This article contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again season two, episode seven.
No one should ever get close to Matt Murdock. This is the ultimate moral of every Daredevil story. Yes, he’s incredibly charming and incredibly handsome. Yes, he has an unshakable sense of ethics. But Matt Murdock follows those ethics so tightly, he lets his Catholic guilt so stridently drive his motivations that he ends up hurting himself, and brings everyone else down with him.
The penultimate episode of Born Again‘s second season, “The Hateful Darkness,” directed by Iain B. MacDonald and written by Heather Bellson, traces the fallout of being Matt’s friend. Karen Page is in prison, Kirsten McDuffie’s in the legal battle of her life, and Jessica Jones is pulled back into the superhero scene of New York City. “The Hateful Darkness” is mostly set-up for next week’s finale, but as each piece moves into place—or, in the case of poor, departed Daniel Blake—removed from the board entirely, it’s Matt’s crusade that drives them.
To the degree that “The Hateful Darkness” has a discrete arc, it’s Karen dealing with her prison sentence. She’s talked a big game throughout this season, insisting that the resistance needs to take more extreme measures and berating Matt for wanting to spare Bullseye, the man who killed their friend Foggy Nelson. Now, she gets to walk the walk, having been caught at the end of last week’s episode.
Although more three-dimensional than her comic book counterpart, Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page has suffered just as much as her four-color predecessor. That steeliness allows her to stand up to the pressure of her sentence, whether it’s staring down Fisk or, in a compelling twist on the classic Daredevil moral, taunting Matt’s ex Heather Glenn with stories of their undying love. Karen has inner strength, to be sure; but she also believes that she and the protesters have finally struck a killing blow against the Fisk administration, and she just needs to wait it out while his entire legal system crumbles.
She’s not the only one who sees things this way. The episode checks in with Mr. Charles, easily the most disappointing element of Born Again’s second season. We here at Den of Geek dearly love Matthew Lillard and would never side with any loudmouth filmmaker who bad mouths him. But there’s no question that he’s been mishandled this season, forced to play a bland and imprecise government operative. With no sense of identity or direction for Mr. Charles, Lillard has to play his standard party guy character, which clashes with the series’ tone.
In addition to some more oblique discussion with Jessica Jones about the actions of her husband Luke Cage, Mr. Charles reveals that the U.S. government no longer considers Wilson Fisk a useful ally. That leads the way for Governor McCaffrey (the also-great Lili Taylor, just as squandered as Lillard) to remove Fisk as mayor. She’s briefly interrupted by a masked man who tries to kill her, who in turn is interrupted by a masked man killing him. It’s Bullseye, having been set free by Matt (remember what we said about him making bad decisions?) and still playing the hero in his own violent way.
Those within the Fisk administration also feel the impending doom, which leads Buck Cashman to finally deal with Daniel Blake. Daniel Blake has been one of the more successful parts of Born Again’s two seasons, showing how a genuinely good kid gets seduced by the promise of power offered by Fisk’s persona. His friendship with BB has been his one remaining tether to decency, but by the time he recovers that good side in this episode, it’s too late. He lets BB go and pays the price, first with a beating and then with a bullet in the head from Buck.
Daniel’s not the only person to take a bullet in “The Hateful Darkness.” Matt also gets tagged, but not in costume. In his latest big, terrible decision, Matt emerges from hiding to stand alongside Kirsten as co-councilor for Karen Page. The reveal of Matt entering the courtroom indulges in legal drama tropes, but it doesn’t do much more than baffle the judges (including one played by Deirdre Lovejoy of The Wire). However, it does lead to an action scene in which Cherry and Angie Kim, who join Brett Mahoney as the good cops apparently unspoiled by the many bad apples, do battle in a parking garage against AVTF vigilantes.
The shot of Matt limping away from the fight leads into the closing scene, in which he enters a church to beg Saint Jude, patron of difficult cases, to pray for “consolation for his tribulations.” As always, Charlie Cox does a great job playing Matt at his most desperate, and the red lighting of the scene, juxtaposed against Daniel’s final moments, adds drama to the closing, especially when Jessica sidles up next to him ready for the fight.
The prayer and montage elevate “The Hateful Darkness” above the standard place-setting chapter. Not by much—there are still too many uninteresting threads (see: Heather Glenn’s visions of Muse, again). But enough that the episode serves as a critique of Matt’s particularly self-defeating brand of heroism, and the many people who get hurt in his pursuit of good works. How many more need to suffer? I guess we’ll find out in the finale next week.
Daredevil: Born Again streams new episodes on Tuesdays at 9pm EST on Disney+.
