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Watching Daredevil Episodes 2 & 3 – Including The Scene That Will Blow Your Minds

"Some dickhead in a black mask shot up a bodega on 38th."

I talked about episode one here. Time to watch more.

There are two scenes in the second and third episodes of Daredevil that link both so strongly together, but with very different messages. In one, the threat made to a thug that, even though Matt Murdock wants answers, if the thug dies, then Matt will just get answers from his replacement. Because that's the way things happen in Hell's Kitchen. It's a threat, but in the third episode it becomes oh, so real.

One thing you are going to miss, watching Daredevil the Netflix way, is the sense of time passing if you watch the second episode straight after the first (and you will, you know you will). But a chunk of time has passed between the first and the second, which will only really be revealed through the episode.

So we begin by meeting Claire, a medical staffer who pulls Matt Murdock's rather damaged body from the trash and patches him up. A merger of the Linda Carter Night Nurse character as reinvented by Brian Bendis, patching up the superheroes who need it, she is Claire Temple, played by Rosario Dawson, a name you may know as Luke Cage's girlfriend. So there's one point for a setup of future Netflix Marvel shows. They may come thick and fast, episode three brings you Marvel journalist Ben Urich on the New York Bulletin was saw in episode one. But back to two..

The show plays fast and loose with time anyway. We saw a reference to the fight between Jack Murdock and Crusher Creel (otherwise known as the Absorbing Man, and who also turned up not quite as aged as he might have been in Agents Of SHIELD) in the first episode, a poster on Matt's wall, now we see why that fight was so important to Matt Murdock. The first episode only gave us a taste of young Matt and Jack. Now we are into Miller and Romita's Man Without Fear territory, Matt dealing with both his father's failings, their shared principles and Matt's burgeoning abilities.

And just as he stitched up his father's face, so he allows himself to be stitched up. As is his own personal story, pieces from across time, stitched together, making sense of the man. Just as pieces of the city also get joined together, across geography, social strata and morality. Matt is starting to see how the trafficking of people from episode one has further implications, that there is a wider net that he is blind to. He still can't see the big picture, but he has an inkling that something is there.

We also get some level of the personal moral decisions of the man. Here, he tortures to get answers and is unfeeling towards human life, a "he'll live" being a Terminator-style response to one act of brutality that may easily have resulted in a "he's dead" but for happenstance. And our new Night Nurse is along with him for the ride.

Oh yes, and she also gets a costume. A better one that Matt has right now though, as he says, it's a work in progress. Two episodes in and someone already knows Matt Murdock's face in association with this masked vigilante It's basically a bit harder to keep faces covered in live action somehow.

But what the second episode is really leading up to is a scene that's closer to what you'd see in The Raid, a single shot battle between one man and a crowd of thugs inside a close corridored building that goes on for ages, expertly choreographed, ducking in and out of doors, sometimes carried on by sound alone until it bursts back into view, in a palette of greens. This scene is truly sensational, people are going to be obsessing about the spectacle for a very long time, and I don't think I've seen the like on an Amercan TV show before. It is also utterly ridiculous, especially the way it concludes, but you will cheer all the same.

ÒMarvelÕs DaredevilÓ

"Idiot parents don't want to vaccinate."

But that second episode ending, the objectivism of its morality is at odds with one comes next.

The third episode brings the show back down to earth, and emphasises the legal trappings of the show, as Murdock and Foggy get retained by, well, the Kingpin. You know it's the Kingpin, we all know it's the Kingpin. It's the Kingpin. And it's time for games of morality. If the second episode was Randian, the third is not, it's all about the greys, the paths you choose to take and not altogether justified reasons for doing so.

Karen Page is probably the most morally centred figure here, fighting the original battle from episode one, even as she is stymied along the way. Matt and Foggy take the Kingpin's shilling, with Matt possibly using it to try and figure out what is going on.

And that scene from the third episode that we talked about  at the top? Going through the legal process, discovering that someone on the jury has been leant upon, dealing with the situation, only to discover that in the interim, someone else has been leant upon. Matt is fighting a Red Queen's Race in the courts and is stymied at every turn. Even as Daredevil, he still seems powerless to stop the system from doing what the system does. The idea of Daredevil in the comics was often for the character to try and seek justice after a corrupt and incompetent court let society down. Here, he is no more successful in costume than in a suit and he seems to get no further dispatching someone who will simply be replaced.

We also meet Bill Urich, with his own life pressure points that might be leant upon, but of a strong moral background that might possible give Matt Murdock the inspiration he needs. They just need to meet each other…

There is lots more to learn. Maybe staring into the painting might assist…


MARVEL'S DAREDEVILDaredevil airs on Netflix on April 10th.

 


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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