Daredevil S03E04 Review: Corridor Fights

Daredevil, Season 3, Episode 4: Blindsided

I do think that this episode feels slightly weaker, pacing-wise, although it does deliver in terms of action scenes. A good chunk of this episode just deals with Daredevil's attempt to infiltrate Ryker's prison and find out just what Wilson Fisk is up to.

Daredevil basically impersonates Foggy and uses his ID to meet one of his old clients, a very nice dude called Michael who apparently used to work for the Albanians... but basically freaks out and tries to get out of the conversation when Matt starts asking about Fisk and the Albanians, even going so far as to punch Matt in the face, despite being a very, very pleasant person previously. Of course, as Daredevil is escorted to the prison's infirmary, he ends up being attacked by the nurse. Fisk also calls Murdock, telling him that "for a blind man, you have very impressive reflexes", and notes how Murdock has threatened Vanessa in the past, and that he's coming for him because of that exact threat.

It's a pretty interesting contrast, for sure, considering how the episode opens with a pretty vulnerable and under-FBI-watch Kingpin being observed and checked down every time he showers, yet he apparently has enough pull to observe and call Daredevil on the phone, and arrange for the prison cells to all be opened dramatically after he calls Murdock. Of course, there could be the explanation that Fisk's voice is just, y'know, a manifestation of the Voice of Fisk hallucination, but I highly doubt it.

This leads to a very, very impressive 11-minute, single-take corridor fight scene. At this point single-take fight scenes are sort of the hallmark of Netflix shows, but god damn, this one is pretty impressive, with the camera shot not breaking even as Daredevil stumbles onto one of the Albanian leaders, Vic Jusufi, and learns that Fisk apparently arranged for his own shanking, leading to Daredevil continuing his fight and escape out of the prison's chaos. It's pretty indulgent, sure, but it's also pretty impressive that it's hard to be angry at it taking up too much time. 

Of course, while Daredevil has found another lead -- Jasper Evans, the criminal that shanked Fisk and was let out early out of the prison -- he ends up unconscious in a taxi, and said taxi is driven off into the pier at the end of the episode for the cliffhanger. It's kind of a silly cliffhanger, but eh, I'm not complaining much.

The rest of the episode is definitely extremely interesting. Sure, I'm not at all invested in the Agent Nadeem storyline, which just seems to take up whole tons of screentime just to repeat things that we can already know for a pretty flat character, but Jay Ali is at least a competent enough actor to sell the emotions in the two relatively long scenes -- one where his wife is worried, and the other where her supervisor basically tells him that some lies are worth telling. Great scenes, but I'm not 100% sure they really add that much. I do think it's a mark about the show's quality, though, when the weakest scene makes me wonder if I'm nitpicking.

I really do appreciate how Foggy just immediately tells Karen about Matt's survival, by the way, so we don't have to deal with yet another season of Karen bumbling around while not knowing anything. Their raw, raw emotions are well done, and Foggy's genuine frustration at having to cover for Matt's lies -- especially when he clearly doesn't earn it anymore -- is definitely well done. Karen's storyline is basically continuing to tie in the conspiracy to find evidence that Fisk is pulling everything from the background (tracking down Fisk's money launderers or something), but it's... it's not the most interesting thing to watch, if I'm being honest, especially when it's so similar to Daredevil's own storyline.

Foggy, meanwhile, gets the inspiration from the most supportive girlfriend ever, Marci Stahl, to run against Blake Tower as DA, in order to do the dual jobs of taking Fisk down and making Foggy a pretty huge target that Fisk can't just make disappear. To this end, Foggy ends up crashing a police function, and with the kinda-help of another recurring character, Officer Brett Mahoney, Foggy manages to deliver a speech to a crowd that hates him and manages to rile them up to fight against a common enemy, the cop-killer Wilson Fisk. It's kind of badass, I must say.

Meanwhile, after the events of the previous episode, Bullseye Dex has apparently came under investigation in the motorcade attack, where the OPR has launched an investigation into the motorcade attack, something that Agent Nadeem confirms for Dex "unofficially" as Dex is asked to leave the room. As Dex later sees by tapping into the surveillance cameras, though, Fisk has actually covered for Dex, spinning a story about how Dex had allowed the Albanians a chance to surrender, but they refused to.


In a pretty well-done scene, Dex actually charges into the room and demands to know "Fisk's game", and refuses to be his pawn. It's a great, great subversion of how sometimes corrupting villains will  do one favour for a good-aligned character and they'll just abandon their allegiance and everything, but here Dex's anger is a genuinely well-placed bit that shows his doubt with this clear criminal, but he also is troubled by how Fisk notes that Dex is "doing his job" and had saved Fisk's life... and he can't find anything to deny Fisk's observation how the FBI needs a fall man since the public is out for blood. It's obvious from a storytelling perspective that Dex is going to end up working for Wilson Fisk before the end of the season, but the way this is told and delivered to us really makes it feel realistic -- Dex genuinely feels like a character and not just a cardboard cutout.

Overall, yeah, the episode does suffer a bit from spending a gigantic amount of time on that super-long action scene as well as a bunch of genuinely redundant Nadeem scenes, but ultimately it's still a pretty fantastic entry.