Daredevil returns with an origin episode, something that it did extremely well in the first season. Here, things take a different turn and show that not all villains are created equally interesting. No matter how cool things are made to appear.
1. Style>Substance
Despite their high budgets and seeming pretense towards prestige, Marvel Netflix shows rarely strike me as that stylish. The outlier being the dearly departed Luke Cage, whose use of musical performance as commentary and thematic binder to episodes helped infuse and heighten the series aesthetics. Daredevil turns things up a notch when looking at the early years of one Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter. Stylistically it’s a functional art piece, that runs completely counter to the visual language the show as a whole operates in. Dropping things to a monochrome palette, with spotlighting and a nostalgic blurry depth of field is the exact opposite of the vague gestures at “realism” and grittiness Daredevil likes to play at. It’s soo artificial and delightful. This artificiality lets it get away with camp and sentimental moments that would otherwise fall right on their face.
Functionally it isn’t to dissimilar to a choice made in The Punisher episode 12 “Home” where Frank vacillates between consciousness and his life choices are spotlighted and treated like a play.
The origin of Dex sequence is 15 minutes long, composed of three movements within it. That 15 minute stretch has me thinking about last weeks hallway fight. Both serve as the highlights and centerpieces (almost literally when scanning through them on the player) of their given episode. These sequence also tend to overwhelm their episode giving you bookends that aren’t as interesting, even if they are relevant to moving the plot around. As the season has progressed it seems to be losing that good thematic motif binding of episodes 1-3 that made for smoother less lumpy entries.
If Daredevil where a show that was made with commercials in mind, aesthetically it wouldn’t be out of place on FX, the stylish examination of Dex’s early years would have been segmented out and made for solid act breaks. I can’t help but feel this episode (most Netflix original shows really) would be helped with that sort of core structuring element. By spreading the examination out, the overall content of the episode would be smoothed out and you could’ve used interplay between imagined child Dex with his present self. Instead we got it all in one big lump.
Those style points are really helpful when the substance is a bit lacking.
2. Making of a Murder
“I want to kill you. To punish you. I want to kill you for dying.”
That’s something Superboy Prime would say. To director Julian Holmes and Teenage Dex Actor’s credit, that moment is played with an extreme close up and self-seriousness that can only be read as comedy. It’s also emblematic of how interested the show is in analyzing Dex. The series treatment of mental illness is a bit rough, like Murdock’s blindness, it is used to other them from the “normal” characters and signify why they’re the special ones who dress up in costumes.
Dex is just an extremely accurate Macaulay Culkin from The Good Son. At least with Matt and to a degree Fisk there was a certain amount of outside forces and arc to it. Nope Dex is just the bad seed.
This and the next episode are about representing his struggle to not given into those tendencies and it doesn’t really work. The show wants to statically present him as crazed, not someone struggling with something.
3. Bad Dates
Juxtaposing or weaving in the imagined past and present may have made that date sequence more dynamic. As audience members, we already know all you need to know about Dex, even if he wasn’t crazed he is a mega creep. It turns the dinner date into something of a formality until he inevitably screws up. There isn’t any drama too the sequence and so there isn’t any emotion as the moment becomes his psychological breaking point.
4. Starting the Day, or Not Really Dealing with Cliffhangers
Netflix likes to end episodes on some sort of revelatory of shocking moment. As far as cliff hangers go, leaving Matt in a taxi going off into the river is a solid one for once. Which is why I chuckled at the start of this episode as it doesn’t pick up from that moment at all. That beginning is actually the episodes end, and a nice mirror to the motif of episodes beginning with a study of how someone goes about their morning.
Continued belowShowing people start their mornings has been a consistent motif for this season. It’s actually a good way to quickly characterize someone, getting dressed and cooking breakfast lets them show off how diligently and timely they handle things. Or in the case of Matt, how much of a disaster he is, walking into the apartment he barely goes to soaking wet and curling up like a cat on the couch only to wake up to the muffled sounds of the FBI at your door.
5. Remember Wesley?
So Fisk is giving the FBI their next pound of flesh, or so they think. I guess this begins the Fisk destroys Matt Murdocks good name section of the ‘Born Again’ adaptation. Hopefully Karen makes it out OK. While Agent Nadeem and the FBI are being played, writer Tonya Kong and the rest of the room haven’t let Nadeem come off as anything but a hard luck competent investigator. Some of his conclusions are wrong, but he isn’t totally wrong. The show has done a good job of not turning him into a stock character, he hasn’t been bought off yet and has good reasons for being this dogged.
The specter of Wesley is a potent one, a reminder that not everyone on this show is all clean. Even if Karen’s actions are entirely justified. He is a byproduct of their and Matt’s actions nipping at their heels and overtaking them.
With how the episode is structured there is a plotty nothingness to these scenes, but should make for something more narratively interesting going forward.
