I was quite happy with Daredevil when Marvel's first Netflix show came out. While the general consensus (and I'd probably agree with that consensus) is that Jessica Jones had a more solid first season, going back to see Daredevil's first season again and now watching several episodes of the new season have reminded me that yes, this one's good too.
This is the year of superheroes fighting superheroes. We have Batman vs Superman over on the DC side (and while those two are pretty much the unequivocal biggest superheroes int he genre, it's Zack Snyder directing, so my expectations are low,) and then in the MCU, Captain America will be coming to blows with Iron Man pretty soon.
Daredevil's in the MCU, but it's rather separated off, down at the street level. Daredevil absolutely has superpowers, but they're subtle enough that he could never go toe to toe with the Captain. Indeed, the Netflix heroes are oddly in the unique position of actually fighting crime, as opposed to threats that are too massive to really be considered crime in the classic superhero demesne. For the Avengers, it's enough that they stopped the Chitauri from literally conquering the world. The street-level crime is way too small potatoes when they have things like Hydra or Ultron to deal with.
So Daredevil fights crime, and that puts him in the realm of the vigilante (despite a trailer that has General Not-Yet-Red-Hulk call Captain America a vigilante, he's pretty much always been operating under some sort of official banner - either the Army or SHIELD.) Daredevil's contrast (well, initially,) is The Punisher.
Now, between Captain America and Iron Man, I'm obviously going to consider Captain America the more heroic. He basically never does anything wittingly that isn't guided by a deep moral code. Iron Man is clearly a good guy, but he's a bit too Ayn Rand-y to let go of his ego - though unlike Rand's ideal hero, Tony Stark does have at least some sense of altruism. It's just that it really has to be coaxed out and sometimes backfires (like Ultron.) Still, both Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are ultimately good guys whose ideologies are based on making the world safe for people who can't fight agains the monsters that threaten it.
Daredevil shares that ideal, though it is shrunken down to the more manageable size of Hell's Kitchen. But his counterpart this season, the Punisher, is arguably more of a villain than a hero. He doesn't have a sense of there being some kind of normality to return to (certainly nothing like Cliff Barton's lovely farmhouse where the Avengers go to regroup in the middle of Age of Ultron.) And he has absolutely no mercy when it comes to the people he considers the bad guys.
Daredevil has his Catholic guilt constantly serving as a check on his violent instincts, and Catholics are opposed to the death penalty. There's a code of ethics there - he'll hurt people, even pretty badly, but he doesn't want to rob them of a chance of redemption, even if they're unlikely to make that choice. The Punisher takes no prisoners.
So for the first few episodes, the Punisher is portrayed simply as the new villain of the season - the Big Bad, to borrow a rather useful concept from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and when writing about TV, that's usually a good source.) Someone is massacring the gangs that have moved in to fill the vacuum left by Wilson Fisk. They strike with military precision, but the legend grows that it's actually just one man (which is of course true: it's Frank Castle.)
Some of the questions that are raised are actually pretty well-tread - questions about the limitations on power. Matt Murdock is simultaneously a lawyer with a great deal of respect for the law but also a vigilante who operates outside its bounds. Frank Castle has no qualms because he has reduced his worldview to a pure black-and-white.
While Season One of Daredevil brought with it much more graphic violence than we had seen elsewhere in the MCU, I'll contend that the Punisher has brought things to perhaps a gratuitous level, such as a drill going into a person's foot and a man's face being blown in by a shotgun. I think that graphic violence can be an effective storytelling tool - I thought the decapitation-by-car-door last year really demonstrated new information about just what kind of guy Wilson Fisk was - but here it is perhaps too much. At most, it shows us that the Punisher is more comfortable living in a world with all this butchery, but that's not really something that we haven't figured out by then. (Lest I seem to be selling the character short, he does carry with him a great deal of menace but also a fair amount of nuance, thanks largely to the performance.)
The gears shift profoundly as episode 5 (of 13) shifts gears and we are introduced to Elektra.
Just as the TV show has presumably erased all memory of Ben Affleck's ill-liked turn as the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, I suspect that this version of Elektra has already been crowned the definitive version. In one episode, it becomes very clear that Elektra was Matt's most toxic relationship in his past (well, Stick might give her a run for her money, though at least Matt got his cool training from that.) Possessing similar fighting prowess, Elektra is another character who dips over into the villainous side of the spectrum. But unlike Frank Castle's humorless crusade, Elektra essentially considers herself an ubermensch (well, uberfrau) who is free to do as she pleases because she can. She seems to have a similar dedication to beating the bad guys (with murder absolutely on the table) but she makes no effort to hide the fact that she does this because she wishes to, and not for any noble reasons.
Elektra shows up after a mini-arc with the Punisher concludes. While there's some closure, it's apparent that the character will come back later in the season, as the clear main arc of the season has to do with some sort of vast conspiracy that involves Frank Castle.
In Punisher and Elektra, we get two quasi-villains on top of whatever the more shadowy true villain of the season will turn out to be. Obviously, there's a huge Wilson Fisk-sized hole in the show this season, but these two characters may succeed in filling it. Given that Fisk was by far the most sympathetic and humanized villain the MCU has had (not that there's been much competition on the sympathy front - maybe Winter Soldier, if you count him as a villain and not a victim,) it's fitting then that we focus on these characters who either straddle ore at least stray very close to the fuzzy area between hero and villain.
I'm five episodes in. I'll have more reflections I'm sure once I've finished the season, which I expect will not be too long from now.
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