Daredevil S01E07 Review: The Cool Old Mentor™

Daredevil, Season 1, Episode 7: Stick

Surprise, Daredevil review before The Flash! What madness is this? Well, while I’ve finished The Flash and Agents of SHIELD a couple of days back, I binge-watched the rest of Daredevil from where I last left off, which is, um, this episode, actually, which I didn’t get a chance to review. I’ll try to be far more concise because I have a fair amount of episodes to work through, and it’s a relatively old series now, so yeah.

Anyway, Stick! Stick focuses on, well, the titular character Stick, who is a blind old ninja-man that is Matt Murdock’s obligatory cool old mentor. And Stick is cool! He’s a sarcastic fucker who takes time to be kind to a young Matt, while still cool enough to have a comeback to whatever Matt says. He’s also not afraid to take lives and whatnot. This episode cuts back-and-forth from Stick helping young Matt through dealing with his blindness, with adult Stick showing up and recruiting Matt to deal with ‘Black Sky’, a mysterious cargo that the Japanese Yakuza are bringing in, and eventually clashing thanks to their differences in ideologies.

All this is a nice, stark contrast to the mafia/lawyer themes we’ve been getting throughout the earlier episodes, and it’s a nice little spotlight on a character while revealing just how Matt Murdock went from a blind dude with hyper-senses into, well, what he is now. It also builds up to something bigger as hints of a far more intricate and wide-reaching plot than just Wilson Fisk taking over Hell’s Kitchen. It’s just hints here and there, though, as Nobu (already implied to be a mere footsoldier of a greater organization) imports in Black Sky… who is a sickly young boy who seem to have seen horrible things, yet is treated like a WMD. Well, metahumans! Or demons or whatever. Stick hunted down and killed Black Sky off-screen, so we don’t know what he is. Also, at the end of the episode Stick reports in to his own organization, noting that Matt may or may not be ready.

Killing Black Sky off-screen was weird, but at the same time it also keeps what this Black Sky thing is in a fair amount of suspense so when another Black Sky inevitably comes back later in... season two, I guess (since he doesn't show up later in this season) there's going to be this air of mystery to it. 

Now Marvel fans who know their shit know that Stick is reporting in to the Chaste, the organization he is a member of in the comics – I have no idea who Stick was before this episode, and honestly thought that he is going to be a villain during the first scene that he showed up in. And that means that Nobu’s organization is very likely to be the Hand – which I actually do know about. The fact that the comics version of the Hand is apparently founded by someone called Kagenobu Yoshioka… y’know, Nobu? Well. Doubtful we’ll get more than hints here and there since this season’s endgame is going to be Kingpin, but it’s nice to have this being built up.

I do like the exchanges between Stick and Matt in this episode, both in the past and in the present. They’re easily the highlight of the episode, and Stick giving Daredevil the chance to use his signature tonfas is a treat. And I do like the bit where Matt adamantly refuses to cross the line here, leading to a pretty awesome melee fight between the two. Stick continues to try and mould Matt into something more… grim and dark, even moreso than he already is, while still at the same time showing that for all his ‘cut it loose’ speech he still cares a great deal for Matt. A nice little two-sides-of-the-coin comparison.

The B-plots in this episode are fairly weaker, with Karen and Ben continuing their slow, drawn-out investigative reporter subplot. And apparently Karen’s back to liking Matt more than Foggy, though we did get Foggy rescuing Karen from the inevitable backlash from Kingpin’s men… with a baseball bat. I dunno, I didn’t like the buildup of this love triangle thing, which seemed to just be drama for the sake of it, and while she is far more believable and less annoying than the likes of Iris West or Laurel Lance when they were being investigative and whatnot – Karen, for one, feels a lot smarter and what she went through in the early episodes really makes her vendetta a lot more believable. The scenes with Ms. Cardenas seemed to go on for a bit too long, and while she is a nice woman and it’s nice to see her… maybe not so much?

There’s a bit of an oddity in this episode, too, with how Ben’s just talking about how ‘in my experience, there are no heroes’ and I get that it worked in the closed context of this TV series, but the fact that this is supposed to be in the same continuity as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Captain America is basically a historical figure, and stuff like Thor and Iron Man are around and relatively prominent… yeah, it sounds cool, but it doesn’t really hold once you consider the continuity. I guess it’s part of the curse of trying to do your own thing in an established continuity, I guess.

Overall, though, the B-plot being weaker yet more fleshed out is something I’ve come to expect from the 40-minute episodes that Daredevil has, and it’s definitely one of the stronger episodes in the show. Daredevil at this point seemed to have phased out the gore-for-the-sake-of-gore and from this point until the end of the first season I honestly cannot think of really gory scenes that put me off. Which is great. It’s a great episode, with Stick being a unique character and a nice take on another aspect of the Daredevil lore. The character work between Stick and Daredevil really shines, and the world-building for a future confrontation with the Hand is defintiely a bonus.