Before I started this episode, the title gave me a bit of a chuckle because of course Daredevil would have a episode called “Revelations.” The episode begins, dropped two MASSIVE revelations on the audience, and then the credits role! Followed by moments that are not so much revelatory for their shock value, but act as a montage for Ray Nadeem and the audience as we begin to learn just how deep the rabbit hole goes. There are likely better all around episodes in this series, but none pack the sheer melodramatic swagger of “Revelations.”
1. Now That’s How You Begin an Episode
A recurring motif in both my writing on Daredevil season 3 and the show in general has been the series instance to begin episodes with a character, often one of our trio of emotionally damaged dudes, starting their day. Narratively this makes a lot of sense because it tended towards showing a character alone and theoretically honest, their ritual of presentation, or how it is they see themselves. On a more structural level it was a great way to train the audience and queue them into the fact that a new episode has begun, as Netflix as a platform incentives you to skip the union mandated credits blurring the edges of when one episode began and one ended.
Watching “Revelations” that training came full circle as the show lulled us into a false sense of security. Sure it didn’t start with one of our trio beginning their day, it starts a few minutes after “Upstairs/Downstairs” ended, but part of that training wasn’t just about the visual patterns but the temporal ones as well. 60 minute television shows are generally composed of in 5 acts, with the teaser pre-title card/credits sequence being first on the block (but it isn’t technically act .) These teases generally run about 3-5 minutes, most the DCWverse shows go about 6 but they tend to use this sequence as a place to cut to commercial, Daredevil has been like clockwork this season with 4 minutes and some seconds being the length of their tease. “Revelations” disregards this pattern, dropping the credits sequence at 13 minutes 30 seconds of the episode at what is pretty much the climax of act 1. Never has a cut to the credits sequence been so impactful for this show, or how furiously I smashed that “skip intro” button.
They drop the credits nearly 10 minutes after the biggest revelation of the episode: Father Paul Lantom is a pool shark and drinks! I’m pretty sure that’s against his vows somehow, but also, maybe, the least of his sins.
Changing up when the credits appear was a dramatic capper to an overall good opening act, director Jennifer Lynch and omnipresent cinematographer Christopher LaVasseur do an excellent job this episode of not overdoing the visuals even as things get oh so delightfully melodramatic. Televisual storytelling isn’t purely visual camera work, they strike a nice balance between well composed imagery and letting the musical ques and actors carry the load. This comes through as they chose to primarily stay on Jay Ali’s perplexed face as his boss shoots her boss right in front of him, letting the diegetic and non-diegetic audio que audiences in as Agent Ray realizes how deep the water is and how powerful Kingpin is.
2. The Sting of Lying
Matt Murdock has spent most of this season in a egotistical rage at just about everything and justified in none of it. They were the petulant spasms of a lonely person. Now he has something to feel justifiably angry about, the fact that Father Lantom and his Mother aka Sister Maggie never told him about his parentage, and hopefully learn from that experience and grow as a person from it. Because their lies of omission are not so different from him not telling Foggy or Karen about his night time antics … oh who am I kidding he doesn’t really grow all it does it push him into an even darker place as he is absolutely ready to kill Wilson “We Don’t Say His Name” Fisk.
It kinda hurts when someone close and important to you keeps something that major from you for a good while. Superhero shows always have to deal with the nature of the bifurcated identity in tougher ways compared to the comics since the sheer difference in screen time slowly creates a sorting of the cast between who knows and doesn’t, and the various tensions such a division creates. It’s nice to see Dardevil deal with this in reverse, giving Matt a taste of his own medicine.
Continued belowWhile the tables are turned on Matt it does allow the series to get at the core reasoning behind such lies, selfish fear. In the case of Matt and Daredevil it was often couched in the fear of reprisals. For Father Lantom and Sister Maggie it was a fear of confusing an already traumatized kid. Both are rooted in a fear of rejection from this new found information, and in all these cases it feels incredibly human to lie in these moments.
3. Montage, Romantic Images and Harsh Realities
There was something Father Lantom said early in the episode about people like Matt who grew up without their parents, they don’t see them as fallible human beings. This point is quickly made in a History of Maggie montage from her and Jack’s blood soaked meet cute and quick courtship, these were romantic, idealized, images. Images that were quickly juxtaposed with Maggie after giving birth to Matt and the harsh realities of her condition.
That several minutes sequence feels like Ray Nadeem’s time in this episode at a microcosm. Agent Nadeem learns the true power of the Kingpin as he officially begins to do his bidding by rounding up all of New York’s remaining crime families. This is done in another quick montage that makes it look like everyone is doing their job – mostly, Dex does throw something and beat a guy once. That montage is contrasted with the more minute by minute realty Nadeem goes through as he sees just who is under the thumb of Wilson Fisk along with him. Jay Ali is fantastic this episode, his body language and facial acting is consistently surprised but with a growing sense of numbness.
4. Maggie was an unfit Mother
This was a surprising and fitting deviation from the source material. Most of the time Matt’s Dad is shown to be an abusing garbage person. It would’ve been easy to go that route, but what would the point have been? Not because of some inherent good in the character of Jack Murdock, but he’s a dead character only appearing before his son as a phantasmic ghost projection. Sister Maggie is the one who is around, and her failure as a mother due to Postpartum depression amplified by her father, is mad 1000x more interesting as a character because of it. She was fun as the sarcastic nurse who bandaged Matt up and badgered him, but this adds some new depth to the character. If the show had been renewed, she could’ve been setup to play a major role in the next season. Joanne Whalley’s wail after she finds out her son knows is probably the best moment of melodrama in the episode.
5. Talking with Dad
Maybe it’s a mixture of the fact that BingeMode is getting ready to talk about Chapter 35 “King’s Cross” from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the fact that presenting these moments this way makes throwing psychoanalysis at it infinitely easier, but the decision to have Matt wrestle with his ego through the psychic projection of his friends and enemies has been a great addition to the show. Matt has been pretty much isolated this entire season, bringing these apparitions into play gives Charlie Cox someone to play off of and create moments of interaction without straining too hard. Without the return of John Patrick Hayden as the Devil Jack Murdock, Matt’s return to the spiritual home of his father would not have worked nearly as well, as the character goes through his dark knight of the soul moment.
Jack is framed on his right shoulder, which is supposed to be the Angel side, but Wilson Fisk also appears on his right shoulder. The phantasmic Fisk tends to pace back and forth but favors the left side.
His talk with dear old Dad isn’t the best. It’s brutally honest, he admits that he enjoys beating people up, that the costume acts as a classic Freudian fetish object for him to disavow those baser toxic urges. Drawing back the curtain, however, only sends Matt deeper into the metaphorical Dagobah Cave, as he gives into those baser tendencies and imagines himself brutally murdering the Kingpin. He certainly doesn’t see the Kingpin as human at this point.
“Upstairs/Downstairs” was the boring and limp plot maneuvering as the season entered the final third, “Revelations” was the emotional opposite of that.
