Hawkeye leaves it frustratingly unclear whether or not Netflix’s Daredevil is MCU canon

Surely the finale of Hawkeye, in which Fisk plays a stunningly prominent role, would answer those questions, right? Actually, no. Not at all. All we know about this Kingpin is that he runs a criminal empire (one that seems a tad low-rent), he’s a boiling bucket of rage just waiting for any excuse to explode, and he owns one white suit and possibly two shirts (both of which are nods to different comic book looks). Oh, also, he can weirdly take a beating like nobody else, having no problem getting hit by a car or blasted with a handful of trick arrows.

There’s no mention of him having a grudge against a certain blind attorney and his lovable friends; there’s no recollection of him getting his ass kicked by Daredevil on multiple occasions; and other than forming a relationship with Alaqua Cox’s Maya, there’s no indication of what he’s been doing in the past decade or so of MCU history. Hell, if not for the fact that he’s clearly been around for Maya’s whole life, you might think he was… just plucked out of the multiverse.

You know, like in Spider-Man: No Way Home. In that movie, a magical mishap involving Spidey and Doctor Strange results in Spider-Man villains from the multiverse suddenly finding themselves in the regular MCU reality, even ones who never directly fought a Spider-Man, like Tom Hardy’s Venom. That would’ve been an easy explanation for how Fisk got to the MCU’s New York without making much of an impact until now, but it wouldn’t make sense because of the other person who meets Spidey in No Way Home: Matt Murdock, a.k.a. Daredevil, played by Charlie Cox from the Netflix show.

But is he Daredevil? He doesn’t wear his horns in No Way Home, even if he does show off his “radar sense” abilities, and, again, nobody in the MCU has ever mentioned that a guy in a devil mask regularly assaults criminals a few blocks north of Doctor Strange’s house. So what has he been doing for the past 10 years? Did he fight Fisk? Did he and his college girlfriend face an army of immortal ninjas with the Punisher?

The temptation is to treat the Netflix shows like the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, which is to say that they’re all canon unless they’re explicitly overwritten by something in the movies, but too much of Daredevil doesn’t fit that mold. For instance, the show’s final episode ended with Daredevil making a deal with Fisk that he won’t go after the Kingpin’s wife for her complicity in his crimes if Fisk agrees not to go after Daredevil’s friends—with Daredevil even taking off his mask to prove that he’s serious.

Fisk goes to prison after that, so if Daredevil is canon, that means he got out of prison and went right back to running a criminal empire (and is so famous that dudes like Hawkeye know him as “the Kingpin”). But Daredevil never felt the need to grab his billy clubs and start putting members of the Tracksuit Mafia in the hospital?

The Hawkeye finale even has Maya shooting Fisk at point-blank range, and if he’s actually dead (never make assumptions in a comic book show), it would mean we might never get answers to any of these questions. It’s always nice to see Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk again, a sentiment that Marvel clearly agrees with, but it would be even nicer to know if the trauma and emotional baggage they built up in Daredevil still mattered.

Otherwise, it’s not a tribute to the Robert Downey Jr.-level iconic performances that D’Onofrio and Cox gave in the Netflix show; it’s just another comic book Easter egg meant to toy with the fans.