Daredevil Born Again might be the most important show in Marvel’s history. After half a decade of disappointing and mediocre shows, Marvel has been on the back foot on Disney+, with viewership dwindling as audience disapproval rose.
This show had a lot to prove because it is the last vestige of hope for long-time fans of the franchise. Additionally, it’s following up the legendary Netflix Daredevil show, which remains one of Marvel’s most beloved projects to date.
One complete creative overhaul and nine episodes later, Daredevil Born Again has left me both disappointed and more excited than ever.
This might be Marvel’s weirdest show to date, because the moment-to-moment quality of the show is great for the most part. Ultimately, however, the show fails to come together as a cohesive whole, leaving it feeling confused, shallow, and captivating all at once.
The narrative picks up seven years after the end of the original show, and we find both Matt Murdock (Daredevil) and Wilson Fisk (Kingpin) in completely different spots in their lives. At the same time, however, there is a clear growing dissatisfaction emanating from both of them as they grapple with whether to give in to their darker halves.
While stories like this have been done before in the original show, I don’t think it quite grappled with them in the same way Born Again is. There is a compelling push and pull from both of them throughout the entire show around whether to be themselves or who they want to be.
At the same time, this central narrative feels incredibly messy and lacking any real thematic depth. The story itself is exciting to watch, but when looking back at the whole season, I can’t discern any real deeper philosophical statements about either Daredevil or Kingpin other than “corruption bad.”
It’s clear from the get-go that Kingpin is supposed to be a Trump allegory in this show. While the show impressively reflects the current political moment with the second Trump administration, despite being filmed in 2023 and 2024, I feel like its commentary is remarkably shallow.
It has nothing to say about the state of a society that calls for a morally deprived man like Fisk to take power. Instead, it centers around his conflict with his power-hungry and violent nature, with nothing to say about the people who got him there.
Besides a few disappointing episodes, the show is consistently exciting to watch, but it’s clear that this show is a Frankenstein of two different creative visions. Episodes one, eight, and nine are all completely new post the creative overhaul, where the original writers and showrunners on the show were fired. That fact is really obvious after watching the whole show. These episodes feel like faithful follow-ups to the original show, while the other six episodes feel radically different in tone and direction.
The other six episodes are mostly solid, but they take a more episodic approach, even down to a filler episode that just hammers in that this is now allowed to interact with the wider MCU. The episodes made by the new creative team have a much more cohesive vision of where to take the character, while the other six feel like they are tacked on because they didn’t have the budget to reshoot the entire season.
Considering that this is a Frankenstein show, I think that Born Again is impressive because it somehow doesn’t completely fall apart at the seams, but this show is very clearly a mess, and it’s a shame that the new crew wasn’t able to fully realize their vision.
I won’t deny, though, that episodes eight and nine are exhilarating and feel like they are pulled straight from the original show (outside of the lackluster visuals). Both episodes make up for the flaws that came before and inspire hope that season two will be better than the first.
Season one doesn’t have the decisive conclusion like the original show did with each season, but episodes eight and nine do such a compelling job setting the stage for what’s to come that I don’t care about the lack of closure here.
Now that season two is entirely controlled by the new creative team, I cannot wait to see what they cook up next. Season one is messy and a bit disappointing, but the finale has left me more excited than ever to see where the Man Without Fear will go next.
Score: 7/10
