka is the stupidest crime boss to don a tracksuit.
Grace
There’s a scene early on when Buck tries to point out that Daredevil rescuing Angel del Toro from Muse is good, actually, because at least he doesn’t have 61 victims now. Fisk goes on a long rant, half to himself, about how Daredevil destroyed his life and ruined ten years of work. This is all standard Fisk. But then he starts in on how Daredevil’s actions ruined an entire community, all the people who had worked with Fisk and become “a network of blue-collar millionaires” through that work. He says Daredevil “broke bones—broke spirits!” and that he did it outside of the rule of law, “without due process”.
First, I was interested in the idea that some part of Fisk actually cared about these people, and what they represented. The concept of “blue-collar millionaires” is an interesting one in the MCU, given that we saw a previous example in Adrian Toomes in Spider-Man: Homecoming—Toomes was the villain, but the film made it pretty clear that he only became the bastard we met because Tony Stark, Oblivious Billionaire, shattered the lives of Toomes and his employees. Here we have an unseen network of people who became successful under Fisk, and then had that success taken by a masked vigilante who attacked them physically when the law didn’t work against them.
I thought it was interesting that the episode included this perspective, and that he seems to be most offended by the idea that Daredevil didn’t simply sue Fisk and his business associates. Of course Fisk is leaving out the part that most of what they were doing was criminal to start with, and only got more violent and terrible as time went on, and that he bought or blackmailed a ton of people into subverting the law for him. But I guess we’re all the heroes of our own stories.
Weirdly the most unsettling scene of the whole episode was Daniel confronting BB, and explaining that her adorable little scrappy news program is now a propaganda arm for the mayor—at least, it is if she wants the rest of her life to be awesome, rather than to suck.
I really enjoyed watching Daniel throw his own “schlubby nice guy” mask out the window.
Retribution
For me, most of this week’s episode falls into this slot. The fight between Daredevil and Muse had good moments, but on the one hand, there’s no way that kid with Taekwondo championships years in his past is going to be able to fight back that well against a person who’s spent most of his life as a masked vigilante.
And about that: this episode does the thing I’ve noticed more and more often in television and film lately: we learn what we need to know immediately before we need to know it. Bastian Cooper tells Heather about his teenage Taekwondo championships just as Detective Kim is telling Fisk about them across town, moments before we see him actually able to fight Daredevil. So anyone who was going to wonder how this kid can fight so well has that box checked off, right before Daredevil comes crashing through a window. Now they could have used this plotline to build suspense about Bastian, they could have talked about a cold case involving his old Taekwondo instructor, could have shown us more of Bastian’s therapy sessions as he talks about his troubled childhood, could have shown him using Taekwondo moves, specifically, to capture victims. Instead we get an info dump that doesn’t add any shading to the character.
More frustrating was that each time Daredevil did cool stuff, like using his grappling hook against Muse (much like Nobu used his Kyoketsu-Shoge against him back in the first season of the Netflix Era) before switching to less violent tactics, rather than exploiting his enemy’s new wound. If I just impaled a dude with a giant fishhook, spraying his blood across the room, I am going to bring my foot, and the entire weight of my body, down onto the exact spot as many times as I can before he stops me. If possible, I am then going to punch that exact spot. I’m not going to, say, pick the dude up and shove him against a bookshelf for no reason, and then hit him in the face repeatedly while there’s still blood gushing from an open wound a few inches away.
And about that—Daredevil punches Muse at least five times. Muse is only wearing his “spooky art murder mask”—there’s no visible padding or armor on that thing. It’s not a helmet. Matt punched the Punisher a couple episodes ago and the man actually staggered back. Muse’s face should have been a raw mess a few minutes into this fight!
If you’re going to introduce a Bloodletting Art Monster Super Villain into your show, commit to the fucking violence, OK?
Anyway, just as the fight starts to get interesting, Heather uses Muse’s gun to shoot him, multiple times. Which I understand from a realism perspective, but it’s really anticlimactic for an action scene. And then she collapses from all the blood loss, the show gives us a handy close-up of the cut on her arm, and only then does Matt—who can hear her heartbeat and her breath, and smell what should be an incapacitatingly nauseating amount of blood—finally remember that his girlfriend is actively bleeding out, and try to help her.
This scene is way too similar to last week’s rescue of Angela Del Toro, but without the same kind of storytelling through action.
And now Muse is dead, so what’s next?
But even that isn’t the part of the episode that really bugged me. You’re asking us to believe that Matt can run his fingers over a couple of paintings, and identify Heather’s specific face from the raised lines of blood on the canvas??? THAT is what you’re asking me to believe???
Fiorello’s Desk
Buck points out that Fisk has more resources to stop Daredevil now that he’s Mayor, but I just don’t think that’s the case. We see the Task Force in action, and they’re pretty useless—except they shouldn’t be. Matt’s able to infiltrate a crime scene by hanging out on a ceiling, and to fight Muse to a standstill and then save Heather before escaping in broad daylight, and there’s never any sense that any of the cops are going to be able to stop him. But for this angle to work—for Fisk and the Task Force to be a tangible threat—there has to be real fear of Matt getting caught.
How’s Lent Going, Matty?
Well, he’s fully Daredevil again, so that answers that.
Quotes!
“Starbucks.”
“Voters.”
“Fear. A city churning to a stop…”
—Daniel, Buck, and Fisk discussing what they see outside a window.
“I’m dealing with some things and not very well… I used to have this whole other life. And Sometimes, to me, this all feels… fake.”
—Matt commenting on his stable, happy life with Heather, and/or the writers commenting on bringing Daredevil into the Disney+ fold.
“What was out of the ordinary? What was different? Unique?”
—Matt, asking a traumatized teenager about what she saw IN THE MURDER BASEMENT. Presumably all of it was “out of the ordinary”????
“He was amped about them, kept talking about them.”
—Angela, talking about Muse’s attitude toward his work. Good for Muse. We love a self-confident artist.
“You’re the key! Don’t you see that?”
—Bastian to Heather, unfurling all of his red flags.
“Does that mean you’ve been displaying your art?
—Heather, beginning to suspect something’s amiss with this client.
“…tell me about that drawing.”
—Heather, desperately trying to salvage a session in which her client has just drawn a creepy face using his own nose-blood.
“You are the thin dark line protecting this City. Remind them of that.”
—Fisk to his Task Force.
“Anybody who needs a mask is a coward!”
—Heather, to Muse, choosing a really interesting de-escalation tactic with the man trying to drain her blood.
“Could you call Vanessa and ask if she’d like me to bring her home some sole meunière?”
—Fisk, who has his priorities straight even during an assassination attempt.
Closing Argument
Between Heather’s hatred of masks, Matt’s increasing double life, the reveal that Muse was the Heather Glenn-obsessed kid from the first episode, and the idea that Muse is the target of a proxy war between Wilson Fisk and Matt Murdock, there was a lot of potential for this episode. Unfortunately, I think it squandered all of it by rushing through plot developments and exposition, rather than giving characters time to breathe, backstories time to unfold, and fights choreography time to tell us as much of the story as the dialogue.