Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episode 8. After 8 excellent episodes, Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is complete, and without wanting to go immediately into cliché territory, it has legitimately changed everything for Charlie Cox’s hero and his nemesis Kingpin. Daredevil: Born Again Season 3 is already confirmed – and the production has already spilled some secrets – and the reveal of Matt Murdock in prison uniform raised some eyebrows. Now we now exactly how that happens, and all that remains is working out what the shocking twist ending could be setting up. Here’s everything that happens in Daredevil: Born Again Season 2‘s ending, and what it all means.
Given how Born Again Season 2 has built – along with Wilson Fisk’s rage, particularly after Vanessa’s death – you could have been forgiven for thinking it would all culminate in a torrent of hyper-violence as the Devil and the Kingpin faced off one last time. What actually happened was far more subtle and far more fitting with the season’s narrative. Now, obviously, we did get a big punch of violence – and Fisk’s terrifying, relentless march through the protestors was a truly magnificent sight to behold – but their battle came down to the courtroom.
Fisk’s undoing hung on the Northern Star, the scuttled ship off the coast of the Red Hook free port, and originally full of military-grade weaponry being moved for Mr Charles (Matthew Lillard) and above him, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) at the head of the CIA. The only way to connect the crime to Fisk was for Daredevil to be called as a witness, and in a rather theatrical flourish, Matt Murdock revealed himself to be Daredevil in front of the packed court in order to provide the witness statement that sunk Fisk, as Kingpin menacingly goaded him about the likely repercussions. Undeterred that his revelation would make him a criminal, Murdock confessed his secret identity and ended the season as a prisoner, with Fisk banished from New York and elected office.
Why Murdock reveals his secret is an important question that speaks to the narrative of the entire season. Born Again Season 2 was about justice as a spectrum, with the political weaponry of Fisk at the most corrupt extreme, through Bullseye’s wayward sense of righteous vigilanteism in the middle, alongside Karen’s furious desire to kill him for Foggy’s murder, and then to Daredevil at the other end. Murdock spent a lot of the season wrestling with the specter of justice, particularly around Bullseye, but his decision to turn himself in to take down Fisk was the perfect underscore of the moral certainty he’s regrown.
Along with Matt’s imprisonment- making him a fellow inmate of the corrupt Anti-Vigilante Task Force, who are thrown into prison for their own crimes against the people of New York – Kingpin is dethroned. His political career was already all but over, but the final insult to Fisk sees him banished from New York entirely. So now he’s lost both the woman he loved and the City he loved. This could very easily have been the end of him, but Fisk is the archetypal narcissist who – like Thanos – believes nobody is as well-suited to save the day as himself.
We know Fisk is back in Season 3 – sporting a new bearded look – but quite what his demeanour will be is anyone’s guess. Even when he was operating from the shadows, Fisk had power, and the version we’ll be reunited with when Born Again returns is a completely unknown quantity. If his criminal infrastructure somehow survives, he could rebuild, but it’s arguably more fun to imagine that we might see Fisk as a vengeful lone wolf.
After Fisk’s banishment, it’s revealed that Mr Charles is sent abroad on a seemingly thankless mission (which, oddly, he doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered by), presumably as punishment for the Northern Star debacle. That allows the absent Luke Cage (Mike Colter), who was previously stationed in an unknown foreign country, to return to his family: Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and their daughter Danielle. So that’s three-quarters of Netflix’s original Defenders back in action, and only Finn Jones’ Danny Rand still absent.
Obviously, we know that Rand – AKA Iron Fist – is back, along with Cage and Jones, for Daredevil: Born Again Season 3, thanks to set photos, and Murdock’s incarceration clearly sets up a hero vacuum in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s not like Spider-Man can be trusted to come and clean it up – he has his own issues. Daredevil being off the streets could easily open the floodgates for other villains to emerge, and Kingpin’s absence creates an entirely different kind of power vacuum, where it feels inevitable we’ll see another sizeable threat appear. Quite who or what that will be remains to be seen.
The other question is, of course, how Danny Rand is involved, given he handed over his role and powers to Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) at the end of Iron Fist Season 2. If that remains canon (and the MCU continuation of Netflix’s show hasn’t ignored nearly as much of the old canonical lore as you might have expected), then Danny will return depowered and essentially useless as a hero. So something has to change there.
Regardless of who the major villain will be in Daredevil: Born Again Season 3, we already knew one potential villain who will appear (again, thanks to set photos). Born Again Season 2’s ending cements how Muse reappears in the coming season, as Dr. Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) takes over the role of her own tormentor from Season 1. Heather is the new Muse, and is clearly struggling with her own trauma after the original almost left her for dead. We’d seen her wrestling with visions of the killer already, and the ending feels very much like the MCU’s new answer to Norman Osborn being tempted by his Green Goblin mask in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man.
Interestingly, Born Again – and the Netflix Daredevil before it – has always been very invested in the idea of doubles and sliding doors fates. Daredevil and Kingpin are both motivated by the same thing – saving New York – but their approaches differ wildly. Daredevil and Punisher are both heroes born out of trauma, but their beliefs and their positions on the moral spectrum are very different. And now we have either a vigilante or a villain who was forged in trauma who could follow Daredevil’s lead and protect New York, or follow in the footsteps of the man who created her and fulfill his legacy as a killer.
While I’ve already joked about the absence of Spider-Man from the events of Born Again Season 2, Frank Castle’s absence initially looked more confusing. At the end of the first season, he had just busted out of the AVTF’s improvised prison and was surely set up to enact bloody revenge on his captors. But then… nothing. The season didn’t even explain where he went, or what mission was enough to turn him away from his usually irresistible lust for revenge. Jon Bernthal’s unavailability (thanks to his upcoming One Last Kill special and Spider-Man: Brand New Day) explained the no-show behind the scenes, but it’s a little strange that there’s no nod to his absence at all.
But now that the season is over, Frank’s absence makes sense. He would never have allowed Fisk and the AVTF’s story to end this way, given his stance on corruption. That may seem convenient, but Born Again Season 2 also replaced Punisher with another antihero with a similar fondness for violent solutions, in a way that actually advanced the plot. The sort-of-reformed Bullseye stood in for Frank, and allowed the story to explore his brand of bloody justice in parallel to and contrast with Matt Murdock’s restraint. And Bullseye also brought the baggage of having killed Foggy and murdered other people as a fully-fledged villain. That offered more nuance and more complexity than just having Frank kill Vanessa in anger, because forgiving the killer of your best friend has its own added gravity.
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