TV Review: ‘Daredevil’ Reaches The Fireworks Factory — And Catharsis — In ‘The Scales & The Sword’

“Ripped from the headlines” plotlines in heavily-stylized genre fiction work best when they ultimately serve as vehicles for audience catharsis. One of the reasons all the Trumpian/ICE parallels in this season of Daredevil: Born Again have been so distractingly-real is the sense of helplessness they engender in the protagonists.

We are drawn to superhero stories to experience things we can’t experience ourselves; tremendous feats of skill or strength, moral clarity, the righting of wrongs. When our heroes are as paralyzed by the oppressive weight of villainy just like we are, it makes watching their adventures a lot less rewarding and engaging.

That’s been the story of the season thus far, but in “The Scales & The Sword”, we finally get to experience a sense of catharsis as Daredevil (Charlie Cox) takes action and succeeds in striking a blow against Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his squad of extra-legal jackbooted thugs – and it feels great.

“The Scales & The Sword” can be roughly divided in half, as suggested by the ampersand in its title. In the first half, we get the beginning of the Vigilante Trials that have been teased since the beginning of the season, with the Swordsman (Tony Dalton) facing a clearly rigged tribunal. This half of the episode is more or less anchored by Kirsten (Nikki M. James), who arguably gets to do the most she’s ever done in a single episode.

She gets to call out Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) for her hatchet job of a psych eval (it doesn’t change anything, but it’s a nice bit of catharsis for the audience), she gets to penetrate Red Hook for a meeting with the Swordsman (which proves pivotal to the back half of the episode) and while she doesn’t win a clearly unwinnable trial, there’s also catharsis to be had in simply seeing her stand up and push back against the ridiculous and illegal circumstances of it.

Similarly, while things go exactly as the Swordsman expects them to, despite the complete lack of evidence against him, there is a kind of schadenfreude in the way he clearly recognizes the game and has no allusions about its outcome.

Following the cold open in which it somewhat randomly turns out the AVTF goon Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) kidnapped at the end of the last episode wants out and wants to help Daredevil take down Fisk (if the way Karen knew that about this guy when she took him was revealed last episode, I missed it).

The second half is all about Matt and Karen making a strike against Fisk and Red Hook, with Matt using a keycard from the captured goon and Kirsten’s recollections of her blindfolded journey through the facility to effectively sneak his way in to get proof of Fisk’s malfeasance. Sure enough, he confirms the guns from the capsized cargo ship are at the port via Chekhov’s Watch, but more importantly, he discovers all the people in cages.

And in true superhero fashion, even though it’s not the mission, and he has no clear exit plan, Matt proceeds to bust everyone the hell out of those cages and take out as many guards as he can in the process, because that’s what superheroes do. The ensuing action sequence isn’t quite on the level of the some of the series earlier ones (it gins up a fairly straightforward fight by doing lots of sweeping camera rotations) but it’s easily the best of the season thus far, with the secret MVP being Swordsman joining the fight wielding two pieces of rebar like rapiers. It even leads to the first proper inklings of the formation of a new quasi-Defenders team, as Karen and Angela (Camilla Rodriguez), wearing her uncle’s White Tiger amulet, join the fight.

It is not, of course, a complete and utter victory for the heroes. Fisk is still in power. He still manages to snatch a victory of sorts from the jaws of the defeat handed to him by Daredevil and friends. And it’s not like everyone who just escaped from the cells can just pick up their lives. But it is still cathartic to see the heroes get a win, however fleeting. The audience, just like the characters, need little wins along the way to keep their spirits up, to make the otherwise unrelenting defeats more bearable. Beyond that, in both the trial and the assault on Red Hook, “The Scales & the Sword” imbue the story with some much needed narrative momentum, both the culmination of things that have building over the previous episode, and an event whose repercussions promise to be felt in subsequent ones, the sense that, whoever wins, the story is at least going somewhere.

The Law Review

• Matt sensing the kidnapped goon was telling the truth, but still angrily calling him a liar, was a nice touch.
• The series seems to have forgotten this, but it’s worth noting that Heather and Kirsten are meant to be friends – that’s why Kirsten hooked Matt and Heather up in the first place last season.
• I know things like due process and attorney-client privilege are out the window at this point, so chain of evidence probably is, too, but it seems odd that Heather would be able to just keep the Muse mask in her desk drawer to ominously look at periodically.
• The governor is played by Lili Taylor, always a delight to see. I’m glad we’re getting an ongoing sense of how Fisk’s actions are playing to the wider world (NYC is big, but it’s still just a city), but I’m also not sure the governor would really be as kowtowed by him as what we see here (like, she could leave him in place and turn a blind eye to stuff while still insisting on due process being followed).
• I am generally pro “superheroes don’t kill” and I recognize there’s a difference between, say, the Punisher actively setting out to kill and Matt deploying lethal violence when attacked, but particularly in live action, where the hits and whatnot are more visceral, the distinction Matt is trying to make with Karen is pretty fuzzy when it seems like every hit of Daredevil’s billy club is fracturing a skull and should be leaving the recipient either dead or severely disabled for the rest of their life.
• I can’t decide if Daniel (Michael Gandolfini) saying he’s got a plan to get some dirt on the governor from her lieutenant governor only for the plan to turn out to be Daniel asking, “hey, what’s the dirt on the governor, anyway?” is terrible writing or brilliant writing.
• I don’t think blindness works the way this episode seems to suggest it does (ie I don’t see how Matt being super aware of information gathered by his other senses helps Kirsten remember her own blind walk through the Red Hook facility with the same level of awareness).
• Notably, the Punisher is NOT in the Red Hook cages; at this point, I’m guessing we won’t see him again until his special MCU one-shot that drops after this season.
• Speaking of the cages, while some of this season’s verisimilitude has hit a little too close to home, I did note that they probably could have gone further in showing the squalid conditions of those cages. Some of those people have been in there for MONTHS, I assume the smell would be terrible, there’d be buckets of piss and shit everywhere, their clothes ragged and filthy, etc (Swordsman gets a pass, since he was presumably cleaned up for trial and is a superhero).