Daredevil: Speak of the Devil

"You don't need sight to appreciate art, but you do need honesty."

"Sight helps..."

This episode, yet again, is another penetrating character piece on Matt, this time through his Catholicism, and a brilliant exploration of the themes of the show. It also had a stonking cliffhanger. Daredevil is brilliant.

The philosophical chat about the Devil between Matt and his priest is compelling, even for those of us who don't believe in such a being. The chilling take from Rwanda ensures that. But for the purposes of the episode the Devil I'd Fisk, and the central theme is the morality, or not, of Matt killing him. It's the classic dilemma: to kill someone who is evil, or to allow evil to happen by not doing so.

And yet... Fisk is not straightforwardly "evil". He loves Vanessa, and she loves him. He means it when he says he takes no pleasure from ordering the death of poor Elena. And he has, in his own mind at least, ultimately idealistic motives for all the things he does. A bad man, yes. An abstract theological evil, no.

But Elena's death brings home, to Foggy at least, what looks like the futility of trying to do good when evil owns everything, including the police, and good has no agency. He's drunk, and not in a good frame of mind, when he shockingly unmasks Matt at the end of the episode in a shocking and original move.

Oh, and there's a big and epic fight between Matt and Nobu. Nobu dies but Matt barely survives- and, cruelly, Fisk gains from Nobu's elimination anyway. We end at a low point for Matt. Time for Act Four.

Daredevil: Shadows in the Glass

"You're my son! You should be a king, not some fat little pussy."

At last we get an episode about the very interesting figure of Wilson Fisk, played interestingly by Vincent D'Onofrio as a crimelord who believes himself to have noble aims and who is, against type, an introvert. At last we get to see the childhood experiences that made him this way, a take of poverty, debt, extreme '70s-ness, domestic abuse and child cruelty, all on the part of Wilson's father, Bill. Who, incidentally, he kills with a hammer and, in a nice touch where we see his daily morning routine, he always wakes up to memories of that day.

In the present, though, Fisk is slipping a little, as Madame Gao kindly reminds him, and it's only with Vanessa's love and support that he's able to end the episode with a more or less firm grip on his mojo.

Incidentally, Fisk speaks both Mandarin and Japanese, which seems to point to an extended history in Eastern parts of the world of which we do not yet know.

Karen and Foggy end up having to confide in Matt about the whole Union Allied thing and he agrees to help them, directing their researches into areas much less likely to be physically risky for them- rather hypocritical of him.

Importantly, Daredevil finally talks to the magnificent Ben Urich, telling him about Fisk and everything he knows. But Urich's subsequent article is somewhat ruined by Fisk's coup de main in stepping out from the shadows. It's yet another superbly paced and crafted bit of telly throughout. Daredevil just gets better and better the further in you go.

Daredevil: Stick

"In my experience there are no heroes, no villains, just people with different agendas."

I've only read parts of Frank Miller's fabled run on Daredevil, so I'm not too familiar with Stick, the Hand and all that. So I came to Stick pretty much for the first time here. I found the character (and performance) fascinating, and this very different episode (placed just after a turning point) to be one of the finest so far. It's time to give the arc a bit of breathing space- although Karen and Ben Urich make progress in their investigation into Fisk's misdoings, and include Foggy in their plotting- for a bit of a flashback and a bit of a character piece for Matt.

We first meet Stick in the title sequence as he carries out a rather cool assassination, establishing that, unlike Matt, he has no qualms about killing.  Then he and Matt meet up, establishing that Stick once meant a lot to Matt, but that he just upped and left, twenty years ago.

Cue flashback, Matt as a kid, Stick's training of and impression upon the young boy to whom he's given hope, and how Matt's natural affection for this gruff new father figure drives him away,disgusted at the young boy's sentimentality. Our old blind Spartan does not much care for sentimentality, or baggage.

Twenty years on they set out on a mission together, looking for a MacGuffin called Black Sky which is being delivered to Fisk. But this is a background in front of which Daredevil's good liberal conscience clashes with Stick's more cynical ways. This "Black Sky" weapon seems to be a little boy and Stick, to Matt's utter disgust, has no qualms about just killing him. The ends justify the means.

An excellent episode, mostly because of Stick, but it's also firmly convinced me how much I really like and respect Ben Urich as a character.