Summary
Daredevil: Born Again establishes the Season 2 status quo in “The Northern Star”, which is largely functional but certainly has its exciting moments, including a last-minute cliffhanger.
“New York is back,” says a happy bystander in the Season 2 premiere of Daredevil: Born Again, in one of those boots-on-the-ground handheld interstitials from BB Urich that the first season used to take the political temperature. It’s a mission statement, it turns out, because New York is only “back” depending on where you’re standing. Mayor Wilson Fisk’s increasingly authoritarian policies and aggressive anti-vigilante sentiment are winning a few voters over, but it’s all a smokescreen for a much seedier operation that a few people aren’t buying, least of all Matt Murdock and Karen Page, who in Episode 1, “The Northern Star”, continue to wage a secretive war against the Kingpin.
As premieres go, then, this one is about establishing the new status quo. A while has elapsed since the first season finale, Fisk’s sleeper hold on New York has tightened, and vigilantes, especially the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, have been driven deeper underground, forced to fight in the shadows while avoiding flagrantly illegal “safer streets” policies and sham trials. The entire establishment, more or less, has been bought and paid for, even if they don’t know it yet. Things were bad before; now they’re much, much worse.
Daredevil Is Big Mad
The opening action sequence of this premiere, in which Daredevil attacks the titular cargo ship connected to Fisk’s Freeport operation, is also a mission statement. It’s all bone-splintering R-rated violence and primal screams and a cool new suit, a nice reminder that we’re still not pulling any punches and that Daredevil is very annoyed.
The Northern Star is being used to secretly move military-grade ordnance through the port, which Matt discovers to his dismay while he’s battering his way through the vessel. The captain and his first mate are in on it, and they’re under strict instructions to scuttle the ship if Daredevil turns up, presumably since fishing the cargo from the bottom of the East River is preferable to Matt getting his hands on it. He does manage to plant a tracking device inside one of the weapon crates, but the rest of the shipment is consigned to the deep.
This creates multiple political and logistical issues. Access to the port is blocked. The weapons are on the riverbed. Matt knows what Fisk was transporting. And the two co-conspirators both disappear, creating a race to see who can find them first. It’s a simple enough setup that allows us to flit across the breadth of New York and get a sense of how all the moving parts now fit together.
Meet Mr. Charles
Those moving parts naturally include both returning and new characters. The most notable of the latter is an enigmatic CIA agent named Mr. Charles, played by Matthew Lillard, fresh from playing an equally repulsive character in Cross. Fisk visibly hates Charles, which is funny throughout, but he’s also willing to get in bed with him since, as becomes clear, the CIA has a vested interest in moving things through the Freeport.
I’m fairly certain Fisk will messily murder Mr. Charles at some point, but his presence in the short term illustrates a larger point. He’s able to get Valentina Allegra de Fontaine – now the Director of the CIA, you may or may not recall – to strong-arm the Attorney General, who’s worried about Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force running all over New York without oversight. With his intelligence connections, Fisk is completely untouchable, at least by the established political apparatus.
The upcoming trials reflect this. They’re a formality. The verdicts are already predetermined. The only process seems to be a cursory psychological interview with Heather Glenn – we see her “assessing” Jack Duquesne here, which consists of her writing down observations that have nothing to do with anything he’s saying – before locking them up and throwing away the key. Heather is still traumatised from her encounter with Muse and keeps hallucinating him lurking around in the background, but she doesn’t get a great deal of screen time for us to really dig into this.
Bullseye is Back
Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episode 1 lends a fair amount of focus to Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF), still led by the psychotic Powell. We see them battering down a kind of underground railroad joint to apprehend the ship’s captain, and then see Powell torturing him mostly for fun until Buck arrives to politely put him out of his misery. The AVTF is running roughshod over New York, and the ICE allegory is obvious.
The AVTF also target Matt’s mate Cherry, who is still secretly working with Matt and Karen to investigate the bits of evidence they’re uncovering during their clandestine operations (Matt and Karen are now also together romantically, Karen is learning how to fight, and she sometimes ventures into the city proper wearing a bad wig to cultivate BB Urich, since she’s still working Daniel as an insider source but is clearly emotionally attached to him in a way that is definitely going to backfire down the line). This brings us to our second action sequence of the premiere and the big cliffhanger ending.
Matt arrives to bail out Cherry, who’s being beaten by the AVTF in his apartment, but because Cherry’s frantic heartbeat reminds him of Foggy’s death, the goons are able to overwhelm and unmask him. Luckily, he’s saved by a mysterious gunman who shoots his attackers through the window. A knife follows, bouncing off the walls before spearing into the ground next to Matt’s head. It has a message on it that reads, “You’re welcome,” along with the familiar Bullseye symbol.
