Born Again’ Had Every Chance To Be Great — Then It Did This

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Daredevil Season 2, Episode 5.To say that Daredevil: Born Again has had a rocky road to development would be a vast understatement. While fans had been clamoring for Charlie Cox to reprise his role as Matt Murdock ever since the original Netflix Daredevil was cancelled, the initial version of Daredevil: Born Again had to be completely re-shot and reconfigured as a result of creative changes. Although the series has pulled off some of the best moments to ever feature the characters, Daredevil: Born Again has also taken major swings where the consequences aren’t fleshed out. The decision to kill off another major character isn’t just a disappointing instance of a story choice being made purely for the sake of shock value, but it’s an indictment of the series’ troublesome depiction of its female characters.

Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) were at odds last season after Vanessa was involved with having Benjamin Pointdexter (Wilson Bethel) assassinate Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and the threat of Bullseye has been prevalent all Season 2. Although Bullseye nearly manages to kill Fisk at his boxing match, Vanessa is the one who is caught in the crossfire when Fisk smashes a glass ornament with his winning belt, and the shrapnel from the glass fatally wounds her. Although Vanessa manages to successfully survive the surgery, she ultimately dies not long after she regains consciousness. While Vanessa’s death will likely turn Fisk into an even more ruthless figure, he’s already been acting recklessly leading up to the boxing match. Vanessa’s death isn’t just an unnecessary and derivative narrative point, but it also robs the series of one of its most complex characters.

‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Didn’t Take Advantage of Vanessa

Image via Disney+

When compared to the vast majority of other projects set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Daredevil has always had a fairly permanent sense of death, and doesn’t needlessly revive characters once they are killed off. Although Foggy’s demise was controversial, it’s not something that the series took lightly because it was important to Matt’s development into a darker, more conflicted figure. However, Vanessa’s death simply confirms a direction Fisk was already going in and undercuts her as an individual character. Considering that he is using the Anti-Vigilante Task Force as his own private militia, Fisk isn’t going to be reigned in, especially since he and Vanessa have been struggling with a growing rift between them. The assassination attempt on Fisk by Dex would already have been a convincing enough reason for him to lose control, but Vanessa’s death is a weighty moment that isn’t built up to in a compelling way. While she was once a character with dimensionality, Vanessa has become yet another sacrifice used to push along a male character’s development; this has been a consistent issue for the franchise, as Elodie Yung‘s Elektra was killed to push along Matt’s development.

What’s especially disappointing is that Vanessa has growing more powerful in the current season. Dex gives a powerful monologue to Matt when discussing the psychological torment that he endured while under her control, and Vanessa had also been making moves to legitimize her husband’s coalition by meeting with officials from the New York state government, not to mention running his criminal empire when he was gone from New York. She represented a different type of villain for the series because of her political connections, and could operate in the shadows in a way that made it more difficult for Matt to discern her plans. While the implication is that Vanessa was just as dangerous as her husband, albeit in a different way, her death seems to discredit that development by making her another sacrifice within the long game. It’s an unfortunate example of fridging, in which a female character is taken out of the story in order to further the emotional development of a male character, Fisk in this case.

‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Has an Uneven Relationship With the Netflix Series

The other issue Daredevil: Born Again has run into is its revolving door of villains, as Mr. Charles (Matthew Lillard) and Buck (Arty Froushan) haven’t proven that they will have the same level of moral ambiguity. Vanessa was one of the rare female characters in Marvel’s television to have a position of authority and power, but there was still room to expand upon her history. When considering that there have been entire flashback episodes that delved into what drove Dex and Fisk to become more ruthless, Vanessa’s backstory has been shrouded in a degree of mystery that could have come to play in future installments in the series. It would be one thing if Vanessa’s death was part of the endgame for what Daredevil: Born Again had in mind, but another season is already in production. It’s disappointing that a character who was clearly being developed was reduced to being a catalyst for Fisk’s aggression, especially since Vanessa hadn’t had the chance to have confrontations with some of the other new characters.

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“The Grand Design” even included a flashback moment when Fisk discusses entering the art world with his former right-hand man, James Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore), which sets up why he meets Vanessa in the gallery back in the first season of the Netflix series. Vanessa’s death is not only an exhausting example of a show putting a ceiling on what its female characters are allowed to accomplish, but a decision that makes Fisk less interesting. The scenes of the Fisks marital issues in Season 1 offered a vulnerability to the character that made him more complex than how he had appeared in the original Netflix series. And as exciting as it will be to see Krysten Ritter pop up later in the season, Daredevil: Born Again hasn’t offered much for its female characters, especially since Deborah Ann Woll has been given little to do in the last four episodes as well. Vanessa’s death is a worrying sign for Daredevil: Born Again, proving that no matter how far the show has come, it is still prone to missteps.