The eighth episode of Daredevil: Born Again “Isle of Joy” is directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead and written by Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane. I think we need to cool it with the “It’s so over/we’re so back!” rollercoaster—I’m getting dizzy. This week was pretty good, and then the last ten minutes were GREAT.
Let’s dig into why!
A Quick Recap with Spoilers!
I figured we were back on track from the opening moments, when we see close-up of a beautiful blue rose. As the camera pans back we see rosebushes, a fence, barbed wire, a guard tower, and finally bars. We’re watching Poindexter, gazing at a rosebush from his prison cell window.
But this comparatively not-terrible, Lynchian idyll was never meant to last, because Dex is being moved from protective custody into General Population, and no one will answer him when he asks why.
(But I mean, we all know, right?)
Meanwhile, Matt and Heather are having a difficult conversation. At least, it’s difficult for Matt, and the audience, because Heather is venting about vigilantes. She calls them all “boys in masks”, and insists that Muse and Daredevil are the same. When Matt tries to push back and say that Daredevil saved her, she snaps back with “I saved me.” Which, usually I’m all for the regular non-superpowered person asserting themselves in these stories, but, Heather. Come on. If Daredevil hadn’t crashed through the window Muse would have been wrapping your corpse in a sheet before the Keystone Task Force got to you, you were only able to kill Muse because Daredevil beat the shit out of him first, and then you collapsed from blood loss. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination did you save you.
But any retort Matt might make is interrupted by Buck Cashman showing up with an invitation to the Mayors “Black & White Ball”. Matt would like to know how exactly the Mayor’s #1 guy knows Heather sleeps over at his place, but Heather, of course, doesn’t see what the big deal is.
It begins to click for Matt that Fisk is a client of Heather’s, and that she does not understand the significance of that, nor does she seem to care that Fisk is co-opting her trauma. Their argument is intercut with Fisk taking Vanessa down to the Not-Murder Basement. As Adam screams and begs for release, Fisk explains, with maximum Fisk-ness, both that he’s a better person now because he kept his promise not to all-the-way murder Adam, and also that he can’t live without Vanessa’s love.
Vanessa’s reply is eloquent: she picks up a gun and shoots Adam repeatedly.
At Gracie Mansion, Sheila is effectively sidelined without being fully fired, as Daniel is promoted around her to Deputy Mayor of Communications. All of her protests are met with Fisk smiling like a shark, and when she tries to mention that “the ACLU is filing thirteen different lawsuits” over Fisk’s Task Force, his reply is that “excessive methods work” because crime has dropped.
When Matt gets to work (late again) his day gets even worse: Kirsten informs him that Dex wants to meet with him. This fully tips Matt into Old Matt Mode, and he goes off on a client for lying to them. He even gives an Old Matt-style speech to Kirsten, saying “We’re not serving justice here, we’re babysitting chaos” before storming out the door in a way that would have made Karen want to date him again. Kirsten just looks annoyed that she has to clean up another mess.
But speaking of… it’s not exactly Karen, but Matt goes back to Josie’s. She’s there even though the place is closed, and thinking of reopening—which, how has that space just been left empty for almost two years? How is she paying for any of that? Then Cherry shows up, they drink, and Matt realizes that Foggy was celebrating right before he got killed. Was it a hit specifically on Foggy, and not just Dex snapping and coming after all of them?
Matt meets with Dex, but Matt just wants to know who sent Bullseye after Foggy, he isn’t there to help Dex get out of General Population. He makes that very clear by slamming Dex’s face into a table when the other man asks for help. Surely this won’t come back to bite Matt in the ass.
Fisk’s Black & White Ball is in full swing! This whole event is a nod to a real Party of the Century thrown by one of my heroes, Truman Capote, on November 28, 1966. Ostensibly it was in honor of Katherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post back when those words had meaning (Meryl Streep played her in Steven Spielberg’s movie about the paper) but really it was a celebration of Truman’s own phenomenal hit, In Cold Blood. (He also kinda sorta stole the whole concept from Dominick Dunne.) Everyone who was anyone was there, you had to wear black and/or white, you had to wear a mask, you had to be fabulous. Throwing this party in the midst of the tumult of the 1960s was a Choice, but, well, Truman was good at those.
Fisk is trying to for that same elitist let them eat cake vibe, except his party features terrifying armed guards at every door and corner.
Several of the guests are openly nervous to be around Fisk. When Sheila tries to be warm-ish with Daniel, he blows her off and goes to talk to BB Urich, leaving his former boss stunned and alone. Daniel does actually make nice with BB a bit, and it seems like they’ve made up enough to dance and do shots again. Fisk uses the party as an excuse for business meetings. Vanessa wears fire engine red to a black-and-white ball—Truman wouldn’t have allowed that bullshit for a second, I can tell you that much—while Heather shows up alone and PISSED.
Meanwhile, in prison, Dex is in the infirmary getting stitched up and—hang on.
Trigger Warning for Tooth Stuff.
Matt’s violent outburst apparently knocked one of Dex’s teeth loose; after getting stitched up at the prison infirmary, he spits it into the forehead of a guard hard enough to knock the man over. Then Dex uses deadlier projectiles to kill the guard and his doctor, and escapes using a pilfered ID.
Vanessa thanks Heather for coming, offers to “fix” the fact that she’s come to the party alone, and tells her that she and Fisk probably won’t becoming to therapy anymore, because the “sins of the past are dead and buried” between her and Wilson.
The Task Force “arrest” a reporter who tried to sneak a photo of Fisk, straight up assaulting the man despite Commissioner Gallo’s attempt to intervene. BB then manages to corner Gallo to explain that she knows Fisk was probably responsible for her uncle’s murder, that she’s only here to investigate, and that not everything she writes is under her own name. She gives him her card, and then slaps her party girl smile back on to go dance with Daniel.
Matt finally shows up. He tries to explain things to Heather, while also eavesdropping on all the nefarious Fisk stuff, and she says “You’re starting to worry me on a professional level” when he tries to tell her that Fisk is using her to get to him.
To which I must ask: does this version of reality not have the internet? Does Heather not know of the long and troubled history between Wilson Fisk and Nelson, Murdock, and Page? Cause it’s really getting old watching this seemingly intelligent woman not know a goddamn thing about what’s going on in her City.
Matt gets fed up and grabs her hand to go confront Fisk, but Vanessa maybe notices this and goes to Wilson for them to have a first dance. (This party really feels like a do-over of their wedding from season three of the Netflix series.)
They dance to Rodgers and Hart’s “Manhattan”—which is one of my favorite songs of all time, but I think maybe they should have danced to this song instead. But it is a nice little jolt to see the First Couple of New York City dance to a song about being too poor to go on a honeymoon.
The music slows in Matt’s head, and he hears Buck tell the Fisks that Dex has escaped, and that Vanessa wants to tell Wilson something, and it clicks that she’s the one who sent Bullseye after Foggy. He takes Heather onto the dancefloor, and then crashes into the Fisks to cut in and dance with Vanessa.
Reader I shrieked at my television. When Matt Murdock cranks the charm up to 11, but he’s also murderously angry? I want a whole show of that.
And how about Fisk’s look of utter shock? And how Vanessa just rolls with it, at least partially ’cause she’s always thought Matt was cute in the midst of everything. (I like to think there’s a timeline where it was Matt in that cell instead of Adam.) But it is a perfect moment—here’s Matt finding a way to talk to Vanessa, making a spectacle of the Fisks at their own party, but a spectacle that they can use to their advantage as long as they play along. He can flaunt his contentious relationship with them (for anyone in the crowd who knows about it) and leverage Heather’s unwanted celebrity as Muse’s last near-victim to keep himself safe in the moment. Either people will think he’s drunk, or that the two couples are actually friendly enough for this to be an amusing dance between them. It’s too public for Fisk to retaliate immediately, but Matt also knows that this move can only yield short-term benefits.
We cut between the two couples dancing, each having loaded conversations in perfect time. Matt tells Vanessa that he knows she was the one who had Foggy killed, as Wilson tells Heather “keeping secrets can make us sick”. “I just don’t know why,” Matt says to Vanessa, about Foggy, before asking, “Does your husband know?” But Vanessa’s not admitting to a thing. “Does Heather know you’re Daredevil?” she asks, and smiles, and tweaks his bowtie.“Have you ever wondered why he has a thing for vigilantes?” Wilson asks Heather, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is the big tense moment. The jig is up, Matt’s about to be exposed, and probably arrested by the Task Force in front of everyone.
But no!
It’s more fun than that!
Dex has stabbed a guard with a fork he swiped from the kitchen! Now he has a gun and a perfect vantage point from a mezzanine. He sweeps his gun over the dance floor. Matt hears him take the shot, and dives—not in front of Vanessa, not in front of Heather, but right in front of Wilson Fisk. The shot that would have stopped the Mayor’s heart instead hits Matt in the shoulder and down he goes as the Mayor and his wife are ushered out by guards.
Grace
There’s a lot of great stuff here. Once again cutting between Wilson and Vanessa and Matt and Heather pays off, I think, in tension and character development.
Heather’s really pissing me off, but I think that’s kind of the point. She’s a normal, smart, cool, well-educated professional woman. This is not Karen Page with a Tragic Backstory, or Elektra with… all the baggage Elektra brings. This is the kind of woman Matt would have a great relationship with if he had a different kind of life. As it is, she is utterly out of her element here.
The scene between Dex and Matt is kind of great? I wanted even more, naturally, but seeing Matt just not give a shit about someone is refreshing.
Once again, some of the most chilling scenes in the show are watching Daniel, a sycophantic idiot with no talent, maneuver around talented, hard-working women of color just because he’s happy to suck up to a man he worships as a god—and because that man sees a cog he can use. Michael Gandolfini has given a great performance as Daniel—going from schlubby screw-up to manipulative mini-shark, while still seeming to actually like BB, and still genuinely looking at Fisk like he’s a long-awaited messiah.
Likewise, the scene where Gallo confronts the Task Force and they don’t even threaten him, just laugh in his face, is terrifying. His shock at seeing himself made irrelevant is excellent—as a scene, as a mirror to Sheila’s plight, and as, I don’t know, an allegory or whatever. Michael Gaston plays his whole arc so well in this episode.
The last eight minutes of this episode are perfect. Or at least they perfectly encapsulate what I want Daredevil to be. The four main characters taunt and parry, all while maintaining masks for the public, while sheer violent chaos takes aim.
And finally, Fun with Color! As I said, the Black & White ball is a fun nod to Truman Capote’s own attempt to take over New York City. Vanessa’s shocking red dress is a perfect statement from Mrs. Mayor. That blue rose in the opening shot evokes A Matter of Life and Death, Dante’s Paradiso, and Blue Velvet all in one swoop. But even that is topped, for me, by that splash of Matt’s red blood on Fisk’s blinding white suit. A nice way to bring their color palettes together, and a nice echo of the blood splattered on “Rabbit in a Snow Storm”.
Retribution
In a stunning reversal from last week, I can’t think of much to put here! As usual I wish the episodes were a little longer, and allowed the scenes to breathe. Dex and Matt’s confrontation should have been dragged out more, because I’d love to marinate longer in a moment of Matt not only not caring about someone, but actively restraining himself from attacking someone. In the same vein, I wish Matt and Heather’s vigilante argument had been twice as long before they were interrupted by Buck. There was a lot of rich loam to dig into there, with Matt having to conceal his identity as Daredevil, and his role in the fight with Muse, Heather making absurd, PTSD-riddled statements about what happened in that office, and the absolute disconnect between them over what vigilante-ism means and why people do it. We haven’t had enough of them in general, but especially here, when he’s saved her life but can’t let her know that, we needed to have to sit in that painful scene until we felt as bad as they do.
Fiorello’s Desk
It IS Fiorello La Guardia’s desk! Vanessa looked into it!
Fisk’s Task Force has driven the vigilante rates down. Vanessa’s fully back to being Mrs. Fisk. The Red Hook project is going ahead. Fisk celebrates all of it by throwing a Black & White Ball, which is mostly an excuse to force all the rich assholes who were mean to him to bend the knee. First among these is Jack Duquesne, AKA Swordsman, who is basically told that he has to contribute to the Red Hook fund unless he wants a visit from the Task Force. During the Ball, while the rich and connected of New York dance and do shots, the Task Force grab a man, drag him to the kitchen, deep fry his hand, and laugh in the face of the police commissioner who tries to stop him. They don’t report to him anymore.
This is all.
Well.
Not exactly entertaining to watch, I suppose I’ll say. Thank fuck Dex shows up and it goes back to being an over-the-top action show.
How’s Lent Going, Matty?
OK.
Here’s the thing.
The only time any sort of, I don’t know, vaguely religious subtext is invoked this week is by villains, or in relation to villains.
We have Adam, invoking God to try to convince Vanessa and Fisk to let him go—but that’s a pretty standard ploy of someone who’s been locked in an underground prison cell.
More interesting is Daniel, who chooses to say this: “I swear to Christ, sir, I will not let you down. I will work night and day for you, sir. I will burn for you.” when Fisk promotes him. Intense even by Daniel standards!
And then there’s Dex.
When Matt visits Dex in prison, Dex tells him: “In another life you would’ve been defending me. Cause that’s what good men do right? Defend their worst enemies?” And Matt responds by smashing Dex’s face into the table and telling the guards he did it to himself, which, in the moment, is hilarious and satisfying. (To me, anyway.) But it’s hard not to notice that Matt ends the episode shot and bleeding on the ground, and Dex is still just peachy when the credits roll. How would things have played out if he’d helped his enemy instead of ignoring his plea? MATTHEW. What were those previous season even for if not to beat into you the idea that you can’t default to vengeance, no matter how justified it seems in the moment?
What would Sister Maggie say about all this, Matthew?
Oh and I mean if you really want to Go There, after opening with a symbol of the Virgin Mary in the blue rose, we end with Matt’s body once again broken, prostrate, and gushing bleeding as a woman who loves him cradles him Pieta-ishly.
Too much? Maybe. Not enough, I say! But then I always say that.
Quotes!
“I am better than I was, but if I cannot be with you, Vanessa—I cannot be.”
—Wilson Fisk has a singular view of love.
“He’s the mayor! He’s in everyone’s life!”
—Heather saying a totally OK and normal thing about an elected official.
“From where I sit you look like a guy who’s blowing up his life. Whaddya need Matt? You need more pain???”
—Cherry, apparently flirting? Cause I’m pretty sure Matt views “You need more pain?” as a proposal, my dude.
“How many oceans of Irish have I served here? You think I don’t know my people?”
—Josie, still living in the Netflix era.
“First, you’re gonna have to lead.”
—Matt to Heather, mid-argument, right before he slams his cane down on a passing hors d’ouvres tray and dragging his baffled girlfriend onto the dance floor.
“What were you looking for, devil?”
—Fisk, in an undertone he knows Matt will be able to hear.
Closing Argument
This has been a bumpy road, Daredevil watchers. But this week’s episode makes up for a lot of it, at least for me. I still wish they’d kept Muse alive to drain another day, and I wish that each episode had a little more heft, but if next week’s finale is like this, and if next season is like this, I will count this whole Marvel/Disney experiment as a win.