Daredevil S01E01 Review: Great Episode, Stupid Costume

Daredevil, Season 1, Episode 1: Into the Ring 

Okay, I did say that I wasn’t really interested in Marvel-Netflix’s Daredevil. It’s just like why I didn’t exactly watch DC’s Constantine, though the upcoming tie-in with Arrow’s fourth season might change that depending on how much I like Constantine in that show. See, unlike John Constantine who I only know tangentially from Zatanna and Batman comics, I actually do know Daredevil. I mean, I am hardly an expert on Marvel comics (unlike DC) and I won’t say I’ve read a lot of Daredevil comics… but hey, I was bored and I ended up booting up the pilot of this show.

It was… okay. My Daredevil reviews will be a bit different from my normal TV show reviews, since it’s a been out for a while I’m going to be a lot more concise instead of the rambling way I usually review TV shows that came out a week or a month ago. Also not sure how regular Daredevil reviews will be, because I'm not sure how regular my watching schedule's gonna be. So yeah.

Anyway, Daredevil the TV show is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is honestly the main reason that it drew me in, but the way this pilot is structured it might as well as simply be a courtesy. Unlike its sister-show Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil doesn’t even bother trying to fit with the tone of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, being far darker, far more pessimistic and has a focus on the dark seedy underbelly of crime. There is the offhand mention of the destruction of New York City (presumably what happened in the first Avengers movie, though, y’know, they tend to blow cities up and it might be referring to something more recent, basically any MCU movie before Age of Ultron) but other than that Daredevil makes it clear that it is doing its own thing, its own darker Netflix-sanctioned brutal tone.

It’s a good take, certainly. And one that fit someone like Daredevil better than, say, CW’s heavily-Batman-inspired take on Green Arrow. But without getting into Arrow comparisons, Daredevil’s first pilot episode was… pretty decent. It does take it slow, introducing the main characters – Matt Murdock (a.k.a. Daredevil) and his buddy Foggy Nelson, plus the damsel-in-distress-turned-main-character Karen Page. Karen is Daredevil's main love interest in the comics, but I didn't know/forgot that particular bit so it's a bit of a welcome surprise when it turned out that she was going to be far more important than what she initially seemed to be. We spent quite a bit of time in the beginning building up Matt and Foggy’s “those two dudes” chemistry, as well as the whole “lawyers without profit” setup they have going on. The sheer amount of snark that Foggy and Murdock lays down onto various characters does definitely have a MCU vibe, I must say. We did get a fair bit of backstory about Murdock’s father and how he got blind, but we don’t exactly get the entire episode devoted to just being Daredevil: Origins, which is great and is something more superhero shows/movies should be doing. Though honestly Daredevil's origin story isn't all that spectacular and the little we saw in the opening and the short flashback bonding moment is really all that we need to know. 

Daredevil’s action scenes are, of course, pretty awesome, well-choreographed and nowhere as brutal as people led me to believe. Or I dunno, maybe Game of Thrones and 24 have desensitized me to TV violence. It’s pretty nice and I do like how Murdock doesn’t immediately win his fights... unlike what the Ben Affleck movie did with him having super-strength, I do like how Daredevil is just a blind man with above-average martial arts training and better hearing to compensate for his blindness, and against the trained assassin in the second half of the episode he actually does take as much of a beating as he doled out. I also do like how there isn't any overlong scenes detailing his powers. We did get a bit of him listening to people's hearbeats to see if they're lying, and him listening to his surroundings and whatnot, but it isn't fully spelled out for us and I appreciate that quite a bit. 

The show’s tone is definitely darker, though, make no mistake. Daredevil’s main villain isn’t some alien army or fallen Norse god or rogue AI, it’s a faceless, well-organized criminal organization that’s happy to kill all the little people, and I absolutely love the ending which shows that while Daredevil might’ve saved Karen Page from being killed, exposed the shady deals in the company and those kidnapped girls in the opening scene, we get some Godfather-esque cutaways from Murdock training to showing how Kingpin’s organization is still running at full strength and how all the people that failed the organization (the assassin that Daredevil fought at the climax, Karen’s boss, the poor policeman blackmailed to attack Karen being found by his daughter) all wiped out.

It’s a nicely structured episode, with Karen being built up as just a random episodic case that Murdock and Foggy takes up, but ends up introducing Karen as the third member of the main characters and tying into the big Kingpin (oh come on literally everyone knows that the unseen main villain is Kingpin) organization plot pretty seamlessly. I also do like the smooth ‘main villain’s right-hand-man’ Wesley (who wasn’t named on-screen in this episode) due to how strong his performance was. We also get established to what I'm assuming to be the main lieutenants of Kingpin's organization. In addition to Wesley, we've got the white old man Leland Owlsley (who people told me is actually a major villain, the Owl, in the comics. Well with a name like Owlsley...), the Chinese drug lord Madam Gao, the Japanese man Nobu and the Russian brothers Vladimir and Anatoly. At least they're easily identified by race, if nothing else. 

Daredevil’s costume design is extremely stupid looking, far worse than the ‘let’s make this realistic and street’ design that Arrow had in his first season, and even more ridiculous than his one-piece horned comic book suit… and when you look worse than your already-silly comic book counterpart, you know you’ve done fucked up. That’s really my biggest complaint about this show. Yes, you can make things darker or alter details so it doesn’t look too stupid… but basically ditching the costume in favour of wrapping a piece of cloth on your eyes and wearing black clothes? Jeez.

But overall it was a nice watch. Not particularly great, but it’s definitely a solid episode. It veers more into the ‘optimistic naïve lawyers digging way too deep into a powerful organization’ type of crime thriller stories than, y’know, superheroes throwing tonfas at bad guys, but it is a pretty decent pilot.