REVIEW: Daredevil: Born Again – Season 1, Episode 8, “Isle of Joy”

Television Reviews

The rumors were that with “Isle of Joy,” or maybe last week’s “Art for Art’s Sake,” Daredevil: Born Again was finally going to get good, having expunged all remnants of the scrapped version from the original showrunners before Dario Scardapane took over. Yeah… no. If anything, I hate this show more with each passing week as the season’s storyline unravels, each new twist, reveal, or development either falling flat or being stupid; sometimes, the important stuff happens off-screen while we’re stuck watching bickering couples and useless side characters that are as hard to like as the series itself. And to make it even worse, none of the returning players feel like the same person, least of all Matt Murdock, who has become a pathetic, erratic child.

Matt and Heather clash over their differing opinions on Daredevil and Wilson Fisk. Fisk tries to repair his marriage once and for all. Bullseye finds his prison situation has changed. There may be more to Foggy’s death than meets the eye.

It doesn’t take long for “Isle of Joy” to become excruciating. The opening scene is actually two scenes intercut, something this show loves to do but is not very good at executing, with the editing killing the momentum in both scenes rather than linking them, which is what it’s trying to do. Matt and Heather are arguing over her reaction to Daredevil and Muse; Heather thinks they’re as bad as each other, and her righteous indignation is yet another takedown of the characters we love while she tells us how much better she is than Daredevil. You recall, of course, that Heather gunned down Muse while Daredevil was fighting him because nothing Marvel makes can be satisfying anymore; well, Heather – who, keep in mind, is supposed to be suffering from some form of PTSD and is scared and ashamed because she killed someone – brags to Matt that she saved herself, Daredevil had nothing to do with it, and superheroes are just “underdeveloped boys hiding behind masks.” Matt’s response is to flail about like an idiot because Heather’s speech is not directed at Matt so much as it’s directed at us: we’re getting a lecture on girl power and toxic masculinity from an insufferable scold in the middle of a superhero show, and the hero can do nothing but shuffle his feet like a wayward child. I’m genuinely surprised she didn’t start singing “Independent Woman Part 1.” There’s no difference between this and the mentality that Snow White is “not going to be saved by the prince;” this is “the message,” as the Critical Drinker puts it, and it has to be in absolutely everything Disney produces. Daredevil, we’re being told, is no longer for us.

***SPOILERS***

That scene between Matt and Heather is intercut with one where Wilson Fisk brings Vanessa to his secret hideout, where he eats dinner and listens to the screams of her lover. Fisk shows her what he’s done, and he offers her the chance to make her actions right, to put her affair behind them, or to set the caged man free. And honestly, I don’t mind this; I still think Vanessa having an affair is completely out of character (although that’s my fault for not understanding that these are in no way the same characters anymore; silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids), but since it happened, this is a better way to deal with it than Fisk sitting in couple’s therapy and listening to her describe how sexy she found the guy she cuckolded him with. Now, it’s on her; she can choose her husband, or she can choose her whore. And Vanessa chooses Wilson Fisk, gunning down what’s-his-name as he pleads for mercy. Finally, Fisk does something that feels appropriate for him, and we can be done with this nonsense. I didn’t appreciate him crowing about how much better than him she is and how he would never have accomplished anything without her (and he’s talking about before she took over as the Kingpin), but I guess baby steps are better than nothing – well, that’s not true, but I did like that plot point. Again, though, I’d rather have seen this situation play out uninterrupted than have to jump to Heather telling Matt what a loser he is every fifteen seconds or so. And Fisk manages to intrude on Matt and Heather’s relationship in more ways than just bad editing when Buck Cashman personally delivers an invitation to some gala Fisk is throwing. Of course, Matt knows Fisk is evil, and Heather seems to have completely forgotten that he’s the Kingpin (like everyone else on this show), so they have another fight, and before the first commercial break, I already want to do anything else but watch Daredevil: Born Again.

Matt hasn’t been very well represented throughout Daredevil: Born Again, starting with the scene in the pilot where he begged Karen to have coffee with him like a lovesick twelve-year-old, but it somehow gets even worse in “Isle of Joy.” Matt has completely lost his ability to be cool, and I don’t mean “cool” in a badass Devil of Hell’s Kitchen sense; I mean he’s an emotional wreck who has a nervous breakdown in seemingly every scene he’s in. After stumbling over his every word with Heather, he shows up at his law firm and gets scolded for being a half hour late by Kirsten, who tells him Bullseye wants to see him (and then berates him for wanting to talk about it – YOU BROUGHT IT UP!), then brings him into a meeting with a client. The guy is a jerk because lawyers gotta eat, and in no time, Matt explodes on him, telling him he’s an evil liar, and then storms out. For God’s sake, is Matt even an adult anymore? He’s gotten indignant at bad people before, but he’s handled it better, coming off as a man of principle rather than a toddler taking a tantrum. When Kirsten wonders what’s wrong with him, he goes off on the horrible injustice of the justice system, bringing up the guy who went to jail for ten days for robbing a store (oh, the humanity!), and he leaves like a drama queen. The word salad speeches, the constant nervous laughter, the awful jokes (thanks, Marvel), and the incessant fidgeting all undermine Matt Murdock, and I don’t believe this is an accident. This is yet another dismantling of a beloved hero, brought to you by the people who denigrated Tony Stark’s sacrifice in She-Hulk, mocked Ant-Man’s role in saving the universe in Quantumania, and turned Thor into a slapstick act.

Speaking of Foggy’s killer, “Isle of Man” does feature the return of Bullseye, who has been transferred from protective custody to general population under Fisk’s orders (apparently, a mayor can do that). Bullseye walks into a huge mob of hardened criminals who look like they want to kill him, but nothing happens because he’s fine when Matt visits him. (Remember when Fisk set up the Punisher in prison, and it led to an awesome fight scene where Frank had to kill his way through a phalanx of bad guys? Daredevil was cool and made sense back then.) It’s Matt who, once again, loses control and slams Bullseye’s head into the table, then pretends Bullseye went crazy and did it himself, and everyone believes him because this show would need a brain transplant just to be braindead. Of course, it was all an elaborate scheme so Bullseye could escape, and while his scene in the prison medical ward is fun (the tooth thing is silly, but Bullseye can do stuff like that in the comics, so it doesn’t bother me), it still seems dumb. He’s got a whole prison full of criminals who want to kill him; why not just let one of them beat on him before killing the guy with some small object? Why does he need Matt to come in and beat him? The answer is, because the show wanted a scene between Matt and Bullseye, and stupid is as stupid does, ma’am. Then, Bullseye disguises himself as the prison guard he just killed and simply walks onto the transport bus. This is a guy who needed a whole team of guards to bring him to general population, but he’s alone with one guard and a doctor in the medical ward. Unbelievable.

But there’s a reason all of these characters are coming together, albeit ineptly. When visiting Josie’s bar – where he talks to Cherry more than Josie – Matt realizes that Foggy’s death was not a simple act of revenge by a man who had no reason to seek revenge on them but a paid assassination. And Fisk wants Bullseye killed in prison to shut him up, meaning he must have ordered the hit on Foggy. So, it’s off to the ball, where Matt goes to confront Fisk as he celebrates the Red Hook docks project, which is now working because Fisk is extorting all those wealthy power brokers who swore to stop him. This one really pissed me off; see, all of this happens off-screen, and we just get snippets of what Fisk did, like the woman who put Fisk in his place mentioning that her husband has disappeared before running off. Why would they not show us Fisk confronting her, telling her what he did, and twisting the knife to get her to play ball? Was that less important than a meaningless interlude at the law firm or Heather telling Matt how much cooler she is than Daredevil? Fisk does set up a meeting with that Swordsman guy from Hawkeye, but again, the show cuts away before they get to the good stuff, and when it returns to them, they simply shake hands. It’s like they’re allergic to entertainment. Anyway, Matt listens to Fisk and Vanessa talking and somehow realizes that Vanessa had Foggy killed, not Fisk; how he gleans this from what she says, which has nothing to do with anything, I have no idea, but at this point, who cares? And, unsurprisingly, Bullseye shows up to eliminate the man who’s trying to kill him, and Matt takes the bullet for Fisk. I’m sure this will all be meaningful in the finale, or at least, we’ll be told it is.

“Isle of Joy” has plenty of details that irk, just to add insult to injury. Why doesn’t Bullseye’s anger with Fisk over killing the woman he was obsessed with in Daredevil ever come up? They could have had an image of her flash in his mind as he pulled the trigger. But she’s entirely forgotten. And Fisk makes that obnoxious twenty-something intern his new deputy mayor, or “deputy mayor of communications,” or some such stupidity. This is another failed storyline, where Fisk is supposedly grooming this kid to be one of his disciples, but it never felt like he had imparted anything aside from fear of failing the Kingpin. It wasn’t long ago that Fisk was close to firing him, and now he makes the guy his number two? BB Urich continues to be a presence when it’s convenient – one who somehow didn’t know that Fisk killed her uncle, which I thought was common knowledge. (Seriously, I don’t think the people who make this show have ever watched Daredevil.) The men on Fisk’s anti-vigilante task force are now acting as his personal bodyguards, burning the flesh off of reporters with impunity as the police commissioner tells them to stop. Does all this mean Fisk is the Kingpin again? I guess, but there are no scenes with the other criminal gangs, so we don’t know what his goals are besides building up the Red Hook docks for some reason. Daredevil: Born Again is a mess, haphazardly slapped together like everything else Marvel makes now, and “Isle of Joy” is another promise that it won’t get better.

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

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