#daredevil review

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DDS3 is coming. We have feelings.

Beyond my official review, in the most recent Marvel News Desk Podcast I talk with the guys about all of our feelings regarding DDS3. There are no spoilers, but there are tons of feelings. 

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TAKE NOTE | Ep.7: The New Daredevil on Disney+

The new Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ is shaping up to be quite different from the Netflix version, and fans have mixed feelings. Here’s a breakdown of how the two compare: Tone & Style Netflix: Gritty, dark, and violent, staying true to the street-level storytelling of the comics. Disney+: Expected to be a bit lighter and more in line with the MCU’s tone, though recent reports suggest…

TAKE NOTE | Ep.7: The New Daredevil on Disney+

[comicweek]

5 Thoughts: Daredevil “Karen”

After a winter break and near sleepless binge of Puroresu, Daredevil returns! “Karen” is at once an excellent episode as it gives Karen Page and Deborah Ann Woll the screen time they deserve. At the same time it is paired with something that could be argued is a vestigial tail of dramatic storytelling. It also ups the Pietà counter to 2.

1. A Story that Should’ve Happened Earlier, in an Odd Episode Overall

“Karen” is a strange episode, one that I’m glad exists now that the series has been cancelled, but one that feels even more odd in that context. As an episode it isn’t very good, even as it tells a story that this show needed to tell. Not considering it a very good episode is more due to the macro structure of pairing it with the Church fight. Screenwriter Tamara Becher-Wilkinson does attempt to stich the two segments together thematically with Karen and Father Lantom’s chat in the basement and largely succeeds, but they feel like two distinct entities that from something of a Frankenstein’s Monster of an episode. Why couldn’t this single episode have been two? The first Karen centered flashback would’ve made a great episode by itself and you could’ve tagged the final 15 minutes on to “Revelations.” The failed promise of Netflix revolutionizing televisual storytelling in an episodic format comes through in “Karen” as a 30 minute episode is stretched to 46 – making it both the shortest episode of the season and series – so that it can fulfill a standard form for a hour long drama.

Macro gripes aside, “Karen” tells a story this series needed to tell. This show is called Daredevil Matt Murdock and his vigilante alter ego are the sun that everything else in the story world rotates. Matt, and to an extant Wilson Fisk, maybe the centerpieces of everything but they are generally focused on at the expense of the shows other regulars: Foggy and Karen. The focus on Matt shrunk the storytelling of the series as a whole and turned these two characters into hollow, dramatically ineffective, supporting characters that seemed to operate as nothing more than pillars to prop Matt up with. Karen got it the worst in season 1, at least Foggy was shown to have a skill and reason to exist outside of the show. That hint of raison d’etre was not found in the Karen Page of season 1, she was the love interest to be pined after from afar and that was pretty much it. Things got exponentially better in season 2 when they gave her the reporter job, suddenly she had a reason to exist outside of Matt! One of the best things Erik Oleson did with this season is make it a more functional TV show by giving the other regulars their own things to do.

Why couldn’t we have had this story told in season 1? It didn’t need to be an individual episode but her backstory is the stuff running c-plots are made of. As they were getting to know Karen, so was the audience, and the show would’ve given her a reason to exist at the start instead of the end. Those lack of c-plots are one of the reasons Marvel-Netflix shows feel like such a slog as everything is over exposed and strung out.

2. Daredevil vs Bullseye: Round 2

I like that there seems to be a cinematic tradition of having Daredevil and Bullseye fight it out in a church. Despite the overall praise for action sequences in this season, this fight felt a bit lacking when compared to the Mark Steven Johnson Daredevil film. I have a soft spot for the director’s cut of that film, it is an integral element of developing what Dru Jeffries termed comic book film style. That said the two set pieces, while their settings are similar, are functionally at opposite ends. The film’s choreography was inspired by wuxia, which is not what the Netflix series aspires towards in the slightest.

In the context of the series, this is how you do a second big fight sequence and keep things open for the trilogy bout. The church fight is the exact opposite of the office fight spatially with unobstructed views and lack of ironic sharp instruments. Furthering the contrast is the visuals, the office fight is back lit with a dark blue, in the church it is red. Their new arena plays into the choreography as Matt does his darndest to keep to the inside and pummel his opponent to the body, stopping Bullseye from making space to throw things. Awesome fight choreography can make an action sequence enjoyable, but like good prowrestling, using that choreography to enhance or tell its story is what makes a sequence great.

Giving Bullseye a slasher-esque disappearing act was a nice touch as well.

3. Red vs Blue 4. RIP Father Lantom

It’s been interesting with the rise of Game of Thrones how the reaction and assumed new willingness to kill of characters has changed. Even though the only reason why those deaths are effective in the first place is their use as a deconstructive element in a narrative that is in some ways deconstructive. It has spurred new dialog on the nature of killing characters, and why certain marginalized characters seem to get the axe at a higher rate. That dialog is why the death of Julie rings hollower than it already did.

The death of Father Lantom isn’t like Julie’s, it is an earned dramatic moment and one that made sense if the show were to continue. At the top of the list of why these two similar events are different is the fact that Lantom was an overall effective character. Earlier I mentioned how poor of character Karen Page was in season 1, in execution she was a blander version of what Lantom, except, she was also a regular. Lantom was a stock supporting character, the Spiritual Father. These qualities when mixed with sound dramatic writing and a nice turn by Peter McRobbie, gave the character a spark and life to him. This allowed his death to have an impact. Lantom was also given agency in his death, he choose to take the bullet, as opposed to being shot in the back of the head over a computer screen. With the arrival of Joanne Whalley as Sister Maggie aka Matt’s Mom, he also had a bit of a functional double that offered up untapped dramatic potential. So if there were a fourth season, there could still be a spiritual adviser for Matt to play off of.

5. A Cool Use of Daredevil’s Powerset

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Before I started this episode, the title gave me a bit of a chuckle because of course Daredevil would have a episode called “Revelations.” The episode begins, dropped two MASSIVE revelations on the audience, and then the credits role! Followed by moments that are not so much revelatory for their shock value, but act as a montage for Ray Nadeem and the audience as we begin to learn just how deep the rabbit hole goes. There are likely better all around episodes in this series, but none pack the sheer melodramatic swagger of “Revelations.”

1. Now That’s How You Begin an Episode

A recurring motif in both my writing on Daredevil season 3 and the show in general has been the series instance to begin episodes with a character, often one of our trio of emotionally damaged dudes, starting their day. Narratively this makes a lot of sense because it tended towards showing a character alone and theoretically honest, their ritual of presentation, or how it is they see themselves. On a more structural level it was a great way to train the audience and queue them into the fact that a new episode has begun, as Netflix as a platform incentives you to skip the union mandated credits blurring the edges of when one episode began and one ended.

Watching “Revelations” that training came full circle as the show lulled us into a false sense of security. Sure it didn’t start with one of our trio beginning their day, it starts a few minutes after “Upstairs/Downstairs” ended, but part of that training wasn’t just about the visual patterns but the temporal ones as well. 60 minute television shows are generally composed of in 5 acts, with the teaser pre-title card/credits sequence being first on the block (but it isn’t technically act .) These teases generally run about 3-5 minutes, most the DCWverse shows go about 6 but they tend to use this sequence as a place to cut to commercial, Daredevil has been like clockwork this season with 4 minutes and some seconds being the length of their tease. “Revelations” disregards this pattern, dropping the credits sequence at 13 minutes 30 seconds of the episode at what is pretty much the climax of act 1. Never has a cut to the credits sequence been so impactful for this show, or how furiously I smashed that “skip intro” button.

They drop the credits nearly 10 minutes after the biggest revelation of the episode: Father Paul Lantom is a pool shark and drinks! I’m pretty sure that’s against his vows somehow, but also, maybe, the least of his sins.

Changing up when the credits appear was a dramatic capper to an overall good opening act, director Jennifer Lynch and omnipresent cinematographer Christopher LaVasseur do an excellent job this episode of not overdoing the visuals even as things get oh so delightfully melodramatic. Televisual storytelling isn’t purely visual camera work, they strike a nice balance between well composed imagery and letting the musical ques and actors carry the load. This comes through as they chose to primarily stay on Jay Ali’s perplexed face as his boss shoots her boss right in front of him, letting the diegetic and non-diegetic audio que audiences in as Agent Ray realizes how deep the water is and how powerful Kingpin is.

2. The Sting of Lying

Matt Murdock has spent most of this season in a egotistical rage at just about everything and justified in none of it. They were the petulant spasms of a lonely person. Now he has something to feel justifiably angry about, the fact that Father Lantom and his Mother aka Sister Maggie never told him about his parentage, and hopefully learn from that experience and grow as a person from it. Because their lies of omission are not so different from him not telling Foggy or Karen about his night time antics … oh who am I kidding he doesn’t really grow all it does it push him into an even darker place as he is absolutely ready to kill Wilson “We Don’t Say His Name” Fisk.

It kinda hurts when someone close and important to you keeps something that major from you for a good while. Superhero shows always have to deal with the nature of the bifurcated identity in tougher ways compared to the comics since the sheer difference in screen time slowly creates a sorting of the cast between who knows and doesn’t, and the various tensions such a division creates. It’s nice to see Dardevil deal with this in reverse, giving Matt a taste of his own medicine.

While the tables are turned on Matt it does allow the series to get at the core reasoning behind such lies, selfish fear. In the case of Matt and Daredevil it was often couched in the fear of reprisals. For Father Lantom and Sister Maggie it was a fear of confusing an already traumatized kid. Both are rooted in a fear of rejection from this new found information, and in all these cases it feels incredibly human to lie in these moments.

3. Montage, Romantic Images and Harsh Realities 4. Maggie was an unfit Mother 5. Talking with Dad

Maybe it’s a mixture of the fact that BingeMode is getting ready to talk about Chapter 35 “King’s Cross” from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the fact that presenting these moments this way makes throwing psychoanalysis at it infinitely easier, but the decision to have Matt wrestle with his ego through the psychic projection of his friends and enemies has been a great addition to the show. Matt has been pretty much isolated this entire season, bringing these apparitions into play gives Charlie Cox someone to play off of and create moments of interaction without straining too hard. Without the return of John Patrick Hayden as the Devil Jack Murdock, Matt’s return to the spiritual home of his father would not have worked nearly as well, as the character goes through his dark knight of the soul moment.

Jack is framed on his right shoulder, which is supposed to be the Angel side, but Wilson Fisk also appears on his right shoulder. The phantasmic Fisk tends to pace back and forth but favors the left side.

His talk with dear old Dad isn’t the best. It’s brutally honest, he admits that he enjoys beating people up, that the costume acts as a classic Freudian fetish object for him to disavow those baser toxic urges. Drawing back the curtain, however, only sends Matt deeper into the metaphorical Dagobah Cave, as he gives into those baser tendencies and imagines himself brutally murdering the Kingpin. He certainly doesn’t see the Kingpin as human at this point.

“Upstairs/Downstairs” was the boring and limp plot maneuvering as the season entered the final third, “Revelations” was the emotional opposite of that.

Read All of My Thoughts on Daredevil @ MultiversityComics.com

[comicweek]

Five Thoughts on Daredevil’s “No Good Deed”

1. Old Habits

“No Good Deed” is a direct continuation of “Please.” Together they form a duology due to their adjacent position on the timeline, but lack the structure of a two part story that would make continuous viewing a satisfying experience. That lack of satisfaction is predominantly derived from this episode. “Deed” lacks the payoff a two parter normally entails or the episodic chops to stand alone. As an episode it recalls the structure of prior Netflix originals where episodes were connected by close proximity in time but nothing more. The viewer is left in a haze of what just happened as the plot nebulously trudged forward.

These old Netflix Original qualities had me considering this as an episode without some kind of unifying motif, as previous episodes this season have. It does, everything is shown through the prism of aftermath. The rest of the cast reacts to the news that Kingpin is in his new prison and the convoy was attacked. That is not a strong enough construct, it created plenty of excellent scenes or sequences, but Sonay Hoffman’s script lacks the connective tissue that comes from good storytelling. “No Good Deed” is an assemblage of pleasant sequences and moments, that never come together to make for something more.

2. The Devil on His Shoulder

As episodically unwieldly this episode maybe, it has some excellent scenes that push the story forward, not just the plot. Daredevil, likely in part due to chewing through a showrunner a season, hasn’t been the most visually consistent or intelligent show. These three seasons have been in a continuity with lighting and other visual signifiers, but compared to what Melissa Rosenberg in Jessica Jones or Cheo Hodari Coker in Luke Cage, lack their contemporaries consistency in letting the visuals tell the story. Daredevil has been more an exercise in shallow style, but that appears to be changing with Erik Oleson at the helm. In these three episodes, Oleson appears to be leaning into the televisual medium harder and using simple imagery and staging inform and enhance the writing in ways previous seasons of Daredevil have not. Past episodes had simple, effective, audio and visual cues that represent Matt’s alternative sight to the audience. They didn’t make the shadow world from Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil or the impressionist image of fire found in season 1, but they got the point across. This sort of simple but effective visual storytelling comes through again as “Deed” continues to explore the depths of how lost Matthew Murdock is.

His sense of self loathing is magnified into a surrealist sequence that imagines Kingpin as a literal Devil on his shoulder, while Murdock stalks the gilded hallways of Wilson Fisk’s new prison. Season long cinematographer Christopher LaVasseur, keeps the focus in the foreground on Matt, blurring and magnifying Vincent D’onofrio immense girth as he paces in and out of frame taunting and urging Matt to give into his baser tendencies to let the Devil out. It is the perfect image to tell audiences how much Matthew Murdock is psychologically flagellating himself for his perceived failures, much like how Bruce Wayne’s trio of dreams did in Batman v Superman.

The phantasmic presence of Kingpin helps to give the sequence a dreamlike quality as Matt haunts these hallways in nice long shots. These, relatively, long takes awake the viewer to the lack of cuts and also highlight how aimless and ill-defined the whole endeavor is. Really, Matt’s going to just bust into an FBI protected penthouse murder like 20 people and kill Fisk?

At the heart of Murdock’s psychological torment reveals is a dark truth: he wanted death when he stayed in Midland Circle. Catholic Matthew Murdock wanted to commit suicide. Now, this is one part reframing/retcon that isn’t entirely supported by or present in The Defenders. However, Defenders was poorly written in the first place and with reports that few people watched it, there is plenty of room for this recontextualization of Murdock’s emotional state. It does feel apiece with the shows overall view of love as a madness inducing emotional state that only death seems preferable to leaving it.

This storytelling choice also allows Charlie Cox and Vincent D’onofrio to interact without really doing it. They have good chemistry, and considering Matt is sequestered away only interacting meaningfully with Sister Maggie and Father Lantom, it gives him and the show another character to play off of.

While the phantom Fisks role is to torment Matthew, it also shows how well he knows the man. The comment about “Prison” changing him is actually true and a bit of a pun. Considering in the previous episode Fisk referred to his love for Vanessa as the ultimate prison, it has indeed changed him.

3. Matthew Murdock is an A-Hole 4. Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter is bananas 5. Karen’s Awkward Home Cooked Meal

Read All My Thoughts @ MultiversityComics.com

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Daredevil Season 3 was so good!!

Seriously, if you gave up on Daredevil a while ago, give season 3 a chance. There’s a new show runner and he is entirely character-focused. Quote:

“One of the things that I came into season three wanting to do, was to more fully flesh out the characters. To make them all the protagonists of their own stories. I don't believe in sidekick characters. I think everybody is the hero of their own movie, and that to me is the mark of premium television, of quality TV.”

It shows. The character arcs this season are some of the best on TV. This is the show I’ve been wanting since season one.

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Daredevil Season 3 Has Every Exciting Element That Makes It Successful

Daredevil Season 3 Has Every Exciting Element That Makes It Successful

Daredevil is streaming on Netflix now, and I just finished watching the season 3. With Luke Cage and Iron Fist getting canceled by Netflix, I was really into Daredevil. From the beginning of the series, I have grown a fondness towards the character Daredevil. I feel in many ways the superhero is different from others. Although season 2 wasn’t much satisfying for me, so I was eagerly waiting for…

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