Should you watch Daredevil? You likely will (or already have) if you’re a Marvel Cinematic Universe completist, or you have a love for the character. But if you’re unsure, here are some thoughts on the first three episodes to help you make up your mind.
(Some spoilers for the first three episodes of Daredevil’s first season.)
Start by saying that if you prefer the lighthearted aspect of Marvel cinematic canon so far, this might not be for you. The violence is brutal and the issues being battled out run from corporate corruption to human trafficking. It’s rough. If you have sensitivities to watching assault against women, for example (which happens several times in the first episode), you might want to skip some bits.
The set up is sharp; after all, any New Yorker with basic knowledge of the city will tell you that Hell’s Kitchen isn’t as rough today as it was even 20 years ago, so what is our hero fighting exactly? The show smartly uses the Battle of New York as seen in The Avengers to fuel the premise—the amount of destruction levied all around midtown has provided countless ins for shady people, and someone has got to keep tabs to prevent organized crime and sketchy corporations from taking the whole area and making it their personal piggy bank.
Enter Matt Murdock and his pal Foggy Nelson, two neighborhood kids who are setting up shop at home because they’re good boys. The first episode gives them their first client, Karen Page, who fans of Daredevil will recognize as Matt’s long-standing love interest in the comics. Once that trio is assembled, it’s on to bigger and even badder things, though Foggy exists primarily to provide us with laughs when the show gets too dark to palate. Elden Henson does a fine job at making a character who exists for his one-liners human enough to care about, and it’s clear that while Foggy is used to passing everything off a joke, there’s a reason why he’s Matt’s best friend.
I keep seeing lots of comments claiming that this is like Frank Miller’s run of Daredevil, which I’m not sure is justified. Yes, it’s dark, and there’s a tendency to toss Miller’s name in the ring any time people want to discuss “dark comics being gritty and dark-like,” but it doesn’t actually seem as though Marvel is going too far down Miller’s road; they don’t change Matt’s background and make his father an abusive drunk, he’s not particularly ninja-like, and while Daredevil is a scary dude when he’s fighting bad guys, I wouldn’t say that he descends to the levels of ambiguity in his anti-hero-ness that Miller brought to the forefront. And that’s just as well because the show is dark enough as is without wondering whether or not our hero is truly a good guy, especially in his very first season.
For those who were concerned or confused, Charlie Cox is an incredible Matt Murdock. He is kind but reserved, and that distance has always been pretty key to the core of the character. The anger there is evident all the time, but it’s not an outward rage even when he’s taken on the Daredevil persona. He plays his emotions very close to him, and it works in his favor; the less discernible he is, the more we want to understand about him. The show is also fairly deft on the subject of Matt’s blindness in regard to the people around him—the casual prejudices, ignorance, and micro-aggressions that he encounters day to day. There is an unfortunate Dark Knight problem—Murdock does speak in a growly secondary register half the time when threatening crooks, and it’s really hard to hear that anymore without thinking of Bale’s version of Batman and how often he was maligned/mocked for the choice.
Murdock’s background is precisely the same as his initial origin story, his blindness and subsequent heightened senses the result of contact with radioactive chemicals after saving the life of an old man who was about to be hit by a car. He is raised by single father Jack Murdock, a boxer who wants his son to have a better life. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance on the flashbacks; without something to ground them in a specific era, the scenes from Murdock’s childhood might as well be in the 1960s, well before this version of the character would have been alive. Additionally, the idea of Jack refusing to throw a fight because he wants to make Matt proud of him and leave the kid with some money to live on feels weird in a modern story—it’s hard to stomach the idea of a single parent leaving his child without a father just so his son can have some cash and think well of dear old dad for once. Maybe if it were clear that Jack needed to get that money to be sure Matt could attend college, or something else was done to explain his thinking. But the idea of dying for the sake your son’s pride is not good parenting any way you cut it, and it’s played as though Jack is doing something heroic, which doesn’t sit well.
The supporting cast work wonders, making the show an intricate enough tapestry to be worth coming back to the well. Vincent D’Onofrio rightly had people excited when he was cast as Wilson Fisk, and he doesn’t disappoint. But the real standouts are Vondie Curtis-Hall as newspaper man Ben Urich, and Rosario Dawson as nurse-turned-confidante Claire Temple. Urich is brought to the forefront as an investigative journalist working for a newspaper that can no longer use men of his pedigree. (Though the line from Urich’s boss about how “the kids are making double what we make working on the blogs” was laughable in the extreme and served only to prove that head writer Drew Goddard clearly knows nothing about “the kids” these days.) Claire Temple is given the singular position of becoming accidentally close to Murdock when he’s in need of a friend, and provides the sort of council and practicality that he desperately needs.
The design of the show is well-done, as is the soundtrack, but it’s the fight choreography that demands acclaim. All the awards. Seriously, there is a fight at the end of the second episode that nearly had me weeping, a no-cut spectacle in a hallway being slowly tracked, and you watch Daredevil take out an entire group of criminals with nothing but his fists, and the boxing influence on his fighting style is perfectly realized, and you just watch the thing happen in real time until about a dozen guys are on the floor. No words. It is a gorgeous thing, one of the best pieces of hand-to-hand fight choreography that I’ve ever seen on film. Another thing that you have to appreciate is the impact of said fighting. Normally, because these people are super human and movie magic does its thing, you watch heroes take hit after hit and land on their feet like cats. Gravity has no effect, momentum is for suckers. But when we watch Daredevil fight, gravity has an impact. Matt kicks people in the chest and falls down because you can’t put all your momentum into one move and land on your tip toes like physics doesn’t apply. It drives home how hard Murdock is working in every fight, which is rare in shows like this.
Mistakes have been made, however; it’s being reported that Netflix did not bother to provide audio descriptions for Daredevil, which are produced to allow audience members with visual impairments to enjoy shows and films. The fact that no one involved thought to get that done when their show is about a blind superhero whose very existence means a lot to people with vision-related disabilities is honestly boggling. Hopefully someone is already on that, and it’s fixed in short order.
All in all, Daredevil is a fascinating offering and addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is unique enough to demand attention and does certain things incredibly well. If you’ve been looking for the grimmer corner of this entertainment empire, this will give you your fix and then some. Where it goes from there will all depend….
Emmet Asher-Perrin has other opinions on the show’s politics that she should probably separate out from a tv review, so make of that what you will. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Really digging this. Just a couple of nitpicks about the review:
– “it doesn’t actually seem as though Marvel is going too far down Miller’s road … he’s not particularly ninja-like … I wouldn’t say that he descends to the levels of ambiguity in his anti-hero-ness that Miller brought to the forefront.”
Without being too spoilery, I think it’s safe to say that Miller’s ninja obsession does show up halfway through the series— I haven’t finished it so I don’t know if they’re going to really bring in The Hand, but they’ve definitely at least opened the door for that.
As for the anti-hero thing, I guess it doesn’t go as far in that direction as Miller does, but I think it’s a lot more like that than any pre-Miller Daredevils. It pretty clearly raises questions about whether this is an idealistic person who fell into violence, or a deeply violent person who’s glad to have an excuse for it. Cox is kind of frightening even in his lawyer scenes.
“…the idea of Jack refusing to throw a fight … feels weird in a modern story”
I agree that getting himself killed is not good parenting, but why is that more of a problem in a modern story? I don’t think we’re supposed to be glad that Jack made that move; they just provided emotional motivation that would make sense to that character, who we know is not the world’s smartest guy.
I noticed what you are talking about in the 6 minute preview(sorry I haven’t watched it yet Marvel, but the Spawn has been too busy with Kimmy Schmidt), that when Matt did a jumpkick, he just fell to the ground afterward because you’re right, there isn’t a way to realistically do that and land on your feet.
Steven DeKnight did great fight choreography with Spartacus, so I’m glad to see him bring those chops here.
I marathoned Daredevil over the weekend. Best was to describe it is ‘Arrow’ with cable tv violence, blood splatters and near nudity. I found Matt Murdock’s origin story to be very similar to Oliver Queen’s in the CW Series. Both heroes are out to save their city. Matt gets the crap kicked out of him a lot more than Ollie though.
The acting is suberb. Charlie Cox gives us a more believable DD than the Ben Afleck version. Vincent D’Onofrio while not as physically imposing as Micheal Clark Duncan (who gained 40 pounds in muscle mass training for the role) as the Kingpin really gets to the inner conflicts and desires that plagues the villain in the comics.
Supporting cast is great too. Toby Leonard Moore as Kingpin’s Secretary Wesley, Robb Morgan as small time crook Turk Barrett, Peter Shinoda as the Yakuza Ninja Nobu, and Judith Delgado as Senora Cardenas stand out in addition to the cast members mentioned in the article.
The fight scene with the Russian Mafia at the end of episode two is probably the best fight I’ve seen since Neo and Trinity went to rescue Morpheus in the first Matrix. The camera work and coreography are amazing.
I completely enjoyed Daredevil and look forward to season 2. Will Elekra be hired to kill him?
I think the earlier episodes do Foggy a bit of disservice. He’s more than the comic relief, he’s the heart of the show, a fact which becomes more apparent in later episodes, especially once we meet Mrs. Cardenas (in episode 4 or 5, I believe), culminating in what I think is my favorite episode of the series, Nelson vs. Murdock, of which the Netflix synopsis is delightfully vague.
I’ve only seen two episodes do far, but a fair review I think. The only bit I take issue with is the lack of motive for his dad throwing the fight.
When you consider the cost of healthcare in the USA, the scenes of his dad being unable to afford even proper stitches for his face, and then the sight of Matt lying in a hospital bed, it becomes much easier to see why he’d risk his life for a big enough payout for his son. His dad also seemed to think he had at least a small chance of making a getaway.
The series really is superb. The lawyer in me cannot help but wonder what happened to the undoubtedly high six or low seven figure settlement Matt SHOULD have gotten from being blinded by the loose chemicals in that accident! What a case! Even a Manhattan jury would’ve given the blind 9-year-old hero kid money!
Holy shit that corridor fight, right!?
@6 Considering how corrupt the city is supposed to be, I can easily see the company that owned the chemicals (in turned owned by a conglomerate, in turned owned by a trust, in turn… etc. all the way up to the Kingpin) declaring itself in bankruptcy and/or turning in appeal after appeal lasting for years…
That picture of the Kingpin looks like Varys.
I’m not up on every detail from the comic book version, but I was surprised by the vulnerability and awkwardness of Fisk. That, combined with his utterly brutal temper makes him seem like a petulant and scared child, which also totally works. He’s not just a cookie-cutter Godfather.
@SeanG, it is my opinion that, just as Matt Murdock is not Daredevil until episode 13, Wilson Fisk is not the Kingpin of Crime until he turns on the city. When Fisk recounted the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he realizes his role in the allegory, I believe that is when the Kingpin was truly born.
What is not said yet, is the amazing casting Scott Glenn as Stick. Perfect in tone and dialogue as his comic counterpart. Really loving this show, and hope it gets a season 2 soon.
This review stresses how dark the series is, but speaking as someone who doesn’t generally care for dark-for-the-sake-of-dark stuff, I was impressed at how funny and enjoyable it was. There is a lot of humor and warmth here to leaven the dark elements. Matt, Foggy, and Karen have a great, funny and charming relationship that’s superbly handled by the actors (even if I felt Cox’s American accent needed a little work). Bob Gunton is, to use a pun I made serendipitously on another board, a total hoot as Leland Owlsley. And there’s surprising warmth on the villains’ side too, in James Wesley’s devotion and caring toward Wilson Fisk, and Fisk’s own love story with Vanessa. I realized belatedly that Wesley is basically Waylon Smithers played seriously.
You mention the assaults against women in the first episode (and there’s another case a few episodes later), but I think it should be clarified that they aren’t sexual assaults, just straight-up violence with the intent to kill (in the first episode) or to interrogate (later on). And I didn’t get the sense that the victims were being sexualized in any way. I’m not sure if that makes a difference as far as triggers go, but there it is.
There’s not much skin either; Karen shows a flash of sideboob in episode 1 and has a PG-rated shower scene much later on, but that’s about it. There’s more male skin exposed here than female, and not always attractive males. So this isn’t in the vein of a Netflix show like, say, Marco Polo in terms of piling on the nudity. (Although I wonder if it has the same title designer as Polo, since both title sequences are built on the principle of paint flowing into shapes.)
Nice review. I also wrote one three episodes in, and the violence against Karen in episode 1 was one of the things that I found problematic. I’m five episodes in now, and in general, I’m hoping that Matt’s brutality lessens as he matures into his Daredevil persona. (The torture in episode 2 in particular – yeesh.)
-Andy
@14/Andy: Yeah, my biggest problem is with the show’s embrace of the dishonest and dangerous conceit that torture is actually a viable way of getting trustworthy information. It raises moral qualms about whether what Matt is doing is right, but it doesn’t question the conceit that it works, and that false premise is what allows the use of an “ends justify the means” argument to legitimize torture. It would be better to show that it isn’t really effective at all — like in the Arrow episode earlier this season where Oliver was convinced that torturing someone was the only way to get information, and the information turned out to be a lie so it was all for nothing.
@15: The difference between Arrow torturing somebody for information and Daredevil doing the same, is that Daredevil can actually tell if they are lying (or so he claims), rather than just trusting that the information is good.
I watched the title sequence with interest in almost every episode. The dripping paint plus the haunting music make the sequence fascinating in itself.
I only saw the first episode and found it really dull. It didn’t grab me at all. I suppose I’m just not into dark and gritty. I found my attention wandering by 20 minutes in and by 40 minutes I was so not into it I couldn’t tell you one thing that happened.
When you see things like violence or torture, what makes it (narratively) worth it is to see how going to those extremes really affects Matt (and his relationships with others). One of the things that I really loved, especially as the series progressed, is how the writers used Murdock’s Catholicism as a way for him to examine what he was doing and really ask himself what limits he was imposing on himself and why (as well as giving some nice comparisons of the seal of the confessional and lawyer-client privilege!). So often, we get either heroes being clear-cut “just because” or else they’re made dark in “grittier” pieces for the sake of imagined realism. The arc with Matt and Father Lantom was one of my favorite examinations in comics film/television of how to integrate four-color heroism within the grays of the MCU by discussing vigilantism through moral philosophy.
The nuanced use of religion and moral philosophy in guiding Murdock (and, by comparison, look at Fisk’s comments on the same topics) was part of just the various reasons why I loved the series. You guys mention how all the characters were great (some have brought up Karen Page started off victimized, but she was the character who quickly grew the most over the series in a lot of ways, albeit never in an artificial manner; none of the characters in the series where every off of their toes). I love how many little moments made me cheer over realizing a connection to larger things or made me gasp as my ‘training’ about connections made think that someone might be safe who wasn’t… ;)
I wasn’t sure about the Netflix series ‘experiment’ at first, but this series really made me a believer. I love how much they were able to include in the 13 hours, yet how much they nevertheless gave everything room to breathe. Much as we’ve commented how Marvel has come to make films that are really over genres that happen to have costumes in them, it’s great how the costume crimefighting was really an add-on in some ways to the great law-drama and urban-mob storyline at play here, with the battle over the souls of two men and those caught in the crossfire between them trying to save *their* Hell’s Kitchen!
(BTW, I love the elegant solution to “how do you mess up today’s gentrified Hell’s Kitchen to synch with the classic Daredevil needs-to-be-gentrified Hell’s Kitchen? Thanks, AVENGERS!)
@19/bhaughwout: “I love how much they were able to include in the 13 hours, yet how much they nevertheless gave everything room to breathe.”
Which is largely because the runtimes were mostly well over 50 minutes, ranging from 48 to 59 minutes, rather than the 40-42 of your typical commercial-TV show today. 13 episodes of Arrow, say, would run about nine and a quarter hours, give or take a few minutes. These 13 episodes ran 11 hours and 43 minutes. Well, a little less once you subtract the lengthy title sequences. But it’s still about 16 episodes’ worth by normal commercial-TV standards. Also, since they didn’t have to fit a fixed time slot, they could vary in length and be as long as they needed to be.
This is one of my favorite things about the Netflix model. “Hourlong” shows are actually reasonably close to an hour long!!! It’s been over 40 years since that was true of commercial TV.
Folks, this might be crazy, but a boxer who: 1) lets himself get abused in the ring and probably has even more head trauma than most of his peers 2) admits he is poorly educated and 3) lets himself be influenced by underworld figures, may not be the best or most rational decisionmaker.
That said, what streched my credulity was the same thing in the
Affleck flick. As a lawyer, the whole ‘I only want innocent clients’ made me snicker.
This is totally based on Frank Miller’s work. Not just his initial run on the book, but there’s also a lot of “Born Again” here, but most especially the Man Without Fear miniseries he did with John Romita Jr. There are entire sequences in the Netflix series that are lifted straight from MWF.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@22/krad: I definitely see the Miller influence, and not just in the story. In the scene at the start of “Stick” where Leland and Nobu (I think) were speaking in a parking garage and were mostly in silhouette the whole time, I thought it was a rather Milleresque composition.
Still, as I said, I thought it had a lot of humor and unexpected warmth as well, reminding me more of the modern Mark Waid run on Daredevil, which is what I was hoping to see. I guess Miller’s work had a sense of humor too, at least what I’ve read of him, but it tended to be harsher and more satirical.
The Daredevil: Yellow miniseries has some influence on the series, too, but given that that miniseries was written by the series’ co-executive producer Jeph Loeb, that’s not a big surprise……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
So, I’m only three episodes in, but it seems to me that Arrow is better compared to Twilight than Daredevil. Not that I’m surprised. A show produced for CW is going to have more teen angst than bleeding knife wounds.
I’m quite enjoying this take on Daredevil. It’s not quite Miller, but it’s not Comic Code approved fare either. It’s gritty, and the fight scenes are realistic, and the rawness of everything they choose to show shines through.
And that’s what I suppose will polarize people. Fight scenes aren’t heroic and beautiful, they’re brutal and everyone gets hurt, win or lose. Violence against women isn’t just a sentence of dialogue or a shadow play of what’s happening off-screen, it’s in your face and forcing you to make decisions on how that makes you feel, or for some relive it.
At its core I think Daredevil is trying to have a Frank (pun intended) and honest dialogue about vengeance, compassion and the troubled hero mythos. I enjoy the space he fills between Steve Rogers and Frank Castle, and that middle ground lets the writers juxtapose compassion and brutality that lets us examine the rewards and consequences when one rules over the other.
Final thought:
Violence is bad. Violence against women is bad. This show doesn’t glory in it. If seeing the violence against women in this show makes you feel uncomfortable, donate some money to a shelter and have a serious talk with your children or friends about how you think a proper human should treat their sisters and mothers.
@25/swgregory: I hear a lot of people using the “CW = teen angst” trope to dismiss Arrow, but it just shows they don’t actually know what they’re talking about, since there’s only one teenage character, Thea Queen, in the entire regular cast (and she turned 20 not long ago). Arrow‘s other characters range from their early 20s (Roy) through early 50s (Quentin, Malcolm). Meanwhile, all of The Flash‘s characters are post-college adults in their 20s through their 40s.
In fact, the only current CW dramas that actually focus on teenage characters are The 100 and Reign, though I’m not sure if the characters in Reign are being played as young as they would’ve been in the series’ time frame in real life. And The 100 focuses as much on its adult cast members as its teenage ones. The other eight dramas in their current lineup all have lead characters in their 20s or 30s — or much older, in the case of the vampire shows.
@26: I enjoy Arrow, but I don’t think the “teen angst” criticisms are wholly unjustified. I personally refer to them as “CW moments”. The fact that none of the characters are not actually teenagers doesn’t mean that there isn’t “teen angst”, just that it is a little more pathetic when it happens…
@27/DrBlack: Why not just call it “angst,” then? Sticking the “teen” label to it is just buying into an outdated stereotype of what The CW is. And like all stereotypes, it undermines the credibility of any argument that uses it.
(Though the line from Urich’s boss about how “the kids are making double what we make working on the blogs” was laughable in the extreme and served only to prove that head writer Drew Goddard clearly knows nothing about “the kids” these days.)
It’s also possible that the writer made the character wrong on purpose, to show just one reason the newspaper business is falling apart. That old school newspapermen don’t understand new media at all.
@26 I suppose you’ll tell me then we I can’t say any adults are being “childish” because, by definition, any of their behaviour is “adult”? And that to tell a child they’re acting childish is redundant? I fear for the language under such rules.
I didn’t dismiss Arrow, I said it was a bad comparison for Daredevil because it was closer to Twilight in terms of themes and demographic. It’s nothing for you to develop some non-teen-angst over.
And the truth is, even if they’re in their 20s or 30s and beyond, a glut of “boo hoo my boyfriend is lying to me and daddy loved you more” story arcs are the true fuel for the teen angst lable, not some unfair stereotype being perpetuated by meany-bo-beanies on the interwebs.
As I said, I’m only three episodes in, but I can tell just by how they developed the story arc between Matt and his father, compared to Thea’s relationship with Daddy #1; Daddy #2; and Mean-Mommy; that these are two completely different narratives, both in form and substance. (Did I just use an Oxford semi-colon?)
p.s. look up the definition of trope.
@25–“It’s not quite Miller, but it’s not Comic Code approved fare either.”
Most of Miller’s work on Daredevil was on the regular monthly series, which did. in fact, carry the Comics Code Seal of Approval.
Stepping in with a reminder of our Moderation Policy, and a request to please keep the discussion civil and respectful. There’s no call for being aggressive or rude in responding to another commenter.
@30/swgregory: It’s not about language, it’s about preconceived notions and how they can color your perception of a show. As someone who does watch Arrow regularly, I find it entirely bizarre to compare it to Twilight. You might have a point with some other CW shows like The Vampire Diaries (which I’ve never watched) or Beauty and the Beast (which I lost interest in after a season and a half), but Arrow? That’s just inexplicable to me. That’s not what the show is about at all. Its model is the Nolan Batman films.
And yes, Arrow and Daredevil are different narratives. Nobody’s saying they aren’t. They’re in a similar wheelhouse — gritty shows about non-superpowered, street-level vigilantes growing into superhero identities — but naturally each show has its own distinctive style and voice in approaching that premise, which is exactly how it should be. Just because two things are different, that doesn’t require declaring one superior to the other. It would be a shame if they weren’t different.
Another similarity, of course, is that they’re both the inaugural shows of shared TV superhero universes, with the difference being that Arrow developed its spinoffs after the fact while Daredevil was planned as one of four from the start. But they’ve both been successful beginnings. The CW-verse consisting of Arrow and The Flash, and soon to be joined by the Atom-led team spinoff whose title is still unrevealed, has proven to be a very successful and enjoyable translation of a large comic-book universe to the small screen, and I hope the Netflix Marvel shows will be just as successful in their own way, with their own distinctive style.
@31 You are quite correct. I have inadvertantly implied that the Miller work was not Comic Code approved, and it was not my intention to besmirch his name or suggest his work was not code-approved. I apologize for any hardship I have caused anyone through this mischaracterization.
@34 I watched all of season 1 and 2 of Arrow, so my notions are post-conceived, and the fact that they are supported by weight of popular opinion on the general nature of CW programming does not diminish their validity.
Can you count the number of love interests Oliver has had on the show? You can sum it up as pretty much “every single female character except Thea and his mom, and that might have happened if this show was on Netflix too.”
Oh, he also didn’t score with Laurel’s mom (who could compete with Doctor Who?)
Anyway, there were also tons of mommy/daddy issues, multiple love triangles, and “what am I going to do without my money?” story lines to bring it fully into the CW plot fold. I don’t think my position lands me in “entirely bizarre” or “inexplicable” territory, particularly since I just explained it.
As for the Dark Knight angle, Green Arrow has been a knock off of Batman for decades, and this show in particular stole the entire earthquake plot from the Batman comics, completely separate from any Nolan-Batman similarities. I’ll give Oliver a +1 in one category: his butler also drives and does security.
This may sound crazy, but I’m actually a Green Arrow fan, and I’ve liked Arrow so far. I just have no illusions about what it is, and love it in spite of some its foibles. I don’t expect it to be perfect, canon, or even great all the time. I expect bad guys to sometimes get shot with arrows, billionaire-ninja-bowmaster-playboy Oliver to do lots of shirtless chin ups and anyone that kisses Oliver to either die or experience a personal tragedy that renders them emotionally unavailable to him.
It’s fun, it’s light even when it tries to be heavy, and it goes well with popcorn. If I want something heavier I’ll go watch Daredevil.
There’s room for both. :)
“Additionally, the idea of Jack refusing to throw a fight because he wants to make Matt proud of him and leave the kid with some money to live on feels weird in a modern story—it’s hard to stomach the idea of a single parent leaving his child without a father just so his son can have some cash and think well of dear old dad for once.”
I got the idea that Murdock was a big name boxer, who had spent almost a decade playing a patsy for some of Rigoletto’s mooks. He was getting too old to keep fighting, and didn’t see how he could maintain his and his son’s lifestyle (and whatever debt/deal he had going with Rigoletto). He saw the big fight against Creel as his best chance of cashing out. I don’t think it was his intention to leave Matt an orphan, its not explained during the show why his mother didn’t take him in.
“(Though the line from Urich’s boss about how “the kids are making double what we make working on the blogs” was laughable in the extreme and served only to prove that head writer Drew Goddard clearly knows nothing about “the kids” these days.)”
Why instantly blame this on the writers ignorance when its a perfectly reasonable thing to have an angry newspaper editor say in an era when printed media is struggling to find a profitable course? I’m sure a lot of people working for newspapers think and say similar things, regardless of how accurate it is.
@36/swgregory: I just don’t understand why you think any of those story threads are in any way exclusive to stories about teenagers. They’re all standard parts of narratives about adults going back throughout history. Oedipus and Hamlet had plenty of mommy/daddy issues.
I also don’t understand using “teen angst” as a dismissive phrase, as if there were something wrong with stories about teenagers. Surely the seminal teen genre drama of our age is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the best genre shows ever. Stories about teenagers can be very powerful and resonant, because it’s in adolescence that we struggle most with the questions of identity, emotion, relationships, and values that guide us for the rest of our lives. There’s something archetypal about it, and it’s nothing to be derided. There’s plenty of great literature about teenagers — Romeo and Juliet, Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, etc. Using Twilight as an example, as if every story about teenagers or young adults’ relationships were no better than it, is just petty and unfair.
So based on this, my answer would be “no” I’m one of the people who “should not be watching this.” I found the first Nolan Batverse movie to have sufficient humor, it was that the second and especially the third was just grim without really any humor that didn’t come from a love of the source material or the characters/actor portrayal. I’m fine with big explosions, even hand to hand combat, even some of the stuff shown in the various seasons of Spartacus, for example, but hand to hand combat or fighting for it’s own sake isn’t particularly interesting or appealing to me. I’d also have the same issue about torture that’s been voiced here (another reason why I’m not a Batfan or bother with Arrow). Plus which I just the week before canceled the cable internet which I have yet to replace.
So, yeah, I guess, “no.”
@38 ChristopherLBennett “I also don’t understand using “teen angst” as a dismissive phrase, as if there were something wrong with stories about teenagers.”
I’ve made no judgement statements about Arrow, Twilight, or teen angst stories, other than Arrow-to-Twilight is a more-apt comparison than Arrow-to-Daredevil, and that is likely due to characteristics that are (fairly) attributed to traits shared by a more-than-common number of series developed by that network. They have a target demographic and they cater to it.
I’m not in that target demographic. I enjoy Arrow anyway, in spite of the CW spin, because I’m a fan of the franchise.
If you want to argue that Arrow has more in common with Daredevil than Twilight (or Vampire Diaries), I’m game. But I’ve made no disparaging comments about teen angst or teen stories, unless you consider “I’m not their target audience” disparaging. (I do not) It’s a worthy topic, and I wish you luck finding someone to argue the view opposite to yours.
I just had to stop by and toss in my 2c after having binge watched Daredevil this weekend. And OMG it’s so good you guys.
I haven’t read all the comments but I echo what many of them say about the show: the cinematography, coreography, acting–all are amazing and perfectly spot on. So many of the scenes I really felt like I was watching a comic book because the shots were just so artistic. The hallway fight, the blind singing man in the cab, and so many others. My husband and I guessed that perhaps these scenes were direct adapatations from the comic books, because they are just so perfect (we don’t know though, since neither of us have read them).
It is darker than the Avenger movies, but I wouldn’t say it goes into the “dark and gritty” teritory that most of us think of when we think of something like GRRM/Game of Thrones or Watchmen. I think DD is just a very realistic take on a superhero. No frills, no softening the blow. Just the truth. Which is a huge theme throughout the show so I’m sure that was intentional.
The other thing I loved about the show was how it’s not just DD’s origin story and rise to fame–it is also the origin story for the King Pin. We get flashbacks of his past, we see how DD’s actions are affecting him. I think it was perfectly encapsulated by his teacher’s lesson about anger vs rage. DD is anger, but he controls it. King Pin is rage. Every time he lashes out at someone it’s in a fury, and he’s really scary, but DD “wins” because of that.
Also–it’s funny you say he has the “Batman” effect going on, because I thought the complete opposite. He didn’t change his voice AT ALL in the mask, so I kept thinking How does no one recognize him when they talked to him(in the mask) 5 minutes ago?! It’s so annoying! People who make fun of Batman/Bale for the growl are ridiculous–I’m sorry but the days of thinking a superhero can put on glasses and be unrecognizable are gone. At least trying to hide your voice, even with a growl, shows some kind of effort.
Anyway, that was minor compared to all the good things this show has going for it. And not to reignite the fire, but I never could get into Arrow because to me it was too fanservicey, and the main character always carried around the Idiot Ball. But DD’s mistakes feel real, and he pays for them in cuts and bruises. Different strokes for different folks, though.
How does no one recognize him when they talked to him(in the mask) 5 minutes ago?!
I assume he’s relying on the “No way a blind man could do this” “logic” here, and to be fair, that’s a powerful bias in his favor.
@41, @42: Actually, it seemed to me that he did change his voice. He was lower and raspier when he spoke as the Devil; it’s just that people are so used to Christian Bale’s “I need a throat lozenge” performance that something more understated is hard to notice.
I’m surprised nobody here has mentioned that one of the minor characters is named “Senator Randolph Cherryh”. This amuses the hell out of me, as it should amuse any SF fan who knows the actual origin of C.J. Cherryh’s name. (There’s no such name in real life! It was made up by her first publisher because he thought “C.J. Cherry” wasn’t exotic enough!)
Claire Temple is his “council”?