REVIEW: Daredevil: Born Again – Season 1, Episode 2, “Optics”

Television Reviews

I was, to put it mildly, less than thrilled with the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again. Its follow-up, “Optics,” is better, perhaps benefiting from getting past the season’s setup and jumping into a plot that keeps Matt busy. It also has some nice small touches, particularly one I didn’t expect to see on the show. But it’s still not nearly as good as its Netflix predecessor, with some truly awful dialogue, characters acting in ways they wouldn’t, and the thing we’ve probably all been waiting for: the patented Marvel misplaced humor, just in case we were in danger of taking a scene too seriously.

Matt defends a new client accused of killing a cop, but while building his defense, he discovers the man is more than he appears. Wilson Fisk deals with his first hurdles as mayor of New York: potholes, reporters, an uncooperative police commissioner, and his troubled marriage.

“Optics” gives a good idea of what this first season of Daredevil: Born Again will be about, expanding on the theme introduced in the premiere: Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk drifting back towards their alter egos after resolving to abandon them. They begin this episode in their new roles, Matt as a lawyer for a new firm and Fisk as the mayor. At the courthouse, Matt finds a new client: Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes), who intervened in what looked like a random assault and accidentally got a police officer killed. Hector is being beaten by the police and prison guards who think he’s a cop killer, making him the perfect client for an idealist like Matt, and after convincing Kirsten to let him take the case (Is she his boss? He’s a name partner – actually, his name comes first.), he has their investigator, former cop Cherry (Clark Johnson), look into the case. Meanwhile, Fisk is unsure of how to proceed as mayor, at first listening to his aides as he wrestles with his rocky marriage to Vanessa. Hero and villain are both trying to do what they’re supposed to do, relying on others to do the things they’d normally do for themselves.

***SPOILERS***

But this doesn’t last long, and “Optics” is the first step towards Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk embracing being Daredevil and the Kingpin again. While Cherry discovers that Hector Ayala is actually a vigilante called White Tiger, he doesn’t find any evidence that Hector is innocent of murdering a cop and suggests that Matt’s judgment is compromised because he is a former vigilante. But Matt knows Hector is innocent, so he finally does his own legwork, tracking down the man Hector rescued and getting him to safety when the bad cops show up to kill him. Fisk decides to roll up his sleeves as well, demonstrating political savvy when he instructs some road workers to fill a traffic-stopping pothole and tries to relate to the police commissioner at a cop’s funeral.  And in both cases, the characters go back to their old tactics, if only slightly: Matt kicks the shit out of the two corrupt cops when they try to kill him, and Fisk shows the commissioner a picture of his illegitimate daughter to get him to play ball. They don’t go too far; Matt is able to restrain himself from completely wailing on the dirty cops, and Fisk only threatens to expose the girl’s existence, not kill her, as he would have in times past. But they’re both making progress.

Matt and Fisk are also shown the errors of their ways by other characters in “Optics.” Hector became White Tiger because when Matt stopped being Daredevil, there was nobody around to protect his neighborhood. Matt abandoned his calling, and it fell to an amateur to do the job he should have been doing. The result was a tragedy that could get Hector sent to prison for the rest of his life. It also put a strain on Hector’s marriage, as his wife is unsure of what to make of her husband now that he’s a vigilante, something he wouldn’t have to be if Daredevil were still around. There’s a beautiful moment where Matt walks by his old church and hears the hymns calling to him, using Matt’s Catholicism as a metaphor for his superhero activities like Daredevil used to do, something I was sure Born Again would drop like a hot potato. And Fisk sees his failures through Vanessa, who felt abandoned by him when she took over his criminal empire. Vanessa fell in love with the Kingpin, and seeing Fisk abandon that role and cast it on her isolated her from the man she married. I still think the affair is stupid and wildly out of character, but at least they’re making an effort to explain their marital strife.

But “Optics” doesn’t completely make up for the previous episode’s shortcomings. The new characters remain either bland or downright awful, with Michael Gandolfini and Genneya Walton being the worst. Walton is BB Urich, Ben Urich’s niece, and she’s an independent journalist who, it’s implied, hit on Gandolfini’s aide to get access to Fisk. The dialogue between them is more of the nonsensical faux-Gen Z lingo they gave Gandolfini last week, and it’s grating. (It does lead to a good moment where Fisk remembers killing Ben Urich, though.) All Kirsten and Cherry do is make you miss Karen and Foggy, something I don’t see this show ever getting past. Hector is fine, but he doesn’t have much of a personality yet. Heather Glenn, Matt’s new girlfriend, is still the best of the newbies, but she doesn’t have much to do in this one despite being present in a key scene towards the end. And some of the dialogue is terrible, particularly Fisk’s because the Born Again writers clearly don’t understand the character. He’s never as subtle as he was before, saying very obvious things Fisk would normally obfuscate, and it feels like the character is being dumbed down. He has a line at the end of the scene where he threatens the police commissioner that is meant to be funny, which already undermines the scene, but that it’s not how Fisk would talk makes it even worse. “Optics” is better than “Heaven’s Half Hour,” but it still doesn’t fill me with confidence for the rest of Born Again.

Let us know what you thought of “Optics” in the comments!

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