In the Flesh: Daredevil: Born Again s1e01 & s1e02, 'Heaven's Half Hour' and 'Optics'

It’s about Trump. Born Again makes no bones whatsoever about this, and it’s better for it, charging out of the gate in a wave of ‘Fisk Can Fix It’ baseball caps and scumbags talking approvingly about how newly inaugurated mayor Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) “gets shit done”. Again and again we watch people look on aghast as the onetime crime lord ascends to high office, paralyzed by the weight of watching a known criminal and murderer take up the reins of government. We all know what that feels like. We know what it’s like to feel the crazy-making pressure of “is this really happening?” mount day after day, week after week, year after year. The show captures this beautifully. The worst people alive have won, the corrupt cops, the wife-beaters (there’s a lot of overlap there), the paranoiacs and the creeps, and the rest of us are all stuck wondering how to stop it, or if it can be stopped, and if so, who’s responsible for doing that?

Showrunner Dario Scardapane, an alum of the excellent Punisher series on Netflix, takes a similar hard-charging approach to his antagonist. Ten minutes into the first episode Foggy (Elden Henson) is dead, Matt/Daredevil (Charlie Cox) has pushed Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) off a building, and Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) has split for the West Coast, estranged from Matt and unwilling to reconcile. Another ten minutes and we’ve got Wilson and Vanessa’s (Ayelet Zurer) marriage on the rocks, Fisk first running for and then winning the office of mayor of New York City, and Matt has been out of the vigilante game for a year. It’s a brisk pace, and the show manages it ably and with style, from the dazzlingly disorienting opening fight sequence between Daredevil and Bullseye in which we flit through the smoke-filled interior of Josie’s Bar, following the balletic swirl of flying limbs and knives to the rooftop where the action culminates, to the timely and compelling legal plot involving fellow vigilante White Tiger/Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes) and a pair of vicious corrupt cops.

For all that it hits the ground at top speed and throws tremendous changes at its audience one after another at a relentless pace, the series’ two-part premiere is fairly reserved. There are only three fight scenes, two of them exceptionally brief. Nobody shouts at anyone. Nothing is ratcheted up for the sake of ginning up easy drama to grease the skids for the rest of the season. It’s the kind of measured but exciting storytelling that so often made Daredevil and The Punisher stand out from the sea of superhero dreck around them. And of course, seeing D’Onofrio and Zurer back in the same room, even if it is for marriage counseling, is no less electrifying than it was seven years ago. Is it surreal to watch anti-Trump television produced and run by a company tied to the current monstrously corrupt and bigoted administration in a thousand different material ways? Yes, as surreal as it was to see them produce art about anti-fascist revolution when Andor hit streaming back in 2022, but hey, at least we’re getting some good TV out of it.