Television Review: “Daredevil’s” Second Season.
One of the things that made the first season of “Marvel’s Daredevil” on Netflix so special was how the show’s gift for economy. Nihilistic and “gritty” though it might have been, the first season of “Daredevil” was nothing if not a brisk viewing experience. It’s hard to really accuse the showrunners of indulgence in this regard. For a gory, broadly sketched superhero noir about a blind lawyer-turned-crimefighter, his nerdy best friend and a crime lord who fancies himself the Charles Foster Kane of a dying city, the first season of “Daredevil” moved quickly. Drew Goddard and Stephen DeKnight’s show was a model of streamlined, focused origin-story mythmaking and also a kind of dead seriousness that you don’t often see in any big-screen Marvel efforts. In spite of the fact that the show was and is yet another large-scale piece of superhero entertainment about a costumed vigilante fighting bad guys, “Daredevil” season one was bleak, bitter and surprisingly raw. It made you forget everything about the misbegotten Ben Affleck vehicle that preceded it, and by the time the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen had bested Vincent D’Onofrio’s cultured brute Wilson Fisk at his own horrible game, fans (and I count myself as one) were itching for a season two.
And so here we are with the second batch of episodes, and while this new season retains many of the great elements that made “Daredevil” so striking upon its first release — the show’s balletic action choreography and spectacular eye for violence remain, as do the moody noir cityscapes and the show’s proclivity for pessimism — it’s just not as satisfying as a complete whole. Not just yet, anyway: I’m nine episodes in, leaving just four installments to go. And while “Daredevil” is as certainly brooding and brutal as it was in its first round of episodes, it seems that this season finds the creators determined to double down on everything that was both good and bad about that first season. Of course, showrunners Goddard (the now-Oscar-nominated scribe of “The Martian” who cut his teeth alongside J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon on shows like “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly”) and DeKnight are out, leaving seasoned staff writers Marco Ramirez and Doug Petrie to assume showrunning duties. These guys have worked on “Sons of Anarchy” and “Fear the Walking Dead”: they can obviously do dark. The question is, can they lighten things up and still keep it interesting? The resulting season of “Daredevil” is a slightly mixed bag, with some undeniable highs, as well as some diminishing returns that can’t really be ignored.
For one, the show is darker than ever, with the panic, paranoia and on-screen viciousness ratcheted up to sometimes unbearable levels. The mood is twice as portentous — even Daredevil’s best friend, the normally amicable Foggy Nelson, seems dispossessed. And yet while all this sounds great in theory, in practice we have a bit of a “Dark Knight Rises” situation on our hands. In other words, we have more of everything: more plot, more bad guys, more drama, more bone-crunching action. Instead of one iconic villain, (The Joker in “The Dark Knight” and Wilson Fisk in “Daredevil” season one) you have a couple of intriguing-but-unformed side players (Bane and Catwoman in “The Dark Knight Rises,” The Punisher and Elektra in “Daredevil” season two). The early episodes of “Daredevil’s” second season, while undeniably thrilling on a base, visceral level, are often jumbled to the point of incoherence. The show’s thematic points about vengeance, vigilante justice and guilt work about as well as they’re supposed to in spite of being played out, and even still it feels like the creators are missing opportunities to push their show forward into the kind dangerous, risk-taking territory it so badly wants to claim. There are undeniably still things to recommend along the way: this is “Daredevil,” after all. The show still looks great, the action sequences are some of the best on television, and character actor Jon Bernthal makes an absolutely brilliant addition to the already-strong ensemble cast. And yet it ultimately feels as though the creators would rather tread water than do laps — to the delight of many fans, I’m sure, who would rather not see their precious superhero meddled with to the point of unrecognizability.
When the second season opens, Wilson Fisk is behind bars and Daredevil — known as Matt Murdock in his civilian life and embodied with genteel good humor and a charming sense of old-world chivalry by British actor Charlie Cox — is a local hero. His law firm, Nelson and Murdock — run with the invaluable aid of the lovely Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll, giving the least flashy and most soulful performance on the show) — is doing better than ever. And yet it doesn’t take long for terror to come screaming back onto the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Someone is wiping out gangs in the city, in great numbers and with an alarming military precision. Turns out the culprit behind the slayings is Marvel’s own Frank Castle a.k.a. The Punisher, who got his own middling big-screen treatment in a drab 2004 flick starring Thomas Jane — for those of you who may not remember, the movie more or less used Drowning Pool as the unofficial theme song and featured Ben Foster as a tattooed tweaker named Spacker Dave — and who gets a full-fledged villain showcase here.
Surprisingly, the Punisher is one of the things that this season of “Daredevil” gets the most right. He’s not a hero; he’s not even really an antihero. Frank Castle has always been one of the more interesting Marvel characters because he exists completely outside the traditional range of human accountability. Unburdened by supernatural prowess or alien parents or any kind of mythic origin story, The Punisher is not an avenging angel, in spite of the considerable human damage he often leaves in his wake. Nor is he practicing vigilante justice like Daredevil, who he not so affectionately refers to as “Red”. No, Frank Castle is a man who is fundamentally broken, and who will not stop his reign of terror until everyone in the city has felt his pain — the pain of losing the ones you love. The Punisher may claim that he’s just taking out the garbage, but there’s a wounded, fundamentally wrecked side of the character that makes him far more three-dimensional than the crass homicidal boobs of something like Troy Duffy’s woeful “Boondock Saints”. Frank Castle is portrayed in the early episodes as more of a mentally unstable loser than some wrecking-crew badass, though he gets a spectacularly bloody prison fight all to himself in the ninth episode that smacks of Park Chan-Wook’s “Oldboy”. In other words, “Daredevil’s” Frank Castle is more Travis Bickle then Bruce Wayne.
By casting a big bruiser of an actor like Jon Bernthal, you’d think the creators would be attempting to paint Castle in the latter light. But the actor — who has been giving quietly terrific performances for a while now, in everything from Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” to David Ayer’s “Fury” and last year’s “Sicario” — imbues The Punisher with authenticity and a human soul, and he’s consistently mesmerizing to watch. A monologue that the Punisher gives in the third episode — one where he recalls his last memories of his family before they were gruesomely executed — is genuinely wrenching stuff, even if the creators inexplicably let the scene run on for a maddening six minutes. Like a lot of the other stuff in this second season of “Daredevil,” Castle’s monologue is hammered home in a blunt and heavy-handed fashion, but Bernthal manages to sell the character’s pain. He’s a real movie star, and we can only hope he gets a show of his own one day.
The same compliments can’t really be made in regards this season’s subplot development with Daredevil’s old flame Elektra Natchios. Elektra is a knife-wielding assassin who’s also played a somewhat integral role in Matt Murdock’s past, but the show’s treatment of their relationship — where bare-knuckle boxing and mental torture is essentially akin to foreplay — is the show’s first big stumble. Elektra is a fairly major player in the “Daredevil” comics universe, but the show mostly depicts her as a demented rich girl with off-center sexual kinks and an almost Machiavellian gift for manipulation. Whereas the first season’s sensitive portrayal of Karen Page as an earnest, devoted young woman struggling to stay afloat in a big city felt limited but ultimately real, the show’s portrayal of Elektra threatens to derail some of the season’s middle installments entirely (the season’s fifth episode, “Kinbaku,” is especially wonky and erratic). It’s not exactly misogyny, but it’s not exactly a thoughtful portrayal either.
Punisher aside, the show’s depiction of urban treachery and the villainous parties who act on its behalf it is similarly unengaging. Wilson Fisk was a brilliant bad guy because underneath his brusque, intimidating exterior was the soul of an overweight outcast who’d been abused and neglected for most of his adult life (spoiler alert: Vincent D’Onofrio reprises his brilliant role as Fisk later in this season, but all-too-briefly). Season two’s gallery of scumbags are of a decidedly more rote variety: the show’s depiction of violent Irish gangs feels ripped out of a Steven Seagal movie, all sub-Lehane Beantown threats and slow-mo gunplay, while the Yakuza and the Dogs of Hell (a Hell’s Kitchen Biker Gang) mostly exist as faceless pawns for Daredevil and Elektra to maim, skewer and pulverize in a series of impeccably-staged action scenes. A tense standoff that takes Daredevil and the Punisher down a winding staircase in one agonizing single take recalls a similarly memorable sequence from the first season, and yet after the lacerating back and forth between Daredevil and his hardened militaristic counterpart that occurs on a project rooftop just minutes before, this bullet-ridden showdown has roughly the same emotional impact that one would get from a good video game. We don’t really know who the bad guys are yet, so what does it matter if the Big Red Guy plows through a couple dozen of them on his way out of the building?
For those who think I’m being a killjoy, I will re-iterate: there are still lots of things to like about this show. It’s a confident, muscular piece of pop entertainment that’s always watchable, even when it’s spinning its wheels. Cox and Elden Henson, who plays Foggy, have the easy, lived-in rapport of lifelong best friends and the show comes to life whenever they have a chance to casually shoot the shit with each other. There’s also an interesting subtext about Daredevil’s newfound sense of arrogance: the fact that he thinks he can protect the city from a psycho like Frank Castle with mere fists and cunning, in spite of his comparatively sanctimonious anti-murder stance. Woll is still a luminous screen presence, although positing Karen solely as Daredevil’s potential love interest for the second half of the season sounds to me like the writers were fresh out of ideas for the character. Bernthal is nothing short of magnificent, and his full-throttle portrayal of grief and despair will hopefully be a calling card for the talented actor to graduate to even greater work. It’s still a fun, ultraviolent 50 minutes of television, although season two more resembles a fatalistic, corpse-strewn crime thriller than any superhero yarn I can think of. I just hope that if we do get a season three, the showrunners extend some faith to their audience, do away with the cheerlessness and bring us back to the reasons we all fell in love with this show in the first place.
Grades: “Bang,” B. “Dogs to a Gunfight,” B- “New York’s Finest,” B+ “Penny and Dime,” B “Kinbaku,” C “Regrets Only” C+. “Semper Fidelis”. B- “Guilty as Sin”. B+ “Seven Minutes in Heaven”. A-
