Daredevil: Season 3

Matt Murdoch is missing, presumed dead after the incident at Midland Plaza. His friends, journalist Karen Page and lawyer Foggy Nelson, are trying to get on with their lives but find their grief is hard to forget. But Murdoch is still alive, recuperating and facing the stark realisation that only Matt or Daredevil can survive, not both of them. When Wilson Fisk is unexpectedly released from prison and exerts a new reign of terror over the city, the choice is made for him.

Daredevil was the series that launched the Marvel/Netflix alliance back in 2015. That partnership has proved both successful and prolific in a short period of time, spanning eleven seasons in six distinct series aired in just three and a half years. Its future is in question, however, with Disney launching its own streaming service in 2019 to be spearheaded by multiple Marvel shows and Netflix recently cancelling both Luke Cage and Iron Fist.

There is, then, an excellent chance that this will be Daredevil’s swansong. That would be a shame because the third season of Daredevil, despite not hitting the heights and consistency of his debut (still the best set of episodes the Marvel/Netflix team-up has produced), is definitely a much-needed improvement after a spate of weak seasons.

The strengths of Daredevil as a series are clear: it has the best central cast of characters of the Marvel/Netflix stable, with Charlie Cox, Elden Henson and Deborah Ann Woll playing Matt, Foggy and Karen with heart and vigour. Vincent D’Onofrio continues to give a brutal, monstrous but weirdly charismatic performance as Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin). This season also brings in new characters, most notably Jay Ali as Ray Nadeem and Wilson Bethel as Benjamin Poindexter (aka Bullseye), FBI agents trying to tap Fisk for intel on other criminals who take radically different paths based on their exposure to the mobster. Both give great performances.

The series also has exceptional fight choreography. One of the biggest disappointments of the Marvel/Netflix collaborations has been the wildly inconsistent quality of the action and fight scenes, particularly Iron Fist’s lacklustre combat. Fortunately, Daredevil is right at the other end of the spectrum, with brutal, bruising and convincingly physical fight scenes that feel real, with the participants having to rest for appreciably realistic periods between fights and every punch causing winces in the viewer.

This peaks in the fourth episode which delivers a staggering 11-minute, continuous cut shot taking in multiple fights in different locations in a prison and an intense dramatic confrontation along the way. It’s a breathtaking technical, action and acting achievement, a masterclass of choreography and acting, and is simply the finest action sequence delivered in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (TV and film) to date. It’s certainly the highwater mark of the season.

In terms of pacing and story structure, which the Marvel Netflix shows have struggled with ever since the first season of Jessica Jones (the second season of the collaboration), Daredevil Season 3 is a mixed bag. It starts very slow, but starts picking up before the end of the second episode, and the wrapping-up of the story (which extends across the last three or so episodes) is excellent. In between there are peaks and troughs, with two flashback-heavy episodes dedicated to exploring character backstories. Neither of these flashbacks are entirely necessary and the exploration of Bullseye’s history is badly-directed, pretentious (the black and white “memory vault” format is in fact unintentionally hilarious) and makes it completely implausible that the he’d ever get a job with the FBI, given their thorough background checks. Karen Page’s flashback episode is well-acted and better-directed, but the revelation of her backstory doesn’t entirely line up with the character as she was presented in Season 1.

The issue of realism and suspension of disbelief recurs throughout the season, particularly in the middle third. Early episodes, in which it appears that Fisk is manipulating situations as they arise, are very well-handled. But the later-season revelation that Fisk in fact set many of the events of the season in motion a year or more earlier (despite being in prison), expertly playing people like puppets and setting up backups within contingencies within plans, is laughably unconvincing. This continues through an awful sequence where Fisk seems to instantaneously and magically know the identities of jurors, the whereabouts of key witnesses and every move our heroes are about to make (including information he couldn’t know without clairvoyance or psychic powers). It’s all very well giving your villain a credible threat level, but this season goes beyond this and makes Fisk lethally knowledgeable and dangerous when needed and incompetent when not. It feels contrived, which is a pity. The later part of the season, where he again has to reach to emerging threats, is better-handled.

More successful is how the season develops Matt Murdoch/Daredevil as a character, presenting him with a crisis of faith and a deeper crisis of morality before convincingly bringing him out the other side into a lighter and brighter place. The theme of the season is fear and how people can overcome it to do the right thing, and, as basic as it is, the season explores the theme through multiple character arcs in a very successful manner.

So, despite some major problems mid-season with plausibility and a couple of ropey flashback episodes, Daredevil Season 3 (****½) emerges as one of the strongest seasons from the Netflix/Marvel collaborative project, and leaves the show in a great place for a fourth season. I only hope it can survive the apparent Netflix/Marvel breakup and give us at least one more season of these characters’ adventures, as they have earned it. The season is available worldwide on Netflix now.

Daredevil: Season 2

Wilson Fisk is in jail and the several criminal organisations he brought together in Hell's Kitchen have been defeated. But the Daredevil's work is not over, as new criminal gangs arise to take their place. More dangerously, a new player is in town, a vigilante who solves problems with heavy weapons and utter ruthlessness. Daredevil has to defeat the games, neutralise the threat of "The Punisher" and deal with an old flame who is back in town with her own agenda.

Daredevil's first season was an excellent slice of television drama, a serious-minded show that grounded the superhero elements in the dirt and back-alleys of New York City and focused on the villain's magnificent characterisation as much as on the hero's development. It also featured brilliantly-realised side-characters, uniformly excellent acting and some really interesting direction. Netflix and Marvel proved a winning combination, and proved it again with the superb Jessica Jones a few months later.

The second season of Daredevil is, unfortunately, somewhat less accomplished. Many of the creative leads on the first season have departed, the show's most riveting villain is behind bars and Matt Murdock's evolution into Daredevil is complete. What more is there to tell?

As it turns out, an interesting amount. Marvel has struggled bringing the Punisher to the big screen, despite several brave attempts. Introducing him on Daredevil is a move that works well. Jon Bernthal (late of The Walking Dead) plays the character to the hilt, bringing gravitas and the required brutality to the role. He's also a good actor, given a chance to shine on Daredevil that he wasn't on The Walking Dead. Several scenes featuring the Punisher stand out from the season, but a quiet moment of reflection in a graveyard may be his best. Elodie Yung is also good as Elektra, although her arc is a little less compelling due to the plot overload that begins to strain the season towards the end.

The second season of Daredevil is divided into several sub-arcs, a good move designed to combat the strain that both the first season and also Jessica Jones suffered in trying to drag one story out across thirteen episodes. In the first four episodes, the focus is on Punisher and his apprehension. Then the focus moves to his trial, with both Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) having to step up as Murdock (Charlie Cox) is distracted by Elektra's return. Enjoyably, the consequences of Murdock's double life and his inability to do everything are played out in full, to Nelson and Page's anger. Nelson and Page were the heart and soul of the first season and are even better in the second, Nelson's rise to becoming a respected, effective attorney and Page's transition from secretary to investigator to journalist playing out convincingly (her sort-of romance with Murdock is more tedious). There's also some good backstory developments and flashback storylines.

The season reaches its high-point with a three-episode arc set in prison which is absolutely riveting, driven by some fantastic performances and some beautifully-written, terrifying dialogue.

The last few episodes of the season are less accomplished. The season has a big problem in that it has no real continuing villain. A few minor bad guys show up and are dispatched pretty quickly, and the return of a Season 1 minor villain is underwhelming. The Hand, effectively an army of ninjas, start out as being vaguely intriguing but degenerate into pantomime. They never show up in numbers of less than a million (it feels), resulting in lots of really tedious fistfights. Also, despite being stealth ninjas able to totally avoid New York City's law enforcement agencies, they get beaten up by a blind man rather easily. When Stick, Murdock's mentor from Season 1, shows up for no real reason it's hard to really care. The final few episodes are still worth watching for the storylines of Nelson, Page and the Punisher, as Daredevil, Elektra and Stick's story becomes vague and forgettable.

Still, if the second season is weaker than the first it's still a highly enjoyable series to watch. The late-season action scenes become boring, but there's two action sequences earlier on (one in a stairwell and one in a prison corridor) which are genuinely breathtaking. There's some good dialogue and twists, and introducing the Punisher like this is a ballsy move which succeeds brilliantly. If Daredevil's second season (****) falters compared to the first, it's certainly not a fatal issue and hopefully the third season will improve upon it. The second season of Daredevil is available now on Netflix.

Daredevil: Season 1

Hell's Kitchen, New York City. A shadowy property magnate is buying up crumbling tenements, dreaming of a "better tomorrow" for the city, but at the cost of people who have lived there for decades. Two hotshot lawyers decline a massive salary from a prestigious firm to set up their own independent practice and soon find themselves mired in corruption scandals and being asked to defend murderers. And, in the back alleys and drug dens, a masked vigilante is bringing his own brand of justice to the streets, one criminal at a time.

Daredevil is a fresh take on the Marvel Comics character, completely unrelated to the 2003 Ben Affleck film, although (obviously) sharing the same basic premise. Matt Murdock (played with quiet charisma by Charlie Cox) is a young man who was blinded as a child by a toxic chemical spill. Although he can't see as other people can, the chemicals have given him a sort of visual "sonar" which allows him to detect people around him. He becomes an attorney at law, but despairs of the crime and corruption he sees infesting his home neighbourhood of Hell's Kitchen. Having been trained in martial arts by a sensei as a child, he renews these skills and embarks on a one-man vigilante spree at night. However, his actions soon attract the interest of the media, the criminal gangs that control the area and he finds keeping his double life secret from his friends increasingly difficult.

So far, so standard. But where Daredevil succeeds is that it adopts a convincing cinematographic style that puts the camera and the viewer in the heart of the action. The fight scenes are spectacularly well-choreographed and acknowledge the fact that actually punching someone once usually isn't enough to render them unconscious. The series also accepts that the human body can only take so much punishment, and Murdock is frequently seen spending days recovering from a brutal fight before he can go back into action again. Having a superhero series which dwells on the fragility of its central character is unusual but this works unexpectedly well, emphasising Murdock's bravery - or stupidity - when he heads out to fight again.

The other thing Daredevil throws into the mix is the idea of the villain as an antagonist deserving of his own story arc and character development. It's four episodes before we finally meet crime lord Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) but when we do, he rapidly becomes as important and compelling a character. We follow him as he develops his criminal enterprise, apparently with the beneficial aim of helping revitalise the city, and also falls in love with an art gallery owner, Vanessa Marianna (Ayelet Zurer). It takes a few episodes before Kingpin's fully monstrous side to come to the fore, as the show instead tries to show how he came to be who he is. Elaborate flashback episodes reveal Kingpin's childhood under an abusive father, whilst also filling in the backstory to Matt's accident, his upbringing by his father and later a martial arts expert, and how he and his partner Fogger Nelson (Elden Henson) met.

Other characters are also very well developed, with Deborah Ann Woll particularly excelling as Karen Page. Woll spent seven seasons on True Blood as reluctant vampire Jessica, where early interesting character development was undone by that show's descent into outright insanity by its midway point. Here Woll gets a lot more to do as Karen evolves from crime victim to legal secretary to self-motivated investigative agent. Toby Leonard Moore also gives a terrific performance as James Wesley, Fisk's right-hand man whose ice-cool professionalism masks an abiding loyalty to his employer.

The series takes advantage of its freedom as 13-episode show guaranteed to go the distance before being written. This is less of a procedural as a mini-series, one story unfolding over thirteen hours which takes full advantage of that running time to delve deep into the characters whilst also providing compelling action sequences, thematic musings on the nature of heroism and villainy and not being afraid to get experimental. In one episode it benches Murdock for most of the hour after a particularly bad beating to explore his childhood. In another, Foggy Nelson takes centre stage and he convincingly evolves away from mere comic sidekick to a fully-realised and capable lawyer in his own right. The show even has time to muse on the gentrification of New York and the good points and bad points about it, and on the changing nature of journalism. Almost preposterously, Daredevil's subplot about news reporter Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall) and his work at The New York Bulletin does a better job of discussing the evolving nature of news media than the final season of The Wire. The season also works as an extended origin story, bringing the elements of the Daredevil character and mythos together slowly rather than just by the end of the first hour.

Daredevil's biggest success is shifting the tone and atmosphere of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to something more serious, better-characterised, more grounded and far more interesting. It's helped by being shaped by a trio of writers who cut their teeth with Joss Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Drew Goddard, Steven S. DeKnight and Doug Petrie - who have since gone on to work on other projects including Cloverfield, The Martian, Spartacus and American Horror Story. Their experience shows immensely in this well-crafted, ambitious, darkly-humoured and at times startlingly well-written drama series which makes you believe that a blind man can fight crime on the streets of New York City and prosper.

The first season of Daredevil (****½) is the best slice of the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far (note: I have not yet seen Jessica Jones) and may just the be the greatest superhero TV show to date, whilst also often working far beyond those narrow genre confines. It is available now on Netflix and will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2016.