Daredevil Post-Binge

Season Two of Daredevil might be subtitled "Murdock Multitasking." There are a lot of elements that come together, or don't quite come together.

Given that this is going to cover the entire season, let's just put a big old spoiler warning on this whole thing.

SPOILERS AHEAD.


Frank Castle's Punisher is an ongoing element throughout the season, but his connection to Daredevil himself is somewhat tangential. Castle associates a lot with Daredevil's supporting cast, particularly Karen Paige, but ultimately he's on his own thing. Our titular hero is more concerned with his old flame Elektra and the machinations of The Hand.

It's this plot that, after episode four, gets the most attention. What's interesting is that this villain's Big Bad actually winds up being a figure who we sort of thought of as a lesser bad in season one. Nobu, Fisk's "yakuza" ally, Nobu, is actually a member of The Hand - an ancient order of mystical ninjas who are Very Bad Dudes. Despite the fact that we saw him burn to death, Nobu comes back to life, really giving the Ninjutsu-voodoo some legitimacy. The Hand has evil plans for New York, though these plans are shrouded in vagueness, and to be honest, I'm not sure how well they hold up from a storytelling standpoint. They're a huge menace, slaughtering innocent people and such, but there are some weird plot holes. (There are also massive literal holes that never get explained.)

We know from last season that these guys are trying to secure a "Black Sky," a person of immense power that they can use as a weapon... somehow. We find out more definitively this season that Stick is (or at least was) a member of the Chaste, a group that rose up to fight back against the Hand. We find that Elektra was trained much like Matt by Stick to fight for the Chaste, but that the Chaste didn't trust her, because, of course, she's one of these Black Skies. Stick shows some sympathy for her by not destroying her like the Chaste want him to, but being the cynical old bastard that he is, he eventually changes his mind, at least for a bit.

Helping Elektra ruins Matt's ability to actually do his job, which is to serve as Frank Castle's defense attorney. This wrecks both his budding romantic relationship with Karen and also puts the last nail in the coffin for Nelson and Murdock as a firm. The season follows through with this, scattering the three in different directions - Karen picks up Ben Urich's journalistic torch, Foggy goes to work at the firm run by Jessica Jones' Jeri Hogarth, and Matt is left with basically no day job.

Ultimately, the Hand forces Matt's... hand by kidnapping just about every person he's ever saved - including Karen - and using them as bait. He goes in to save them with Elektra's help, but in the end, Elektra takes a blade for him and dies. Asterisk.

It's not clear why the Hand didn't take Elektra earlier, like when she was playing her corporate espionage games earlier in the season. They might not have known what she was then, but if so, how do they know who she is now?

Meanwhile, Frank Castle willingly blows his own trial at the invitation of a figure on the inside. Yep, Wilson Fisk is there, and while he's obviously a much smaller presence in this season than last, he's clearly not letting prison stop him from taking over the crime world. Fisk swiftly establishes his own gang inside, and with Castle's help, he eliminates his main rival. He then tries to dispose of the Punisher, but Frank Castle is too much of a badass/horrifying monster for that. Still, Fisk lets him loose (the guards are under his control before long) on the theory that he'll maintain the power vacuum until Fisk gets out of jail and can reestablish himself.

Frank is of course primarily interested in taking out everyone involved in his family's deaths. So when DA Reyes is gunned down in her office (right in front of the not-yet-disbanded Nelson and Murdock trio, with Foggy getting wounded,) just as we learn that she was involved in a sting-gone-bad that left 3/4 of the Castle family dead, plus the ME who falsified the report to help cover up said sting, it looks like the Punisher is expanding his scope of vengeance. However, this theory is quickly eliminated when he shows up at Karen's apartment and rescues her as the machine guns open up on her apartment.

Thanks to his deal with Fisk and the brutal interrogation of Fisk's prison rival, Punisher is on the hunt for someone called The Blacksmith. He eventually traces the guy he thinks is the Blacksmith to a dock, only to be cornered by a group that seems to be the ones doing the hits and seemingly dies in a confrontation with the death squad.

Meanwhile, Karen, who has talked enough with Castle to think that, while he's totally wrong for the wanton murder and everything, he's not just a homicidal maniac who will kill the innocent, is trying her hand at doing a profile on Castle - to tell a story of him that goes beyond the obvious vigilante angle. She talks to his former CO, who by the virtue of his being played by Clancy Brown should have clued us all in to the fact that he's the bad guy. She recognizes some of the bodies of the death squad in his military photos, realizing that Castle was targeted because he wouldn't join their post-war crime syndicate. The Colonel figures out that she knows and is going to kill her somewhere quiet and private when Frank Castle comes to the rescue. But just in case you thought he had become a real hero, he shoots the Colonel in the head over Karen's protestations. Remember kids, the Punisher is not a good guy.

All through last season, one of my best friends had more or less spent the whole time going "wear the suit! Wear the suit!" It wasn't until the last episode that we saw Daredevil in his iconic devil costume, but we get plenty of that this time (and it does seem to work pretty well - far fewer scars gained this time.) I suspect that when that friend watches this season, he'll be shouting at Punisher to "wear the shirt! Wear the shirt!" Well, by the last episode, he'll finally get that wish. Finding the Colonel's shed of weapons and taking inspiration from both the shape of the body armor and the x-ray of his bullet-pierced skull, Frank paints the skull motif on the front of the armor, giving him the iconic comic-book look we've all been waiting for.

In the end, Nobu gets tossed off a building, but comes back because of his ninja magic. But just as he gets up, Stick sticks him with a katana and then beheads him - and assuming vampire rules apply, that should mean no more Nobu. Punisher helps out a little in the end, taking out some of the last threatening ninja goons from afar while Daredevil has his climactic fight. But ultimately, it's a pyrrhic victory, as Elektra lies dead in a grave, with only Stick and Matt to attend the burial.

In a sense, Matt's had a kind of love-triangle situation this season, though he pretty much chooses Elektra after she shows up, despite his protestations. He offers to go away with her if they survive the fight against Nobu in one of those speeches that pretty much telegraphs that she's going to die (there's no way that Daredevil's leaving Hell's Kitchen.) But when Elektra is buried in the ground, he goes back to Karen to try to make amends. And because their relationship fell apart due to a lack of honesty, he brings her his Daredevil mask, telling her exactly who he is.

And frankly I feel a wave of relief. Secret identities are a staple of the superhero genre, but they can also become tedious. I think the show has explored the "keeping a huge secret from those closest to you" as much as it needs to, and I'm more interested to see how Karen feels when she has to reconcile the vigilante she admires with the man who she has seriously complicated feelings for. It was interesting seeing how early in the season Foggy was basically able to handle the Daredevil knowledge, but he could no longer put up with it when it meant Matt wasn't doing his share of the work for their law firm. I'm curious to see if their relationship improves without the pressure of being business partners.

Because I do like the three of them together. There's good cast chemistry and one gets the feeling that outside of this superhero drama, they are a good circle of friends. Healthy friendships might not be dramatic, but Daredevil is a show that risks falling into a chasm of despair porn. Levity can be achieved by having characters who are just fun to hang out with, and the three main guys no longer at Nelson and Murdock can achieve that.

Now to deal with that asterisk. Of course, Elektra can't stay dead forever. While Nobu might be perma-dead, Elektra's grave is sadly not too well guarded, and the massive sarcophagus we've seen the Hand fueling with blood (and other stuff) is clearly some sort of resurrection chamber. It looks like they got their Black Sky after all, though what they intend to do with it (what they can do with it) remains a mystery.

EDIT:

I thought I'd throw in a little post-season feature:

Unanswered Questions:

What will the Hand do with Elektra? Are they putting her in that thing to resurrect her or to extract the Black Sky essence? And what does Black Sky actually do?

What was with that disc Frank got out of his house labeled "Micro?"

What's with the enormous holes the Hand has dug into New York?

Is Nobu perma-dead?

What made Stick decide to have Elektra killed? And are the Chaste ok with him having killed one of their guys to free her when she was a kid?

Madam Gao is back in New York. Surely she's as crazy mystical as Nobu, right? I hope that doesn't come off as racist, it's just that she claimed to be from somewhere much farther than China, and last time I looked on a globe, there's not too many places farther from New York than China. On Earth at least.

Am I going to need anti-nausea meds to watch the Punisher show? Because Frank Castle single-handedly raised this show's gory violence level to Game of Thrones levels when he was merely a supporting character.