Against all odds, the second season of “Daredevil: Born Again” is pretty cool, if not tonally confused and thematically empty.
As someone who has been reading Daredevil comics my entire life, has a soft spot for the ridiculous Ben Affleck film adaptation, considers the Netflix series a masterpiece, and hated “Daredevil: Born Again” Season 1, I’m shocked to say I like the new season quite a bit.
Season 2, which aired its finale on May 5, had an uphill battle to deliver a satisfactory batch of episodes after a misconfigured first season that went through creative overhauls and took years to bring to Disney+ screens.
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With the cliffhanger ending at the end of the last batch of episodes, this new season promised high action as Daredevil and his small resistance crew band together to stop the evil Mayor Wilson Fisk from using New York like his personal criminal Monopoly board.
I enjoyed the story “Born Again” is telling this year, and found myself even more excited for what it sets up for the third season in 2027, but I don’t think it was necessarily good TV. There aren’t exactly character arcs, only the tracings of them, and there isn’t really a holistic meaning, only the gestures at one.
What is there, is a goofy, self-serious vigilante revolution tale full of over-the-top, violent, and weightless fight scenes and edgy dialogue — I really don’t need to hear Matt Murdock drop f-bombs every other sentence.
There are also a myriad of reverent callbacks to the excellent three-season Netflix series — which this is allegedly a sequel to — comic book references, and hype moments meant for me to point at the screen and clap my hands.
Is that enough to make a compelling political thriller story? Nope. Is it enough for me to have a dumb grin on my face the entire time? Yes.
Daredevil is one of the most versatile characters in comic book history, and the runs written by Brian Michael Bendis, Ann Nocenti, and Frank Miller have used the blind lawyer vigilante to confront real-world systemic issues in the U.S.
“Born Again” tries to follow this lineage by obviously drawing parallels between Fisk and President Donald Trump and the Anti-Vigilante Task Force and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but no plot labor is dedicated to actually exploring these parallels. They exist merely to make a viewer think, ‘Wow, this is just like real life,’ when in reality, it’s a shoddy and often confused political commentary.
The show at once wants to be a silly action show in which Bullseye, Daredevil’s nemesis turned ally in this story, kills a diner full of bad guys with lobsters and a milkshake straw, and heartfelt commentary about authoritarian arms of the government wrecking underprivileged communities.
Unlike in a comic book, in which my suspension of disbelief is inherently more elastic, this is live-action TV, so the balance feels off. I can’t take anything seriously when the solution to rescuing a warehouse full of unjustly incarcerated New Yorkers is Daredevil zipping around the walls and a character named Swordsman bashing bad guys with a pipe.
It’s silly on purpose, sure, but by the time the strangely January 6 coded finale in which a mob of New Yorkers storms the courthouse demanding the arrest of Mayor Fisk after he tried to incite a civil war, I just checked out on the stakes.
That’s not to say I didn’t have fun, though. The Daredevil mythos is my jam, so any reference to it or development that resembled a comic run I liked had me clapping like a seal in my living room — just like it was designed to do. I just was not at all invested in the dramatic stakes.
While I can’t say I enjoyed “Born Again” all the way through, and barely remembered what happened in an episode five minutes after it was over, there were a handful of moments that are top-shelf Daredevil content that had the comic reader in my soul jumping for joy.