The following contains spoilers for the second season of Daredevil: Born Again
For a while it was unclear how much Daredevil actually wanted to be Born Again. Thanks to some massive mid-production retooling, the Disney+ Marvel reboot was a strange, Frankensteined creation. The initial pitch brought back Charlie Cox’s blind lawyer Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s criminal kingpin Wilson Fisk, but distanced itself from the original Netflix Defenders universe by placing its two leads in a lighter, more episodic series—recasting roles like Fisk’s wife Vanessa and writing out characters like Matt’s two best friends. Though a mid-strike overhaul brought on former Punisher writer Dario Scardapane to provide a greater sense of continuity, it all felt a bit halfhearted.
Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) died in the premiere, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) was shipped off to San Francisco, and returning faves like Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) and Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter (Wilson Bethel) came and went while less successful new characters got the bulk of the screentime. The series couldn’t decide whether it wanted to embrace the full scope of the first three Netflix Daredevil seasons (and the rest of the interwoven Defenders universe) or whether it wanted to stake itself out as its own thing. After all, when Disney+ first began to create Marvel shows for its burgeoning platform, the hook was that they would all feel epic, cinematic, and connected to the big-screen MCU. Born Again seemed afraid that retreating to the smaller scale of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage would be admitting a defeat worse than the first season of Iron Fist.
As it turns out, however, when you’re rebooting a beloved television show, it helps to actually embrace what made that show work in the first place. Though Born Again’s second season still has some substantial flaws, the best thing about it is how unabashedly it ties itself back to the Netflix Defenders universe. Even if superpowered private investigator Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) wound up a bit underutilized, the casualness and confidence with which she reenters the series—as if she never stepped away from this universe—feels right. The same goes for the sense that she’s going to be sticking around for a while.
Instead of placing Matt in an uncanny valley version of his life, the second season of Born Again re-anchors his world around Karen and suggests everyone else we know and love has still been operating just slightly offscreen. It’s not too much of a surprise that Luke Cage (Mike Colter) pops up in the show’s finale considering he and Jessica now have a kid together. (It’s awfully nice to see him again, though!) But it’s charming just how far this season of Born Again ventures down the cast list of the old Defenders universe. Characters like local detective Brett Mahoney (Royce Johnson) and intrepid newspaper editor Mitchell Ellison (Geoffrey Cantor) aren’t “big gets” in the traditional MCU cameo sense. Yet they were key to the texture of the Defenders universe and it’s just as exciting to see Born Again honor that aspect of its worldbuilding.
It’s not only the casting that provides the inter-series connection, however. The second season of Born Again feels more like the Netflix show tonally and thematically too: Where last season struggled to remember Matt even had a connection to religion, this season puts everyone’s favorite angsty Catholic back in his old church to contemplate his morality and weigh his choices. While the original Daredevil series may be best remembered for its one-take fight sequences, it had a real interest in character-driven debates about ethics, duty, and righteousness too. (Cox is literally introduced delivering a three-minute monologue about Catholic guilt.) The best installment of Born Again’s second season returns to that idea. The flashback episode “The Grand Design” doesn’t just recreate the Netflix show’s noir aesthetics with returning roles for Foggy and Fisk’s right-hand man, James Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore), it also serves as a reminder of how satisfying it is to watch three-dimensional characters talk to one another about the things that drive them.
The heart of the original Netflix show was Matt getting caught up in big, violently intense ideas about right and wrong while Foggy kept him grounded with a down-to-earth, human perspective just as steeped in morality. “The Grand Design” puts that dynamic back into glorious action as the two loving, long-time friends discuss and debate their obligations within an imperfect legal system—and an imperfect world. Watching Cox and Henson immediately slip right back into their old chemistry is a reminder of just how lived-in the relationships in the Netflix show truly were. Though none of Born Again’s new characters are quite on that level yet, season two at least bends new players like Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan), BB Urich (Genneya Walton), and poor, doomed Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini) in a more nuanced direction.
Indeed, instead of totally throwing out the new for the old, the second season of Born Again holds on to what works about the Disney+ era of Marvel TV too. The fourth episode, “Gloves Off,” opens with Bullseye setting a trap for some Anti-Vigilante Task Force officers at a diner. The brutal, bloody action sequence that follows recalls the best of the Netflix show’s incredible fight choreography. Yet setting the sequence to Billy Joel’s “New York State Of Mind” and ending the whole thing with Bullseye killing someone with a lobster tail are more stylishly heightened choices that call to mind the trick-arrow-filled car chases and “Holding Out For A Hero” needledrops of the Disney+ era. You couldn’t have gotten away with such a goofy final kill in the more serious-minded Netflix show, but it fits right into the glossier world of Born Again.
In that way, the series isn’t replacing one identity with another—it’s synthesizing its two halves into a more cohesive whole. Fittingly, that’s exactly what Matt does in the season finale too. After one season where he rejected his Daredevil persona to work exclusively as a lawyer and another where he tried to fix the world by becoming a full-time vigilante, Matt ultimately realizes that blending his two personae—and publicly revealing he’s Daredevil—is the only way to expose the true hypocrisies of Mayor Fisk and send him packing for a plea-deal exile on the beach.
It’s a big swing as entertaining as it is baffling, but, then again, that’s part of the Netflix Defenders experience too. The original Daredevil could get a bit lost in the sauce when it came to the specifics of Matt’s no-killing policy and why it always seemed more focused on big villains than henchmen or everyday people. There are ways in which the original show was more powerful in conception than execution, which is even truer for Born Again. Still, if this reboot has a ways to go before it matches the heights of its predecessor, the fact that it’s even trying feels like a miracle.
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