Episode 6 made me want mercy for Wilson Fisk. Episode 7 reminded me why Matt Murdock might be the most dangerous version of Daredevil.
Not the mask. The lawyer.
After all the raids, resistance calls, street violence, and superhero machinery, the boldest thing the penultimate episode does is let Matt Murdock walk into court. And somehow that felt more dangerous than another fight scene. Fisk has been trying to own the street and the law, and in these two episodes, both start slipping out of his hands.
Today we’re talking about Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episodes 6 and 7: “Requiem” and “The Hateful Darkness.” “Requiem” was directed by Angela Barnes and written by Devin Cleiger and Jesse Wigutow. “The Hateful Darkness” was directed by Ian B. MacDonald and written by Heather Belson. In “Requiem,” Jessica Jones returns, Mr. Charles becomes clearer, Fisk walks out of personal devastation into public pressure, and Karen is recognized. In “The Hateful Darkness,” Karen Page is pulled into Fisk’s courtroom machine, Matt returns as her attorney, Daniel Blake reaches the end of the road, and Fisk’s regime starts damaging the people inside it.
Now, I wasn’t planning to do this as a two-episode review, but I’m glad it happened this way, because I don’t think Episode 7 just follows Episode 6. I think Episode 7 changes how Episode 6 plays. At first I thought “Requiem” was rushing Fisk’s grief: too much plot, too much setup, too little breathing room. Then “The Hateful Darkness” made me reconsider the shape of that choice entirely. These episodes aren’t just escalating violence. They’re moving power back into rooms, into institutions, into public performance, into the law. And that matters, because Daredevil’s not just a show about what Matt does in the mask. It’s a show about what happens when the mask comes off.
The Grief Fisk Isn’t Allowed to Have
So let’s start with what bothered me. “Requiem” doesn’t let Wilson Fisk grieve. Not really. And my first reaction was irritation. Fisk is hit with one thing after another. His control is slipping, his enemies are closing in, his personal life is collapsing, his political machine is cracking, and the episode does not stop. It keeps interrupting him with consequences.
At first I thought the episode was skipping the emotional weight. Then I realized I wanted the wrong thing. I wanted the clean grief scene. The villain alone in the wreckage. The silent room. The held close-up. The carefully composed image of a monster becoming tragic for a few minutes. The show clears the room, the actor sits in the pain, the audience gets permission to admire the suffering. That’s what television has trained us to want from wounded monsters.
And “Requiem” doesn’t give it to us. It doesn’t let Fisk arrange his grief into something grand. That matters because Fisk arranges everything. Power, fear, violence, love, even pain. He turns damage into architecture. But here, he’s not allowed to make the loss beautiful.
The city hall window scene is such proof. Fisk has just come from the funeral. He’s standing at the window, and below him the city is turning against him. Protesters outside, flames in the glass, the reflection of unrest sitting over his face. For a second, the episode gives us the shape of the grief scene: the isolated man, the city below, the monster alone with consequences. But he gets the frame of grief, not the moment of grief. Because the room will not stay empty. People keep coming in, one after another. Bad news, worse news, legal threats, political pressure, another problem, another piece of damage control. And Fisk barely speaks.
I think that’s what makes it chilling. Vincent D’Onofrio is not playing release there. He’s playing containment. Fisk has to swallow the grief while the world keeps asking him to function, and that is the punishment.
The speed still bothers me. The crowding still bothers me. The lack of breathing room very much still bothers me. But now those things bother me in the direction of the episode’s emotional idea. Everything is pressing in before Fisk can become the image of grief he wants to be. And that’s why the episode got me. It made me want mercy for him. Or maybe worse, it made me want the pleasure of watching his suffering made elegant. Then it denied me that, too.
Jessica Jones and the Room Behind the Room
Jessica Jones fits into that, but she’s not the center. I like seeing Krysten Ritter back. She still has that irritated, armored, exhausted Jessica energy. The domestic version works as a quick status update: hair, T-shirt, sweatpants. Then the leather jacket, and Jessica just snaps back into place. It’s fine. It’s efficient character memory, maybe a little obvious, but efficient. The kid and the domestic setup are still more shortcut than drama right now, but Jessica definitely widens the room. She tells us a little more about Charles, which deepens his story, and we get allusions to Luke.
And Charles works because he sharpens the power map. Matt Murdock’s not trying to out-Fisk Fisk, and that’s good, because that’d be a mistake. Fisk is public domination. Charles feels like private capture. Fisk is the office, the badge, the city, the visible machinery of power. Charles feels like the room behind the room. The money behind the policy. The hand that doesn’t need to announce itself anymore when it walks into a room. So Fisk is being squeezed from below by Matt and from above by something he may not fully understand yet.
“Requiem” isn’t just about Fisk being sad. It’s about the control freak losing control, and he’s not allowed to own any of it.
Matt Murdock Walks Into Court
Then Episode 7 comes in and does something I was not expecting. It does not waste that pressure. “The Hateful Darkness” does not reset the board after “Requiem.” It shows what happens when a man who cannot control his grief still tries to control the system. Fisk’s machine is still moving, but now it’s unstable. The governor’s making moves against him. Karen’s pulled into the legal machinery. Bullseye’s still floating around as a live wire. Daniel Blake becomes the human cost inside the regime. Buck has to decide what to do with whatever he feels. And BB, who knows what she’s going to do now that she knows the truth.
And then Murdock walks back into court. That’s the moment.
But I want to be honest about why it hit me. Is this truly a return to legal drama, or did it work because I was desperate to see Matt Murdock act like Matt Murdock again? Maybe both. There’s something to that for sure, because the scene works partly because the season has been starving us of that version of him. For much of the season, Born Again was pushing toward violence: street violence, state violence, resistance violence. Fisk’s city has become a machine of force. So the obvious move would be to answer force with more force. Let Daredevil kick the door down. Let the mask solve the problem. Let the violence finally arrive.
Instead, the penultimate episode brings the pressure to a head with Matt Murdock holding a cane, wearing the suit, pushing up the glasses, and walking into court. No flourish. No superhero punctuation. No flip. No inflated entrance. He enters plainly.
That restraint is the power. The room has to reclassify him in real time. Not as a vigilante. Not as Fisk’s former public symbol. Not as a ghost from the old show. As an attorney. As a man who knows the room. As someone who can fight in that language.
That is the episode’s masterstroke, and yes, I’m using that word on purpose, because this is not just a cool Matt moment. It’s a structural correction. Matt Murdock is not Daredevil’s civilian disguise. He’s not the thing Matt does when the action calms down. He’s one of the reasons Daredevil matters. The law in this show is not background decoration. Not like She-Hulk. The law matters in this show. It’s not just the day job. It’s one of the battlefields, and Fisk has been trying to corrupt that battlefield too.
The last time the public saw Matt, Fisk was calling him a hero. Fisk helped create that public image. He used Matt’s survival, Matt’s courage, Matt’s public goodness as part of his own performance. And now Matt uses that image against Fisk’s regime. Fisk wants the law to become theater. Matt reminds the room that the law can still become resistance.
Karen Becomes the Case
And that brings me to Karen, because this is another place where the episode surprised me. I expected, and you can roll back the tape from last week, I expected Karen to be used as leverage against Matt. Honestly, the show sort of trained me to expect that, especially at the end of Episode 6 when the officer recognizes Page. I could see the move coming from a mile away. Karen gets exposed, Karen gets grabbed, Karen becomes hostage bait, Fisk uses her against Matt. Very simple math. The simplest chess move you could possibly see. We’ve all watched television before.
But Episode 7 does something better. Karen is not just leverage. She becomes the case. She becomes the public target Fisk’s new legal machine needs in order to prove itself. That’s much stronger than kidnapping her and waiting for Matt to rage. It gives Karen real pressure to carry. It gives Deborah Ann Woll real work to do. And it gives Matt a reason to return, not as Daredevil, but as Matt Murdock.
Karen’s vulnerable. Very vulnerable. She’s in danger, no doubt. But she’s not just bait, and that is the difference. Woll plays that difference beautifully. Karen’s always had this raw nerve quality. She looks like she’s holding herself together with willpower and bad memories. Here, that really works, because the courtroom is not just a location. It’s a pressure chamber. She’s being used to legitimize something really ugly, and Matt walking in contaminates that performance. He doesn’t break it by punching anyone. He breaks it by existing in the room as Matt Murdock.
Episode 6 is about Fisk losing control over grief. Episode 7 is about Fisk losing control over narrative. He wants to control what the law means. He wants to control what order means. He wants to control what justice looks like. But Matt walks into court, and suddenly the story has another author.
The Regime Eats Its Own
And then we get Daniel Blake. This is where the really messy production reality actually improves the story. The team decided there was nowhere viable for Daniel to go in the story space that was left, so they changed course and killed him in Episode 7. The gunshot flare and the blood were added in post, and at least one later Sheila scene was cut as a result.
That’s not just trivia. That’s story manufacture becoming visible. And in the case of the final version, I think it’s stronger because of it. When you’ve reached the end of a character’s journey, you can choose to push through (“people really like the character, we can’t get rid of him”), or you can simply say: this character’s arc with us is over, and there’s no viable way to just step him out of the story to maybe come back someday. His story ends here. For everyone to look around, trust that decision, and say, okay, that’s how we’re going to move forward? That’s confidence. Absolute confidence.
Fisk’s machine doesn’t just crush enemies. It crushes subordinates. It crushes people who still have a line. It crushes anyone who becomes inconvenient to the logic of power. Daniel’s end works because it shows the regime eating one of its own.
Buck’s part in that moment is really the actual scene, though. Artie Froushan is excellent here, because this can’t just be “Buck kills Daniel.” That’s too simple. The pause is the moral moment. The gunshot’s just the paperwork. There’s still a split second where duty and feeling collide, and you can feel that Buck didn’t want to do it. At least part of him didn’t. And then he does the job anyway.
That’s the Fisk regime in one beat. Not cartoony loyalty. Not mindless evil. A person feels the cost, hates the cost, and still obeys the machine. And that’s way colder. It doesn’t require everybody inside it to be emotionless. It only requires them to obey after the emotion happens. That’s much more frightening.
And now BB knows the truth. That matters going into the finale, because the regime depends on people not fully seeing the thing they’re serving, or at least pretending they do not see it. Someone who sees the whole thing can question it, and the question changes. It’s no longer “do you believe the story?” It’s “are you still willing to function inside this lie?” That’s a better finale question than “did Daredevil punch through enough people?”
Bullseye works for a similar reason. I like how they use Poindexter here. It’s quiet. Understated, even. Maybe a little anticlimactic considering everything he’s been through, but that’s why it works. Bullseye doesn’t need to dominate the episode. His presence is enough to remind us that this system has weapons it cannot fully control. He’s not just chaos candy. He’s a loaded gun in a story that’s trying to pretend it’s about law and order. And that’s exactly where Bullseye belongs right now.
That’s why these two episodes work together. They stop acting like escalation only means more violence. The escalation here is identity. Fisk can’t control grief. Fisk can’t control the court. Fisk can’t control every subordinate. Fisk ultimately cannot control every public story. And Matt Murdock, not just Daredevil, becomes the pressure point.
Because when Born Again remembers Matt Murdock, it remembers Daredevil.
The Verdict
For me, “Requiem” and “The Hateful Darkness” do not erase the season’s earlier problems. The middle still sags. Some of the franchise machinery is still visible. Jessica and Luke Cage still feel like setup, and I can still see the slow arrangement of the finale board in a very obvious way.
But these episodes give this season something it badly needed: a real emotional and structural center. “Requiem” made Fisk’s grief feel like a trap. “The Hateful Darkness” made Matt’s return to court feel like a correction. Together, they prove the season still has force. Not because it got louder. Because it got sharper. I didn’t need a bigger fight. I didn’t need another cameo. I didn’t need Marvel to prove it remembers the Netflix shows existed. I needed the story to remember why these characters matter in the first place. And for these two episodes, it did.
So where do “Requiem” and “The Hateful Darkness” land together? For me, the two episodes land at an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. Episode 6 made me really uncomfortable with my own reaction to Fisk. Episode 7 gave me one of the cleanest Matt Murdock choices of the season. These episodes are strong. They’re the strongest evidence so far that Born Again knows where it’s going. And more importantly, they remember who Matt Murdock is.
Now I want to hear from you: did Episode 7 make Matt’s courtroom return feel like the piece this season had been missing? And did Episode 6 make you feel something for Fisk, even if you hated that it did? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And until next time, never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
