WARNING: MAJOR spoilers for the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again ahead!
Fans have been eager to see Daredevil properly return to screens since the series was canceled in 2018. While his cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home was celebrated, fans wanted to see him at the center of the story. Likewise, his appearances in She-Hulk and Echo were enjoyable but a bit lackluster for fans, as he was always used to drive someone else's character arc.
The reason that the Netflix series was such a success was because of how human Matt Murdock was, not just that he existed as a hero. Audiences cared about him struggling with his faith, and the series constantly teetered on the question of whether it was possible for the city to thrive if he was just a lawyer or just a vigilante. Those questions were virtually impossible to answer without the people in his life—chiefly his best friend Foggy Nelson and on-again-off-again love interest Karen Page.
When Marvel announced that they were bringing the series back, fans were ecstatic. It's hard to imagine a better actor for Matt Murdock than Charlie Cox, and the same goes for Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin. But the studio and actors went back and forth over how connected it was going to be to the Netflix series, and fans were sorely disappointed by the idea that Foggy and Karen might be left out.
Despite having finished most of the first six episodes, plans for the new Daredevil series were scrapped and rewritten in 2023. Apparently, it just wasn't working quite right, likely because the movie-focused mindset of the MCU simply didn't work for a character that was already so clearly developed in a television format. One of the big changes that came from that overhaul was that Elden Henson's Foggy Nelson and Deborah Ann Woll's Karen Page would, in fact, be returning.
Which brings us to last Tuesday, when the first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again dropped on Disney+. I, and many fans, took the time to rewatch the Netflix series in preparation. And then the first fifteen minutes included a narrative choice that quite frankly disgusted me. It felt disrespectful and crude, taking advantage of the audience's love for the original show, and then throwing away much of what had made it so successful.
Let's talk about it.
The end of Daredevil Season 3
In order to properly understand why the start of the new series upset me so much, we need to briefly discuss how the original series ended. After losing Elektra in The Defenders and being badly injured, Matt Murdoch let his friends (and everyone else) believe he was dead. As he recovered, he became more convinced that he had gotten it wrong by trying to be both a lawyer and a vigilante, committing himself to only be the Devil of Hell's Kitchen.
Throughout the third season, he and his friends suffered for this choice. As Kingpin rose to an even higher place of power than he'd held before, Matt debated if there was any good that could come from having friendships. He lost his faith in God, and he planned to break his no-killing rule. Every time he tried to handle the situation the legal way, people died.
In the final episode, Matt pointed psychopathic Ben Poindexter at Fisk like a loaded gun, and he followed behind Dex to seal the deal. Although the fight between Dex, Fisk, and Matt was admittedly somewhat confusing, motivation-wise, he was convinced that Kingpin could only be stopped if he was dead.
But even when he gave up on his moral code, Foggy didn't. He looked for a legal way to send Fisk back to prison, and, thanks to the help of FBI Agent Rahul Nadeem, he got it. Matt pulled himself back from the brink and let Fisk go, with a deal that he wouldn't go after Fisk's new wife if Fisk left Matt's friends alone.
It was a great moral victory, leading Matt to a brighter future. He reconciled with his estranged mother, asking her to help him stay on the right side of the line. He found his way back to his friends, who decided to go into business together. After all of the pain and the hardship, the final lesson of the Netflix series was that Matt needed his friends to keep him grounded, to keep him from becoming more monster than man.
Daredevil: Born Again starts by violently rejecting its predecessor
The new series takes place at least five years after the end of the Netflix series, which makes it reasonable for it to be moving in new directions. In our world, it's been seven years since the finale, but it might be up to nine in-universe, since Matt's previous MCU appearances were slightly in the future. In theory, the first episode was intended to help bridge the gap between the previous show's ending and the new storyline.
The first few shots reacquaint audiences with the setting, taking us back to Hell's Kitchen for a police officer's retirement party. There's some light joking about nostalgia ("Reverence for the past yet hope for the future"), and then the action starts. Matt leaves the party in an attempt to protect their client, who had been hiding at Foggy's apartment. And then everything falls apart.
Poindexter, who has apparently held a grudge against Foggy, of all people, shoots him right outside of Josie's Bar. He then goes on a killing spree, with Matt trying to stop him. Karen stays with Foggy as he dies, and when his heart stops, Matt drops Dex off the roof. In one fell swoop, we lose Foggy and Matt breaks his no-killing rule.
We find out later that Dex survived the fall, but it doesn't change the fact that Matt tried to kill him. We also learn that Karen moved to the other side of the country, which leaves a clean slate for the series to jump forward a year and not have to worry about any of the friends and moral struggles that the Netflix show had so lovingly built for Matt.
About a month ago, Charlie Cox spoke about the death scene, sharing that he had his doubts about it. But the justification he gives, which is likely the same one he was given, says a lot about the perspective the writers had going into this.
"I'm still not convinced it's the right thing to do, but we have to come back big and bold, you know, we’ve got to make a statement after all these years away, and what it does do is it's a wonderful catalyst for the rest of the story."
The showrunners felt the need to "make a statement," which that first scene certainly does. However, the statement that was being made is probably not the one they intended. The statement I got out of the killing was that they didn't want to have to compete with the past while building the future, hoping they could win some approval from shock value while simultaneously telling fans that "the past is dead."
Why killing Foggy this way disrespects the original show and its fans
There was obviously a lot of back and forth between the idea of this series as a continuation or a reboot, and killing Foggy this way ultimately feels like their answer to that question. Pretend it's a continuation, pull in all the old fans with promises of returning characters and a Daredevil collection on Disney+, but don't actually bother having to honor the original.
Showrunner Dario Scardapane explained that Foggy's death was part of the new series before he arrived, but that he pushed for it to be shown on-screen. While that was the correct choice, if it had to be done, the choice itself is baffling for reasons Scardapane himself acknowledges! Speaking to CinemaBlend, he said the following:
"And you know, there's a promise written on a napkin at the end of Season 3, and we see that promise in the beginning of this, and we take a hammer to it, and it's harsh, and it hurts. But it is also not done lightly, because that loss colors everything that goes on with Matt from here on out."
He promises that Foggy's death will have future impacts, but that doesn't make it the right choice. He acknowledges that the first plot point of the new series "take[s] a hammer" to the promise of the original series, but you don't get the right to do something like that without earning it first. I'm not saying that writers aren't allowed to kill off main characters, but this felt like an easy way out of having to write Matt's relationships with Karen and Foggy properly.
If they felt that Foggy's death was necessary, it at least could have been done after a few more episodes, had the production been planned differently. Head of Marvel TV Brad Winderbaum told Entertainment Weekly that the death was similar to a major character death from X-Men '97, but that happened at the end of the fifth episode. Foggy died just sixteen minutes into the new show, with only about five minutes even showing him on-screen.
That's not enough time for new viewers to get to know Foggy and his relationship with Matt, nor is it enough time for long-time fans to see what's been happening for the last 5-10 years. There's always a struggle in revivals about whether they should be targeted at old or new fans, but this timeline failed both. The writers didn't prove themselves to fans of the Netflix show, and they didn't show new fans enough for them to truly understand why Foggy's death or Matt dropping Bullseye off the roof would be so important.
It all just happens, and then what do you know? The writers get to start fresh with Matt's new law partner, his new love interest, and even a new Kingpin-Vanessa dynamic that means they don't really have to continue much of anything at all. The only character that they have to do right by is Matt, and he can be a drastically different character, now that his closest confidants are gone and his most sacred rule is broken.
Honestly, it feels like the easy way out. They get to claim they are honoring the original show with an off-hand reference to Ben Urich (who had ten episodes of build-up to make audiences care before his death), but they don't have to actually reckon with the characters that long-time fans are primed to care about.
Maybe that significance will develop with time, but Marvel has a troubling recent history of killing characters off as a plot device, barely acknowledging the emotional impacts. At this point, Dex has killed more people that Matt was emotionally connected to than Kingpin, and in far more malicious ways, but you wouldn't know it by the way he acts at the trial, where he seems more concerned with Karen than the murderer of both his best friend and the man who raised him.
But what if Foggy survived?
Of course, the best argument against my thoughts here is that it's entirely possible that Foggy isn't actually dead. On a broad scale, this is a comic book adaptation, so death doesn't mean much. The old expression used to be that nobody stays dead except for Jason Todd and Bucky Barnes, and... we know how that's turned out. But there's actually a lot of evidence to support this theory.
Starting with our world, we know that Elden Henson was confirmed to be in Season 2, and showrunner Scardapane told Empire in February that he was willing to lose his job in the fight for Matt's closest friends, stating, "You can’t do this show without Karen and Foggy."
On top of that, there's the source material. Foggy has faked his death (and even been resurrected) a couple of times in the comics, the most famous of which may have been referenced in an Easter Egg of the new show. Marvel also released a new bio page about Foggy and his multiple death fake-outs the day after the first episode debuted.
Honestly, turning this into a fake-out would actually be worse. As poorly conceived as I think the choice to kill Foggy was, it is clearly driving Matt's moral choices for the first season. He told Fisk, "My best friend was killed. A line was crossed. I felt like I lost the privilege [to be Daredevil.]" So if all of that is just a misdirection, it's going to weaken this season's story.
If Foggy isn't dead, then there are only two options. Either Matt knows, which doesn't make any sense with what we've seen so far, or he doesn't, leading up to some big reveal, probably in the season finale. That reveal would seem like shock value for shock value's sake, similar to the emotional manipulation inherent in killing off Foggy in the first fifteen minutes in the first place.
Either way, it will mean that the audience's emotions were being toyed with. To some extent, that's just a part of media consumption. Writers want to make us cry; they want to make us hurt so deeply that the story sticks with us long after writing it. But it's cruel to do it with no real narrative payoff, and, more importantly, it keeps audiences from believing it the next time around.
That's already a growing problem in the MCU. The Blip itself is a massive character death retcon, but it was at least one that every fan could see coming a mile away. More frustrating is the characters (like Loki and Gamora) who died, only to be brought back in another form, or the ones like Wanda Maximoff that are almost certainly not dead, no matter how many times they try to tell us they are.
Character deaths are effective because they hurt us. They're effective because they hurt the characters, and because there are consequences. Half of the plot of Hawkeye was driven by Yelena mourning the death of her sister, which makes a fairly weak death feel more significant. If Daredevil: Born Again manages to pull off the consequences of Foggy's death, the very worst thing they could do is undo it.
The creators of Daredevil: Born Again haven't been shy in telling fans what they thought about the Netflix series, praising the action scenes while claiming that the character-driven moments are "naval-gazing." Perhaps that's why they felt it best to eliminate Matt's most symbolically important relationships, with his anchor to the law dying and his morally grey love interest moving away.
The plot point itself isn't terrible. It's not even that surprising, as fans had been guessing Foggy might die ever since the promotional materials started coming out. But it does feel lazy, to use a beloved character with 39+ episodes of history as an inciting incident corpse. This could have been handled better, and only time will tell if they make the unpopular move better or worse as the show goes on.