Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Episode 4 should have been peak Daredevil.
And for long stretches, it is. There are sections of this episode where everything is just clicking. Not in a “this is good TV” way. More like you can feel something underneath it actually driving. Bullseye moves, Matt’s behind him, Fisk is setting himself up in public, and it’s all feeding into each other. I’m sitting there going, okay, yeah, this is it. This is what the show is supposed to feel like.
And then it doesn’t lose it. It just stops following it.
Everything is lined up here. Bullseye is finally active. Matt’s not in any kind of control, he’s reacting. Fisk is out in the open, building toward something. Structurally, that should be enough. That should just carry you. And when it does, you can feel the episode tighten. But then it pulls away from that line, and every time it does, you’re not continuing the episode. You’re re-entering it.
Built to Converge
“Gloves Off,” written by Shantelle Wells and directed by Salman “Sly” Naeem, is built to converge. Everything is supposed to move forward toward Fogwell’s Gym. So it’s not about how many threads there are. It’s whether they’re actually moving in the same direction. Because when they are, you don’t have to think about structure at all. You just feel momentum.
The diner sequence is arguably where everything locks in, because nothing about it is loud. Bullseye walks in, sits down, barely moves, and at first it just feels off. Too clean. Then you start clocking what he’s clocking. There’s already a fork at the table. Other objects are within reach. People are positioned around him at distances that actually matter. And the camera doesn’t cut away from any of it. It just sits there and lets you see the space. Which means by the time anything happens, you’ve already been given everything you need: a road map to the geography of the set.
Then he calls in Frank Castle, and immediately I’m thinking, okay, here we go. He’s about to do that impersonation thing again, like when he impersonated Daredevil. Turn the identity into the weapon. That’s the play.
Except he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t escalate. He just lets them come to him. And once they’re in that space, nothing new gets introduced. That’s the thing. Every object he uses, you’ve already seen. You just didn’t know it mattered yet. So when it happens, it doesn’t feel like the scene solving itself. It feels like the scene paying off something it already set up.
That’s when it clicked for me. This isn’t coverage. They’re not cutting around the action to make it work. They’re staging the action so it works without needing to cut around it. Which is why the geography never breaks. You always know where everything is, so every hit feels inevitable. Not lucky. Not chaotic. Inevitable.
Matt Is Behind, and That’s the Good Part
Matt’s side actually feeds that really well, because he’s behind the whole time. Bullseye acts, Matt shows up after. So now you’re watching him solve something you already understand. There’s one moment in particular where he’s working through what happened at the diner, and it works precisely because you’re ahead of him. You’re not waiting for information. You’re watching him catch up to it.
So the tension in that moment becomes: how far behind is he, and how fast can he close the gap? When the episode stays aligned with that, you feel it building.
And then the episode breaks its own momentum. Not by adding something new. By repeating something it already did.
Restart After Restart
Take the Northern Star survivor, the first mate. We already know what happened. We’ve already seen the result. Then we cut to him explaining it on camera. Same information. Different scene, but nothing changes. That’s not progression. That’s duplication. Same thing with BB: information gets handed off, then it’s handed off again, without evolving. Instead of moving forward, you’re circling the same point.
That’s where it starts feeling like those old comic book captions, where a character says something and the bottom of the page tells you it came from issue #12 or whatever. We don’t need that. We’re already tracking it. And every time the episode does this, it resets your position in the story.
You can actually feel this in how the episode cuts. When it’s on Bullseye and Matt, each scene feeds the next one. Dex acts, Matt reacts, you’re closer to the same end point. But when it cuts away, it’s not feeding that line. It’s pausing it. You go from forward motion to explanation, then back to motion. Instead of building A, B, C, it turns into A, then A again, then B. That’s why it feels like restarting. Not because nothing’s happening, but because the episode keeps reintroducing the same step instead of moving to the next one.
And this ties back to Bullseye, because his scenes never do that. They set something up and pay it off in the same space. You see it once, then it resolves. No repetition, no reinforcement. Just setup, payoff. Everything else in the episode keeps reintroducing setup, which is why those scenes feel slower even when they’re shorter. In actual runtime they are shorter moments, but god, they crawl.
The Vanessa Problem
Fisk’s public event works. He puts himself in a controlled environment, which creates the exact conditions for that control to collapse in front of people. That lines up perfectly with Bullseye.
What doesn’t line up, for me, is the Vanessa scene with the governor. The show has already established her as Fisk’s equal. Not behind him, beside him. So when the governor scene tries to reframe her like she’s been standing in his shadow, that’s not development. Nothing in the episode builds to it, and nothing after it actually reflects it. It’s not revealing anything. It’s a bad attempt to rewrite something, and for me it didn’t stick.
The Verdict
When this episode stays on its central line, Bullseye moving, Matt catching up, Fisk positioning, every scene builds on the last one. The diner proves it. Matt’s delay proves it. The convergence proves it. But the episode keeps reintroducing information instead of advancing it, and every time it does, it resets the structure. Instead of one continuous escalation, you get restart after restart, and eventually that breaks the tension. “Gloves Off” lands at a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Did that central line hold for you, or did the resets start pulling you out? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. I cannot wait to see what happens in the next episode.
