Things Escalate Quickly in ‘Daredevil Born Again’ Episode “Requiem” — Review

Well, that escalated quickly. There’s a lot to like in “Requiem,” the sixth episode of Daredevil Born Again‘s second season. We get the long-teased return of Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter). Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini) continues to unexpectedly be the most nuanced character on the show. And the last 15 minutes or so are a tense, riveting culmination of season long plot threads, with Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) ripped-from-the-headlines fascist takeover coming to actual blows with the rising resistance movement cultivated by Daredevil (Charlie Cox), Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and friends. Yet in that dramatic escalation, the episode moves almost too fast — in terms of the boiling over of AVTF/resistance tension, it feels like we’re missing an episode.

“Requiem” opens in the aftermath of Vanessa’s (Ayelet Zurer) death and Matt’s desperate push to save Bullseye’s (Wilson Bethel) life. Fisk immediately crushing to death the surgeon who failed to save Vanessa’s life is an appreciated moment, if only because it immediately put to rest any concerns I had about the previous episode possibly asking us to feel bad for the villain. Meanwhile, the arrival of Bullseye, chained to a bed and ministered to by Soledad (Ashley Marie Ortiz), brings the “we don’t kill!” tension between Matt and Karen to a boiling point. Much of their argument, while well-acted (Woll brings a kind of feral ferocity to Karen in this sequence that is awesome), consists of beats we’ve heard before. It’s something that, when combined with a sequence later in the episode, makes me wonder if the whole point is the repetition.

Aside from that opening doctor-crushing, this is an episode in which Fisk — seemingly broken by the death of his wife — largely takes a back seat. This allows his antagonists to get in some much-needed wins. Aided by Jessica, introduced in a fun in media res sequence in which her young daughter casually goes about her suburban childhood day while her mom beats the crap out of a bunch of AVTF goons, Matt succeeds in blowing up all the guns Fisk was meant to be running for the CIA but instead gifted to the AVTF. This, in turn, forces Mister Charles (Matthew Lillard) to pivot, potentially sowing the seeds of Fisk’s political downfall as he recruits the governor to help him put a stop to a one-time ally who, in his grief, is moving off-script.

While this is all well-rendered and intriguing to watch — Fisk has been riding so high for so long, seeing some chinks in his armor is downright refreshing — with Vanessa’s death serving as an understandable change point in his previous unassailable confidence, it does all feel rushed. Kingpin is far from defeated, but the escalation into this Emperor’s New Clothes moment could use some room to breathe. Similarly, the explosion of resistance from quietly-muttered dissatisfaction to organized protest in the streets outside city hall, egged along however effectively by Karen, feels like it comes out of nowhere, at least in terms of its intensity.

This is clearly to what that storyline has been building all season long but, again, it feels like we missed an episode that connected point A to point C. It’s not even terribly clear how the death of Vanessa — an event which, from the outside looking in, would arguably engender more sympathy for Fisk amongst the general public, not less — is the thing which pushes the resistance from “simmer” to “boil” other than “we’ve got two episodes left after this, time to kick things up a notch.”

Which brings us to the Kingpin/Daredevil fight which concludes the episode. It’s a cathartic, well-choreographed action sequence. These two have been circling each other for so long now that seeing them come to actual physical blows after so long is as satisfying a release as seeing the people in the streets finally stand up to Fisk’s goons. At the same time, there’s an echo of the earlier debates between Matt and Karen in their fight, the sense of pointlessness and circularity to their conflict. Matt won’t cross the line and kill Kingpin, Kingpin won’t stop being Kingpin and hurting (singularly or institutionally) people Matt cares about. So what’s even the point of meeting up in Fisk’s dungeon of psychological torture and throwing each other into the walls? That’s the question underpinning the entire confrontation. What remains to be seen is whether the series has an answer for it, or is merely hanging a lampshade on this particular foible of superhero storytelling.

Law Review

• Part of the reason the events in this episode feel so rushed is that it seems to imply everything is happening within a day or two of Vanessa’s death. Daniel and Buck (Arty Froushan) talk about what they did the night before (ie burying that body) at Vanessa’s funeral. They left to dispose of the body from the hospital, when she was still alive. So Vanessa died, her doctor was crushed to death by a grief-soaked Kingpin, that was covered up, and a highly stylized and color-choreographed funeral was arranged in, at most, 36 hours? Seems sus.
• Jessica’s daughter is named Danielle, which is the same name as her daughter with Luke Cage in the comics.
• She offhandedly mentions some superpowered associates joining a superpowered CIA team assembled by Mister Charles; I have no idea what that is meant to be a reference to.
• The person BB (Genneya Walton) is leaking her stories to is Mitchell Ellison — her uncle Ben Urich’s editor at the New York Bulletin.
• Speaking of BB and Daniel, it really seemed like they were going down the path of BB deciding not to send over the fake lead Daniel fed her as a trap because she’d at least come to see him as a more relatable, decent person, which would mean Daniel’s plan to expose her failed explicitly because he did the thing Buck and Fisk are trying to quietly force out of him (be a decent, normal, human being), which would have been fun and twisty and quasi-ironic. Instead, it ends up getting played like a straight-up romance plotline, and then Daniel reveals he knows BB is the mole regardless of her having held back the fake lead.
• And speaking of weird romances, Heather (Margarita Levieva) is back and things get … weird with her and Buck.
• I really hope Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley) eventually gets some hardcore comeuppance. What an ass.
• The deal Matt tries to cut with Fisk is that if Fisk leaves town, Matt will leave him alone, and they’ll finally be out of each other’s lives. So Matt’s fine with Kingpin being a tinpot dictator ruining peoples lives and locking them in cages so long as he’s not doing it in Matt’s city?