Voters love a supervillain. Comic book readers have long known this. Despite torturing Superman for decades, Lex Luthor won the presidency. In an alternate timeline, Gotham City’s citizens turned on Batman and let The Joker become its mayor.
In 2025, Wilson Fisk’s ascendance to New York City’s top office in “Daredevil: Born Again” is entirely plausible.
America’s addiction to fable over fact and common sense has brought us closer to the superhero’s unreality, minus the powered-up vigilantes. This partly explains why 77.3 million Americans chose to elect Donald Trump to a second term in the White House despite his felony conviction on 34 counts of fraud and being found liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.
New York, where Vincent D’Onofrio’s crime boss reigns on Marvel’s pages, made Eric Adams its mayor. Federal prosecutors charged him with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions — allegations that may date back to when he was Brooklyn borough president.
America’s addiction to fable over fact and common sense has brought us closer to the superhero’s unreality, minus the powered-up vigilantes.
Trump’s Department of Justice lobbied to have the case against Adams tossed. Although a federal judge blocked that request, who knows if that ruling will hold? Normalized injustice is the trend, what with a billionaire and his bros upending the federal departments charged with maintaining our safety net and ignoring protests from congressional Democrats. Laws only work if they’re enforced.
That’s long been the tension buoying “Daredevil” and other street-level hero titles. The Avengers handle global threats, sometimes razing entire cities as they do — you know, omelets and eggs — but generic crimes like murders and muggings are generally left to the cops or, if they’re not around, The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
But Charlie Cox’s masked hero hasn’t been around much lately for reasons beyond the series transition from Netflix to Disney+, even if he turned up in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” Matthew Murdock returns to us on a straighter path, choosing his daylight identity as a lawyer over his secret vigilante life. As much as he can, we should say; trouble always lures the man with paranormal hearing ability and an inability to ignore the click of gun hammers being cocked or victims pleading for mercy.
Matt’s faith rests in his assumption that constitutionally established justice cogs usually work as they should. When New York’s cops and courts fail its citizens, those are anomalies.
Fisk’s successful mayoral run tests his attorney’s faith in that theory. But even before that, a life-changing shock curbs his willingness to don his red suit and horned helmet.
Cox’s hero isn’t alone, as was established and quickly dropped in “The Defenders,” Daredevil’s team-up with Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Jessica Jones over on that other streaming service.
“Nothing about ‘The Defenders’ is more political than any of the series leading up to it,” I wrote when that show premiered in 2017. Maybe that was flawed thinking but consider the circumstances. “The Defenders” hit Netflix days after a torch-wielding mob of white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, VA., one of whom drove into a crowd of protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.
That show also pre-dated the third and final season of “Daredevil” and the existence of Disney+, along with every TV title related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It could pretend that its New York reflected comic book canon.
“Daredevil: Born Again” is the product of a different era and an arc that came about during Trump’s first presidency. Writer Charles Soule introduced the storyline of Mayor Fisk in 2017, well after the country saw what type of leader Trump is.
Michael Gandolfini (Daniel Blake), Zabryna Guevera (Sheila Rivera), and Wilson Fisk / Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) in “Daredevil: Born Again” (Photo courtesy of Marvel Television/Giovanni Rufino)
Regardless of the extent to which showrunner Dario Scardapane patterns this season after its origin, there’s little question of the reference point to which the writers anchor the storyline. Production began before the 2024 presidential campaign heated up, but the man-on-the-street interviews from citizen journalist BB Urich (Genneya Walton) have echoes of familiarity.
When she asks one person about Fisk, the woman replies. “He’s an animal. That sort of person brings out the worst in other people as well . . . Why are we even talking about this? You know, supposedly he crushed a guy’s head.”
The next guy sings a different tune. To him, politicians and criminals are all the same. Why bother fussing about morality? Besides, he adds, “It’s a good rumor, crushed his head. I mean, I’d actually like to see that.”
Disney+ will likely brush aside any implications that D’Onofrio’s Fisk, better known as the Kingpin, is meant as a Trump proxy any more than Luthor or Harrison Ford’s Thaddeus Ross in “Captain America: Brave New World,” who transforms into a rampaging Red Hulk. None of these denials will hold water with MAGA culture warriors bent on attacking Disney’s supposed “wokeness.”
Of the two titles, “Daredevil: Born Again” has a more overt investment in using the title character’s popularity to make political and social statements about police corruption and criminalizing the poor. A brief subplot is wholly dedicated to the latter, in fact, as a matter of waking up Matt to the folly of his faith in systems.
Another poke comes in Jon Bernthal’s return as The Punisher, which demonstrates keen business sense on the part of Mouse House executives since both the character and actor are extremely popular on the left and the right. The writers also clap back at MAGA’s claim on Frank Castle’s signature.
Given the NYPD’s reputation for using excessive force and rampant stop-and-frisk violations, which climbed to their highest level in a decade since Adams was elected, it can’t exactly be a spoiler to say that a segment of the force is elated to have Kingpin calling the shots.
As in real life, those cops are especially enamored of the Punisher’s skull. But in the New York of “Daredevil,” Bernthal’s Castle lurks in the shadows and might have some thoughts about them appropriating his emblem.
Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) in “Daredevil: Born Again” (Photo courtesy of Marvel Television/Giovanni Rufino)
Before getting too excited about that hint, know that these nine episodes of “Daredevil: Born Again” contain fewer of the athletic combat sequences that defined the original series. This is part of the return’s trading off pure suited-up action for character study, particularly as that pertains to Cox, D’Onofrio and Fisk’s wife and partner-in-crime Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), who assumed his capo duties while he was off hunting the protégé who shot him the face.
We’re talking “Echo,” the first mature-rated series Disney+ introduced to its Marvel line-up, and one that was only intermittently worth watching. Newcomers to “Daredevil” needn’t subject themselves to that series if they don’t want to, although it’s probably worth taking in the 2015 first season of “Daredevil” as a matter of tracking the story’s evolution.
Cox remains a magnetic lead, although perhaps less so than D’Onofrio who, for all the points discussed here, is the main reason to watch. Already masterwork in balancing gentility with explosive rage, the actor blends the spark of a political mover with the oleaginous menace of a mob boss.
Resurrecting Daredevil, Kingpin, The Punisher and other marquee figures provides Disney with a broad opportunity to blow through several character cameos and subplots that slightly veer “Born Again” away from accusations of moseying into political minefields.
Casting Michael Gandolfini as Fisk’s youthful lickspittle of a right-hand, Daniel Blake, further augments the heavy’s shadiness. Even if you didn’t know the kid in the office is played by Tony Soprano’s son, Gandolfini oozes with enough dumb DOGE-bro confidence to corrupt a room by being there.
The Disney+ version of “Daredevil” retained a few characters from the original, including Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page, who did double duty on “The Punisher” as the figure tasked with keeping the vigilantes in her life centered and human.
Those watching to enjoy fresh versions of bone-cracking fights and flying bullets may be left impatient by Scardapane’s emphasis on moral quandaries and tangles over tussles, especially when it comes to Matt’s personal life; Margarita Levieva joins the cast as Heather Glenn, a therapist who does not condone masked heroes. Levieva and Cox bubble with chemistry in a strong cast overall. Clark Johnson is another welcome face, here playing a retired cop who chooses to work with Matt.
Resurrecting Daredevil, Kingpin, The Punisher and other marquee figures provides Disney with a broad opportunity to blow through several character cameos and subplots that slightly veer “Born Again” away from accusations of moseying into political minefields. Social ones are unavoidable. Daredevil isn’t alone in his off-hours endeavors, and New York City is racially diverse.
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Still, the effort at variety gets messy and shortchanges a portion of whatever opportunity there may be to make a parable out of a popular hero’s adventures. That’s probably a good thing given Marvel’s role in pushing the myth that billionaire industrialists want to save us.
This is still a media conglomerate property invested in cementing its heroes as incarnations of the American story and using its TV titles as bridges. One episode in the middle of this season is just that, entirely meant to establish the titular hero as adjacent to another Marvel hero in the area – and otherwise inessential.
That shouldn’t be much of an obstacle to anyone enjoying this, especially those who missed the era Cox launched on Netflix. Ten years and many superhero TV shows following the debut of the first “Daredevil” have numbed us to the notion that comic book dramas can be gritty and might have daring things to say about systemic failures.
“Daredevil: Born Again” doesn’t fully commit to that, and most people wouldn’t expect it to, but it takes enough swings to win an investment in the next season already in production. Maybe in Matt Murdock’s America, his justice-devoted allies will prevail over their criminal mayor, although we know that’s only temporary. Some antagonists always find a way to prevail, even if it’s only for a while. That keeps people hooked on this genre to a degree that sometimes, against common sense, we let the villains win – even in real life — just to see what happens.
“Daredevil: Born Again” debuts with two episodes Tuesday, March 4 at 6 p.m. PT/ 9 p.m. ET on Disney+. New episodes stream weekly on Tuesday.
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