Daredevil - 'The Ones We Leave Behind' and 'Daredevil'

"You're awful quiet tonight."

Last two episodes and it's everything to play for. As his enterprise approaches fruition, Fisk's world spirals out of control with the death of Wesley and the threat of exposure hanging over him. As his dominance of the situation slips, he becomes more and more brutal, falling back on raw strength. Meanwhile, Team Daredevil begin the slow crawl back from the brink, with Foggy persuading his ex to turn on her employers and thus expose the chinks in Fisk's armour and Matt getting his arse handed to him by a little old lady (Madame Gao, one of the big mysteries of the season.)

"Well... bugger."

The core of 'The Ones We Leave Behind' comes in the final act, with the murder of Ben Urich. It's an emotional kick for Karen, who will inevitably feel responsible for pushing him, and also Urich's own finest hour, as he faces down Fisk's wrath and takes the hit without turning on his allies. It is also a brutal and one-sided act of violence that reminds us that even the grinding action of most of Daredevil's fight scenes is more glamourous that actual murder.

It is also the impetus for Matt and co to get back on their feet. 'Daredevil' opens with Ben's funeral, which is of course a huge guilt trip for Karen, but his wife is there to put things in perspective and convince Karen that Ben wouldn't have done any different. Ben's fate and Karen's fear that her involvement will come out spurs Matt, and Foggy as been investigating hard. When it becomes clear that a dirty cop is being hidden by Owlsley, the race is on to bring him in before Fisk takes him out.

"Stop me if you've heard this one..."

In a dramatic reversal of much that has gone before, they win. With all of his partners dead or gone back to somewhere 'further away than China', Fisk is off balance and the Feds sweep in to pick up everyone he's paid off. Of course, he isn't done yet and pulls one last trick, busting out of custody after a soul-searching rendition of the story of the good Samaritan (which parallels Samuel L Jackson's 'path of the righteous man' speech in Pulp Fiction, but with an almost exactly opposite conclusion.) With everything on the verge of falling down, Matt heads off - with Foggy's blessing - for one final confrontation with his nemesis; a last battle for the soul of Hell's Kitchen.

Not a bad look for something designed by a blind man and
executed by a brilliant simpleton.

This is the cue, of course, to unveil Melvin Potter's creation, the full-fledged Daredevil costume, because this is the point at which it stops being Wilson Fisk vs. Matt Murdock and becomes instead Kingpin vs. Daredevil. Gone are Fisk's legitimate front and Murdock's doubts and improvised costume. Both men are past any pretense of temporary necessity and fully embracing their destiny; Fisk as the iniquitous man and Murdock as the walking embodiment of the fear of God.

We end with Fisk in jail and the newly-minted Daredevil standing on the roof and hearing a scream (because a hero's work is never done.)

Thus ends the first season of Daredevil, a rousing origin story for a sometimes difficult character. It did an excellent job of working in the many influences of Matt Murdock - his late father, Stick, his Catholic guilt, his friends - which make him overall a more complex concept (if not character) than, for example, the classic Spider-Man. Of course, it is also the origin story of Fisk, which gives me hope that he won't be a one-arc villain. There is a substantial gap still lingering between his move out of Hell's Kitchen and his return, but in part that's because, with the exception of one visit to an upstate nursing home and a couple of scenes with Stick, nothing happens outside of Hell's Kitchen in this series.

Of all the entries in the MCU, this is the most determinedly local. There are no trips to other dimensions (again, Madam Gao perhaps excepted,) no casual flights to Afghanistan to blow up some tanks, no anti-Hydra shenanigans in Eastern Europe. If the Black Sky and Madam Goa's mysterious homeland are mentioned, it is solely because of their immediate impact, not just on New York, but specifically on Hell's Kitchen. When Fisk and Murdock talk about 'my city', they don't even mean New York, they mean Hell's Kitchen*. Perhaps neither of them wants to get into a pissing contest with Tony Stark over Midtown or Captain America over Brooklyn***? Never mind all the mutants upstate and Spider-Man in Queens if those get rolled back into continuity.

New York is just lousy with superhumans, it turns out.

It is also impressive that the series managed as well as it did
when its big ad campaign seemed to be working to make
Charlie Cox look like Harry Potter in a suit.

As a pioneering 'instant release' series, Daredevil was also successful, generating significant buzz from those powering through it and getting through a rocky first couple of episodes on the strength of not having to wait a week (compare and contrast the retention of Amazon's Constantine, if Netflix made that possible, and I suspect the numbers would be telling, and probably do much to clarify why one was renewed and the other cancelled.) It is also a much better paced series than most of the weeklies around, and by many estimations is a better Batman series than Gotham (not mine; Matt Murdock isn't rich enough or gadgetty enough. With the addition of Melvin Potter, next season may be more Batmany.)

* To save other non-New Yorkers from having to research this, Hell's Kitchen is a neighbourhood less than a square mile in area, with a population of 45,000. For comparison, that's a bit smaller than the City of London, with twice the population density of the most crowded residential boroughs** of London. And that's in the real world, where it is considered to be gentrifying.
** London neighbourhoods are harder to find specific information for.
*** Apparently in the comics Steve Rogers hails from the Lower East Side. Did they realise Manhattan was getting over full?