This article contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again season 2 episode 5.
Daredevil has a Kingpin problem. The superhero Daredevil, of course, has a Kingpin problem because Wilson Fisk’s wife Vanessa has died. In the final moments of the previous episode Bullseye fought his way toward the mayor’s high-profile boxing match, and though Daredevil tried to stop the killer from finding his target, Vanessa couldn’t be saved. Surely, the proximity of the Man Without Fear to his beloved wife’s death will only push Fisk to go full supervillain.
However, the show Daredevil: Born Again also has a Kingpin problem, as did its predecessor on Netflix. Thanks to Vincent D’Onofrio‘s incredible performance, neither the Netflix series nor the Disney+ reboot has been able to move past him to other members of Matt Murdock’s (admittedly thin) rogues gallery. By devoting most of episode five “The Grand Design” to flashback, Born Again is able to rework history and reframe both this series and its predecessor as the Wilson Fisk story, for better or worse.
The occasion of Vanessa’s death gives the series permission to follow Fisk’s memories back to happier times, back to events that took place around the time of the Netflix series. For longtime fans, the most exciting of these brings back Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, Matt Murdock’s best friend and law partner. Henson’s affable take on Foggy made him a favorite among viewers, so much so that many hope against hope (or hope in comic book logic) that he would be back from the dead.
He is not, but at least “The Grand Design,” written by Jesse Wigutow and directed by Angela Barnes, has a reason to bring the two together again. Try as hairstylists might, Henson and Charlie Cox don’t at all look like a pair of fresh-faced 20-somethings, but they effectively play the jittery excitement of two young lawyers on the brink of something big. As the two agree to defend Foggy’s childhood bully, they get their first whisperings about a shadowy figure known as the Kingpin.
For those who don’t remember, the Kingpin of Daredevil‘s first season was hardly the public figure we know today. Rather, he operated like an underworld urban legend, someone who only appeared via his right-hand-man Wesley (who also shows up here, thanks to a welcome cameo by Toby Leonard Moore) and whose name was not spoken aloud. The mere suggestion of his displeasure was enough to make the hoods who wronged him kill themselves in spectacular fashion.
We get glimpses of those days throughout “The Grand Design,” which almost intentionally invites us viewers to compare Born Again to its pre-MCU predecessor. That’s not always a flattering comparison for the new show, even if we remind the Netflix series’ biggest fans of that era’s tendency to spin its wheels in the middle episodes. The Mayor Fisk storyline used by Born Again might come directly from recent comics, but it feels particularly ill-suited to D’Onofrio’s strengths. He plays Fisk like a wounded baby in the body of a giant, which never made him believable as a successful politician, not even in the shadow of the current administration.
However, the comparision between the two shows allows the episode to pull off its greatest trick, completely reframing the way we think of Vanessa. The flashbacks bring us back to moments before Vanessa and Fisk made their first appearance, in the season 1 episode “Rabbit in a Snowstorm.” Throughout most of the Netflix series, Ayelet Zurer played Vanessa as a normal person who saw the vulnerability of the giant man and tragically pursued it, even as Wilson embraced his Kingpin persona. Conversely, Born Again has made her into a Lady Macbeth type, someone willing to use her husband’s brutal predilections to her own social ends.
“The Grand Design” reconciles the two versions of the character by showing us an early conversation between Vanessa and her boss at the art gallery where she works. The boss does not want to show the all-white avant-garde painting Rabbit in a Snowstorm. But Vanessa displays it anyway, revealing that she intentionally sought out a man who exuded power, but was also something of a blank space himself, someone she could interpret as she sees fit.
Through much of Born Again, we’ve been seeing Vanessa’s interpretation of Fisk: frightening, undeniably powerful and willing to go to extremes, but also able to fit within polite society. Both Daredevil series have featured an incredible scenes of Fisk, fully solidifying Kingpin as one of Marvel’s best villains. The revisionist history of “The Grand Design” and D’Onofrio’s performance do not solve Daredevil’s Kingpin problem. But they do prove that it’s a great problem to have.
Daredevil: Born Again releases new episodes every Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+.
