I was watching the video from SaveDaredevilCon in which Steven DeKnight and Erik Oleson interview each other about their experiences show running Daredevil, and I decided to transcribe everything Oleson said about what he was planning for future seasons before the show got canceled.
If you haven’t watched it and want to see it for yourself, the video is on YouTube. What I’ve transcribed here happens starting at about 41:55. I removed a few ums, likes, and you knows, and one instance where Steven DeKnight made a brief comment that Oleson confirmed (about a casting choice he wanted), but otherwise I have not altered what Oleson said. Ellipses are not edits, just pauses in what he was saying.
“Season 4, I was going to hopscotch, I was not going to directly pick up the Bullseye storyline because his back was broken and he had to heal. I was going to bring him back in season 5, is what [Jeph] Loeb and I had figured out.
Season 4 was going to be Typhoid Mary, Alice Eve [who played the role in Iron Fist], we were doing a kind of...I had a much different version of her than what Raven [Metzner] had done in Iron Fist. I was kind of rebooting what she was going to be like, and we were going to do a, you know, kind of a warped love story/murder mystery kind of femme fatale, but kind of a modern-day, feminist version of it, as opposed to kind of the older, sexist kind of femme fatale archetype.
We had, we’d broken more or less the entire season when we got canceled. So that was heartbreaking. But Owlsley [comics villain The Owl, who in the TV universe would have been the son of season 1’s Leland Owlsley] was going to be one of the key figures in that season as well. So we had a really intense, but different kind of season. Because I wanted to take—I didn’t want to just do season 3 again, I didn’t think I was gonna be able to pull that off, honestly. I had to take a different tack. And then I had plans for season 5 for how that would all kind of come back together.”
[Steven DeKnight mentions Melvin Potter, and how the show could have turned him into his comics counterpart, The Gladiator]
“I was planning to continue The Gladiator as well because, you know, in season 3 he basically had to go on the run, Fisk forced him to build the suit for Bullseye, so like I was answering some of those story threads as well.”
So there you have it! There was speculation back when the show was first canceled about what Oleson had planned for season 4, but definite information has been pretty scarce. So now that he’s revealed some details, I thought it might be of interest to people who might not have watched the video.
I definitely have some thoughts about some of these ideas, which I may write down if I feel motivated enough. Is it really worth the effort, when this is all completely theoretical, and right now there’s no reason to think it will ever actually happen? Debatable! Is that likely to stop me, if I feel a good opinion post coming on? Probably not! I haven’t written any meta in ages, maybe a good theoretical post is better than nothing. We’ll see!
