Summary
After a banger double-bill, “Art for Art’s Sake” feels like a mild step down.
After a banger double-bill, it’s easy to consider Episode 7 of Daredevil: Born Again a bit of a step down. It’s not bad, of course – it’s actually pretty good, with a solid fight scene and some pleasantly messy imagery and another memorable Wilson Fisk line reading (“I like boxing,” he snarls at Angie Kim when she asks him what he knows about taekwondo.) But it also rockets through the resolution to the Muse subplot at a rate of knots and devotes a lot of time to Heather, whom I’m not sure anyone really cares about.
With Muse now established as a frankly terrifying and sickening villain after the previous episode, it’s disappointing how unceremoniously “Art for Art’s Sake” both identifies and then disposes of him. Of course, this happened with White Tiger too, so it’s obviously an intentional tactic to flesh out the thematic underpinnings of the seemingly endless Daredevil vs. Kingpin arc with the help of obscure Marvel second stringers. But I can’t help feeling like there was more to do here.
And Heather, I’m just not sure about. It’s cool to see Matt having a physical romantic relationship, so you can buy into him as an actual human being and not just an avatar of masochistic Irish-Catholic self-penance, but this is all playing out on fast-forward. We’re at the mutual “I love you” stage already? They haven’t even had that many scenes together! And don’t get me started on the contrivance of Heather being Muse’s psychiatrist as well as Fisk and Vanessa’s marriage counsellor. Is she the only therapist in New York? It’s a pretty big city.
Speaking of which, the city seems perhaps too big for local law enforcement, which is why Matt is so righteously embodying the Daredevil persona once again. Muse was able to claim 60 victims under the nose of the NYPD, but Daredevil found him in one night, which is a fair point, but it overlooks the fact that nobody knew he was active until the murals were analysed and Matt was led right to his hideout by the niece of the person who did all the actual work. And that’s after Matt initially refused to help, so let’s not get carried away with the grandstanding here.
Nevertheless, I do agree with Matt that Daredevil is necessary, since being Matt Murdock, Attorney at Law full time is demonstrably not working; the longer he stays out of the suit, the more he risks proving his point in reverse by getting all of his clients and loved ones killed. This makes Cherry’s antagonism about Matt donning the cowl again feel a little forced to me – he works in the office, so surely he sees the problem?
I guess not. Anyway, let’s talk about Muse. After his standoff with Daredevil in the previous episode, he has gone to ground and word has spread from the subway tunnels to the mayor’s office that Daredevil returned to bring him to justice. Fisk is annoyed about this because it violates the pact he and Matt made in the two-part premiere – which is also, incidentally, the last time we saw Bastian Cooper, the Heather super-fan who turns out to be Muse.
Ayelet Zurer in Daredevil: Born Again | Image via Disney+
I know – disappointing reveal, right? I didn’t even recognise him. Daredevil: Born Again Episode 7 plays it as a much bigger moment than it feels like, too, crosscutting between a scene of Angie Kim giving Fisk Bastien’s details and Bastien gradually revealing his murderous alter-ego in a session with Heather. It’s decently acted but a little kooky in spots. Angie explains how the NYPD suspects Bastien killed his live-in taekwondo coach three months after he started training him at the behest of his (presumably wealthy) overbearing parents, but we saw Muse go toe-to-toe with Daredevil in a fight last week, and again this week, so I guess he must just be the fastest learner in the history of martial arts.
Anyway, Bastian is obsessed with Heather and has decided to paint his masterpiece by bleeding her on a sheet on the floor of her office, but Daredevil bursts through the window for Round 2 of last week’s smackdown, which means he probably overheard Heather ironically insist that anyone who wears a mask is a coward. Matt technically saves Heather, but it’s she who shoots Muse dead, and she’s later pretty torn up about it. Matt reassures her at her hospital bedside, claiming she had no other choice. Heather asks him how he knows that and he says it’s because he knows her, but that’s a little vague. She must know it’s him, right? She heard Daredevil say her name in Matt’s exact voice, and after the shower scene, she’d probably recognise that chiselled stubbly jawline anywhere.
In all this, Fisk once again spies an opportunity and gets his Anti-Vigilante Task Force to take credit for busting Muse. It’s a big win for him without having to lift a finger, but you can tell his obsession with Daredevil might prove to be his undoing. He tries to explain to Buck how Daredevil hunted down and savagely beat his various business partners, collapsed a decade’s-worth of infrastructure, and had him wrongfully arrested, as justification for using city resources to hunt him down personally, even though – this in a bit of whisper – stopping a serial killer is objectively a good thing for the city. I’m honestly not clear how much Buck knows about Fisk’s former activities, but based on this, he sees through the tall tales either way.
He remains unflinchingly loyal, though, as we see towards the end of “Art for Art’s Sake”, when it seems like Vanessa has conspired with Luca to have her husband killed. Luca arrives at the restaurant where Fisk likes to dine in solitude and silence and walks right into a few of Buck’s bullets. The implication here is that Fisk and Vanessa were working together to take out Luca, who was becoming a threat, but there’s something in the little smile Vanessa wears when she gives Luca Fisk’s location that suggests she’s at least entertaining the notion of unseating her husband for real. All those therapy sessions don’t seem to be working. Based on how the Muse arc turned out, I’m starting to think Heather might not be very good at her job.
