Daredevil: The Ones We Leave Behind

"It's a difficult thing, isn't it, taking a life?"

It's the penultimate episode plus, you know, that title: we can expect some deaths. And it's interesting to see how we're going to advance towards the finale because, frankly, Fisk seems as impregnable as ever at this point. Especially with Matt and Foggy so far apart, and Karen despairing. Not to mention poor Ben Zurich being fired for flying too close to the Sun.

In an episode all about killing we begin with Karen feeling guilt for killing, albeit in self defence. That is an emotion Fisk will never feel about killing those who get between him and his goals, and he's out for revenge for both Vanessa's poisoning and Wesley's slaying. It now becomes just about feasible that they might be able to wrap up the season in one more episode, but it still feels sudden.

And we also have the shock ending; Ben, about to start a blog exposing Fisk for what he is, is killed in cold blood by Fisk himself in what is a superbly written and acted scene. It's an excellent episode as an individual piece of television, as have so many this season, but surely they've left it a bit late to start wrapping up the season now?

Daredevil: The Path of the Righteous

"We're going through a rough patch."

"I found the Nelson and Murdock sign in the trash."

"A very rough patch."

Fisk shows rare vulnerability as he struggles to save the poisoned Vanessa, while both Matt and Foggy spend much of the episode lying to Karen and not saying why they've fallen out. There's a lead- Karen and Ben know that Fisk killed his dad- but the evidence is weak and it's doubtful they can use it. The situation seems to have hit rock bottom.

Meanwhile, Claire gives Matt the idea of body armour. She'll always be there to patch him up, but her heart is closed to him. He's too dangerous. And Matt's priest then mentions, as part of a philosophical conversation, the Devil as a figure to encourage sinners to find the path of righteousness. We can see where these two things are going. And so he visits Melvin Potter (the Gladiator himself!) to commission a certain set of red-hued items. Daredevil is coming.

Fisk angrily swears revenge on Vanessa's poisoners. He's a fascinating villain portrayed brilliantly by Vincent D'Onofrio. Interestingly, he isn't a psychopath. He has morals, of a kind. What he does he does from a genuine love of his city. It's just the means by which he does it that he's damned himself.

We end with Karen captured by the resourceful Wesley going rogue. She is, it seems, in very deep trouble. And yet, she's resourceful. I don't know about the state of New York, but I think English law would certainly acquit her for what she manages to do in shooting him. Go Karen...

Daredevil: Nelson v. Murdock

"A blind old man taught you the ways of martial arts. Isn't that the plot to Kung Fu?"

This episode is both an extraordinary character piece, earned by the way the characters has been gradually developed, and brace in making the early decision to have Foggy discover Matt's secret early on. Not to do so would have risked making Foggy appear stupid, and doing so allows for this rich examination of the relationship between the two of them, complete with flashbacks. It's an extraordinary episode. And you always side with Foggy in the brilliant philosophical debates.

We also get an interesting scene between Fisk and Madam Gao which, after the ending of the episode, looks like foreshadowing; will he choose light or dark? And we see heartbreaking scenes of the dementia of Doris Ulrich. Poor Ben. But Doris' dementia is key to an important plot development, if a rather convenient plot coincidence; Fisk's mother happens to be the person Ben and Karen visit at a care home they're thinking about for Doris. Could this be the lead Ben needs?

Fisk, meanwhile, is at a charity event of his where the wine is poisoned. He doesn't drink any- but Vanessa does. I suspect she'll die..

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.

Daredevil: Condemned

You "Letting the police do their jobs; that's what I pay them for, isn't it?"

This is clearly a turning point, the episode in mid-season where Matt and the Kingpin have a sort of confrontation, albeit only by telephone, and where both Fisk and the script attempt to push the apparent similarities between the two. It's a bloody good bit of telly.

The episode, following last week in which Fisk blew up all the Russians' buildings in Hell's Kitchen, is largely a two-hander between Matt and Vladimir in which they slowly come to understand each other before Vladimir, inevitably, is shot by the NYPD who are so hopelessly in Fisk's pockets.

Foggy and Karen, though their relationship continues to deepen, take a bit of a back seat. Ben Urich, meanwhile, gets closer to the truth about Fisk; I suspect that he, once he establishes the relationship with Daredevil that we know from the comics, will be instrumental in Fisk's downfall. But not, alas, before facing much mockery as a representative of the old media in this digital age which is, alas, not so friendly to crusading investigative journalists.

This episode also serves to indicate how completely the police force is compromised by Fisk's money, and how many of them are in his pay. It's truly shocking. Something must be done.

Alas, the episode ends with Fisk blackening the name of this mysterious man in black, manipulating the media with frightening ease. Matt is so affected by this that, effectively, through fear of his potential notoriety, he dumps Claire. And they were such a perfect couple.

Still, Matt now has a name: Leland Owlsley: for us comics fans the Owl...

Daredevil: In the Blood

"If he had an iron suit, or a magic hammer, maybe that would explain how you get your asses handed to you."

It's early days, I know. Even Buffy seemed distinctly unpromising at this stage. There's nothing wrong with Daredevil per se, it's just that it isn't catching fire yet. The characters seem well-rounded, well-written and performed, but I don't know them yet. 

Perhaps I should bear in mind that this is all set-up at this point; Matt is still floundering a bit and yet to put on the red spandex, and even Wilson Fisk, the focus of this episode, is yet to become a true Kingpin. He's an intriguing character- ruthless, yet also nervous and chivalrous around Vanessa, the lady he likes, and there are intriguing hints of a hard early life in Hell's Kitchen.

The ostensible focus of the episode is on Anatoly and Vladimir, our two Russian brothers, wannabe crimelords, and their ambitions, only to be cruelly snuffed out by Fisk, who ends the episode by personally killing Anatoly with his bare hands after his date is ruined. It's a nice way of establishing how Fisk, nervous around girls and only occasionally getting his hands dirty, invisible to the Internet and ostensibly law abiding, is the true threat, not whatever thugs may currently be top of the pile. As Matt muses to Claire, if one crimelord inevitably replaces another, what's the point of him? I suppose he will come to find an answer.

We also see a tightened by of a wary anti-corruption partnership between Karen Oage and Ben Zurich but, as Zurich makes clear, they're playing for high stakes. This is more immediately so for Claire, captured and roughly treated. Daredevil may have dramatically rescued her, but it's his fault she was put in harm's way at all. Still, the experience seems to have deepened their bond.

It's a good episode, yes. But I'm still waiting for the engines to fire up. 

Daredevil: Rabbit in a Snowstorm

"Used to be if you killed a man you sent his wife flowers. Now you send his wife with him."

This is the first episode with no introductory stuff, and it's an episode with no real heroics. Instead, it's an episode where Matt and Foggy make a moral compromise in representing a dodgy client with even dodgier backers. It also introduces us to Ben Urich, a principled journalist in a cynical, Murdochian world. It's not hard to see him as a parallel to Matt, both of them principled Philip Marlowe figures floating in a world with moral anchor. Yet both must make compromises.

Set against this is Karen's decision not to compromise. In showing Urich all the stuff she knows from the first episode she is doing the right thing, not the smart thing. 

Oh, and we get our first proper introduction to Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. He's a villain with power, presence and charisma and will, no doubt, stay in the background for a long time until he and Matt meet.

What we don't get, despite the displays of Matt's superpowers, is any costume stuff. No doubt there'll be some of that next episode. As for this one, it's perhaps better thought of in terms of set-up, mood and character development for the long term, and may seem better in hindsight, but it perhaps underwhelmed slightly.

Firefly: Our Mrs. Reynolds

“If you take sexual advantage of her, you’re going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theatre.”

Another Joss Whedon script, then. I like Joss Whedon scripts a lot. They’re good, they’re witty, and they always contain the phrase “not so much”. What’s not to like?

We have a river which looks an awful lot like the Mississippi. We have a hold-up of a stagecoach. Well, a marine stagecoach thingy. Yep, that’ll be a Western in space, all right. It’s an amusing sequence, as is the party with more Irish dancing. Then it’s back to Serenity, and Mal appears to be married…

This is the first time I’ve seen this episode since I became familiar with the excellent Christina Hendricks (well, I managed to keep up until part way through Season 2, but I’ll be marathoning it for this blog one of these years). It seems that Mal has his own domestic servant-cum-“nubile little slave girl”, except he’s far too much of a gentleman to take advantage of that. We think. It’s interesting to observe how this pans out, knowing Joss Whedon’s reputation for undercutting and playing with traditional gender roles. In fact, anybody with a passing knowledge of Whedon’s stuff would probably guess from the start that Saffron isn’t what he seems to be.

It’s fun to see everyone reacting, of course. The bit where Zoe calls everyone to see and have a good laugh is fun, but it’s interesting to see that Inara is immediately and obviously jealous. She also gives away, to the viewer at least, that she cares an awful lot about Mal when she sees him unconscious. So far this has only been hinted at, albeit fairly blatantly. It’ll be interesting to see how things develop between the two of them, but I suspect the whole thing is far too slow-burn, sadly, for a programme with such a limited life expectancy.

Mal’s starting to fall for Saffron a bit, though. He even starts to tell her of his upbringing, on a ranch on the planet Shadow. We eventually get to an hilariously awkward bedroom scene (“Oh, I’m going to go to then special Hell!”), ending with Saffron kissing him. Her lipstick’s poisoned, of course. I bet that’s where Steven Moffat got the idea from, for River Song.

Now that we, the audience, have had our suspicions confirmed, we get the fun of watching Saffron trying to seduce other members of the crew. Wash, being very, very married, isn’t falling for it, and has to be karate chopped from behind. Inara isn’t taken in by the Sapphic charms of Saffron, though, much as it seems otherwise at first. But she ends up kissing the unconscious Mal, must to her later hysterical denials! Morena Baccarin is great in this episode, where she gets a wider range of material. We can’t have her just being poised and graceful all the time.

Interestingly, we’re told Saffron has been to companion academy, but she remains mysterious. It’s a fascinating last conversation between her and Mal, though, about individuals “playing” each other versus people sticking together. Is this a coded message in favour of social democracy as opposed to the dangers of right-wing individualism?

The last scene is perfect, of course. Mal draws completely the wrong conclusion. Of course, Inara would find it truly intolerable if only he knew! Their relationship is shaping up in a rather nicely ‘40s screwball sort of way…