When Netflix released the original Daredevil show in 2015, it stood out (like its other Marvel shows, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and The Punisher) because it was interested in the moral lives of its characters. The problem these particular shows (which can in many ways be talked about separately from the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe) found endlessly fascinating was what it meant to be a good person in a morally ambiguous world.
Luke Cage finally resolves it by taking the perilous step of taking the job that deeply corrupt villains previously held, trying to basically rule in the same way they did but doing good things instead of bad. The Punisher takes the opposite approach: just kill all the villains. Between these approaches was Matt Murdock’s Daredevil.
Murdock lived publicly as an altruistic lawyer, helping the disadvantaged and vulnerable, while living a private life as the vigilante hero Daredevil. His alter ego accomplished through brute force what the law was often unable to do or was simply bad at doing.
The tension, for the original show, was in how Murdock’s Catholicism (as well as the moral examples of his friends Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, who both shared his goals but did not ever use private, extra-legal means to pursue them) interplayed with that divided self pursuing a single goal. So we see him praying, dreaming, even having extended conversations with a trusted priest. Nelson makes mention of Murdock’s Catholicism often.
What being Catholic meant for Murdock was that there were moral lines he could not cross, even when he operated outside the civic law. It also meant that he had to atone for his actions in some way, and that he was haunted by a deep-seated sense of guilt, both over the things he ought to have done which were left undone and by the the things he ought not have done that he did.
There is moral drama here because there is a moral law that is not always easily known but is real nonetheless and because there is real guilt and real forgiveness and real damnation. This, far more than the well choreographed fight scenes and stunning cinematography is what made the Netflix Daredevil work so well.
It is disappointing, then, that the Disney+ revival, Daredevil: Born Again, has retained some of the actors, the world, the fight scenes, and the cinematography from the original while almost entirely jettisoning the moral heart of the show. Nelson and Page are gone, as is Sergeant Brent Mahoney, one of the only clean cops in the New York PD in the world of Daredevil.
What remains is Charlie Cox’s Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, who was the most charismatic and captivating villain of the entire Netflix Marvel universe.
Retaining the best hero of the Netflix shows and the best villain should make for great TV. And, to be fair, it doesn’t make for bad TV per se. The series is certainly watchable and the things it turns its attention to are interesting enough. But its moral center lies elsewhere.
The defining conceit of Born Again is that Murdock and Fisk are more alike than different. Both have a more civic-friendly public face (Murdock the altruistic lawyer, Fisk the self-made millionaire philanthropist and son of the city) existing alongside a more menacing private identity (Murdock’s vigilante Daredevil, Fisk’s crime lord Kingpin). And what fascinates the show is the ways in which both characters wear masks, both characters have to somehow navigate their complex interior lives, floating back and forth between their public face and their chosen masks.
This parallel is set up quite clearly in the pilot when the two share a meal at a diner. But it is made more explicit in the cinematographic portrayal of two fights shown at the end of episode six in which both characters, for the first time in Born Again, fully adopt their masked identities—Murdock disappears entirely into Daredevil at the exact same time that Fisk disappears into Kingpin.
The defining question that shapes the show, then, is about authenticity: Who is the real Murdock? Who is the real Fisk? It is telling, I think, that Murdock’s closest on-screen relationship in Born Again is not his fellow lawyer Nelson but a new romantic interest who works as a therapist.
The problem the show runs into is that these kind of hangups about what an authentic self is, who a person’s “real” identity is, feel a little bit decadent now, indulgent even. And it misses the real dynamic between Murdock and Fisk that reigned in the Netflix era: For Netflix-era Daredevil, what was most important about Fisk was not becoming Fisk—and so he needed friends like Nelson and Page as well as the moral guidance and wisdom of the church to save him from that fate, one that Murdock was plainly vulnerable to and nearly fell into in the final episode of the Netflix series.
It is perhaps here that Born Again’s failure is most plain, for it turns out that when the church is torn out of the story the writers lose the ability to distinguish between the hero and the villain. Yet the realities of human nature endure. What we desire is not authenticity, but something higher. We need goodness. And when our guilt cuts us off from the good, we desire expiation, reconciliation. Daredevil understood that in a more sophisticated and interesting way than virtually any other show in the Marvel universe has. It’s too bad that this has been forgotten in its ironically named reboot.
Jake Meador
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.
