Daredevil, Season 1, Episode 10: Nelson v. Murdock
As we enter the home stretch – four more episodes to the
inevitable Daredevil vs. Kingpin finale – we have this little distraction that is
Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson’s drama when Foggy discovers Matt’s vigilantism
crusade. It’s… handled as well as it possibly could, but spending twenty
minutes in Arrow or the Flash seeing characters argue over
discovering a secret that the main character keeps from them is grating enough.
Daredevil spends forty minutes, so
that kind of makes it worse, I think? I’ve never ever been a fan of superhero arcs
where a main supporting character is angry at the main character because of ‘OMG
you’re a superhero!’ It’s a necessity, yes, and usually it leads to well-done
character arcs, as in this. It is also an overused cliché that I’ve grown to
dislike over the years.
Granted, the show tries its best to show just how close Matt
and Foggy are over the years, showing their first meeting in college, showing
them doing the silly avocados-at-law thing, Foggy denying a lucrative lawyer
job thanks to Matt thinking it’s unethical, only for present-day Foggy to
discover that Matt himself is, well, doing unethical things in vigilantism. It’s
well done for a confrontation, I suppose, and Foggy’s quips are at least funny,
but it just mostly fell flat for me because, well, I expected something more
interesting instead of just telling us things we already know.
For its credit, thankfully the show manages to not make
it a retread of the ‘omg you’re a superhero you lie’ arc all too common in
these kind of stories, and have Foggy’s betrayal be extra-hard thanks to Matt
hiding his hyper-senses over the many, many years and events they’ve been
through. But still. Not to sound callous, but… I just find it really hard to
care. Also, while I do applaud Foggy’s loyalty to Matt even after this giant
betrayal, why is Matt still keeping it a secret from Karen? It’s going to lead
to another episode like this in the future and I don’t need that thing in my
life.
Matt and Foggy fight, they cry a bit, and at the end
Foggy throws away the Nelson-&-Murdock sign in the trash. They’ll
undoubtedly make up before the end of the series.
A bit of a missed opportunity is the mention of Claire
showing up because Matt half-unconsciously called her to help out, and I get
that the focus of the episode is the Matt-Foggy fight, but I thought that was a
bit of a missed opportunity.
More interesting to me is Ben Urich dealing with his wife’s
extension in the hospital having ended, and Karen subtly manipulating Ben to
investigate this luxurious hospice house… we don’t know how exactly Karen found
that out, or if it was pure stupid coincidence, but either way, dick move for
Karen, using Ben’s wife like that. A bit of a surprise to finding Fisk’s mother
relevant to the story, but it was a poorly done plot twist. How does Karen
manage to find out where Fisk’s mother was in? How does she manage to do so
right when Ben Urich shows up with hospice brochures? If it was coincidence,
out of all the rooms in the hospice house, how did they go into the room with
Kingpin’s mother? None of it is ever answered in the show beyond “there’s more
than meets the eye to Karen” and is one of the weakest plot holes in this
season.
There were a couple of sly Marvel Easter Eggs like the
mention of a Greek girl that Matt was into in college, a reference to Elektra. As
well as a case involving Roxxon Oil, a company featured in Iron Man 3 and Agent Carter,
among others in the MCU. Leland also mentions a certain ‘Van Lunt’ obsessed
with astrology, who in the comics is the supervillain Taurus, a member of the
Zodiac.
Fisk, thankfully, shows up in a couple of scenes to make
this episode not entirely boring. We’ve got a conversation with Madame Gao
warning him about Vanessa being a distraction, about how not to get his
ambitions too high. We’ve Leland snarking around and being a glorious asshat,
we’ve got Wilson Fisk being adorably out of place in a social gathering… and at
the end Vanessa collapses from poisoned champagne. There’s the nice little
mystery of who the real target of the poison is – Fisk or Vanessa, and just
whodunnit. But that’s not until the last five minutes and the rest of the
episode is filled with drama that took up far too much time than it deserved. I’m
not opposed to character development, but I am opposed to unnecessary
screentime-consuming drama.
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