Daredevil: Dogs to a Gunfight

 "Maybe we created him...?"

Again, there's so much going on in this gripping and excellent episode. We still see little of the Punisher, lreaving the rumours from terrified Grotto (and an equally terrified Karen, who hints at hiding secret guilt) to shape how we feel about this terrifying ogre figure.His only speaking scene- Jon Bernthal's first- has his buying illicit stuff from a black market shop... and giving the proprietor a beating when he turns out to be selling underage porn.

Yet the morals of this are fully explored. We may feel a brief instinctive good feeling about this paedo, who profits from and indirectly creates such unspeakable suffering, getting a beating. But is this justice? As Aeschylus taught us, long ago, we need justice and not vendettas. With vendettas- as the police sergeant notes- not only the guilty ultimately suffer. And then there' the cycle of revenge. Justice may be imperfect, corrupt, unfair... but it's better than vigilantis,

And yet, this being the case, what of Daredevil...? Here we face the hard questions: the differences between DD and the Punisher are only ones of degree. Daredevil doesn't kill, but he uses violent force unsanctioned by an accountable state. And then there's the question, horrifying to Karen, of the Punisher being a copycat killer.

We see another argument between Matt- covering for him yet again after his shooting- and Foggy re Matt's extra-curricular activities. We are reminded of the firm's dire financial situation. And we see the easy bond between Foggy and Karen and the equally close but more complicated one between Karen and Matt which again hints at possible romantic feelings. Yet we also see Karen beginning to suspect that Matt- and indirectly Foggy- is not telling her something.

We meet the District Attorney, Reyes, a hard bitch who tries to push Foggy around until he starts being awesome. I've never heard of Reyes, but her deputy Blake Tower is a familiar figure from the comics, so I rather suspect she's not long for this world. We shall see.

We end with the tension of Grotto being double crossed and used as bait for the Punisher, as the Punisher and DD fight...