Daredevil S03E05 Review: Kid Sociopath

Daredevil, Season 3, Episode 5: The Perfect Game

Well, this is a... very interesting episode. It's an episode that mostly just builds up Bullseye in a huge,  long and extended black-and-white flashback sequence which... is interesting bit. It's supposed to represent Wilson Fisk's visualization of the events as he listens to some conveniently comprehensive therapy tapes, but I'm not sure if it needed to be in black-and-white for so long. I'm not sure what it really adds into the episode other than being kinda artsy. Mind you, I don't mind it all that much.

The episode opens with Wilson Fisk and Donovan discussing about how, well, the fact that there isn't any dead body in the taxi crash means that Matt Murdock is basically alive, since "a man capable of that would survive". Kingpin's all but saying that he figured out that Matt Murdock is one and the same with Daredevil, and ends up making use of his deal with Agent Nadeem to basically destroy Matt Murdock's life, sending Nadeem on a chase to hunt down Murdock, who Fisk paints as a dirty lawyer who had worked for him. It's an interesting storyline that I'll talk about after discussing the Bullseye stuff. It is interesting just how much Fisk is keeping up with the FBI and Nadeem basically poking the bear and withholding help and that Fisk will get everything offered "within time".

And as Fisk sends Nadeem off to destroy Murdock (who isn't actually in this episode a whole ton), Donovan shows up with a whole ton of resources he dug up on Benjamin Poindexter, and, well, we enter a whole-episode flashback mode. Without giving any commentary on the obviously-not-real-life-accurate psychological diagnoses, it does paint Dex's lack of empathy pretty well. He's an utter sociopath, and only really understands things as to how it relates to him -- even a coach that has been nothing but supportive to him ends up earning Kid Dex's ire when he wants to give another kid a chance in a baseball game. This leads to Dex (complete with Bullseye Easter Egg cap) to throw a baseball that straight-up kills the coach.

Dex is a selfish, jackass prick even as a kid, but it's hard, again, to really blame the kid. A combination of a child-like desire to 'see his parents again' (they're dead) and, as his psychiatrist notes, a lack of any sort of positive parental guidance, ends up sort of warping the poor kid's mentality. Dr. Mercer is a very, very parental figure, not judging Dex and trying to teach empathy to him... and we flash-forward a couple of years until Dex is a bit older and Dr. Mercer is ready to retire.

But Dex confesses on how utterly broken he is. All his life he's been doing nothing but pretend to be normal, and the idea of not having someone to 'right' him back to normalcy ends up scaring Dex so much. "Don't leave!" He yells and cries, and confesses that he wants to kill Dr. Mercer to "punish" her for leaving him, and it's a genuinely unsettling moment as Dex's combination of emotional grief and lack of emotion ends up being portrayed amazingly well. "I want to kill you for dying", Dex says, although he doesn't actually manage to go through with killing Dr. Mercer. Mercer leaves the collection of tapes to Dex, and we get to see him work at a suicide prevention hotline and keep a rigid, structured life to basically distract him from any of his impulses. We get to see a bit of that rigid life as the cold opening of this episode, too.

It's a pretty chilling bit, though, because even as he's working at a suicide prevention hotline, Dex ends up being a bit too honest and eggs one of the dudes to "try and deal with" the problem that causes him to want to kill himself in the first place. We also learn that this is where the stalking of Julie began.

We cut back to Fisk and Donovan, and Fisk tells Donovan that this Dex fellow is... very interesting, because Fisk plans to give the city a new villain to distract the public, and as a 'fall guy', Poindexter will do. It's a neat brand of villainy that Vincent D'Onofrio manages to perform seemingly effortlessly, combining genuine respect and passion with the desire to manipulate everything for his own ends. Of course every conspiracy that Karen thinks is real is indeed part of Fisk's plans, which is definitely far more preferable than to have Fisk grasping at straws just to free Vanessa.

Fisk manages to 'get' Julie to show up at the same hotel bar that Dex is assigned at, and it's interesting that it's all Fisk seems to do -- he trusts Dex to ruin everything with his lack of social skills, and ruin the meeting it did. Dex ends up revealing a bit too much that he knows waaaaay more about Julie than acquaintances that bump into each other after a couple of years are supposed to, and it's horrifying and sad at the same time to see poor Dex grasp at straws to keep Julie on the same table with him while revealing more and more just how deep he's stalked her. Whatever the case about real-life psychological analyses, it's still a pretty damn harsh event on poor Dex, and I'm curious just how this will affect his relationship with Fisk and eventually his transformation into Bullseye.

Meanwhile, the rest of the cast basically gets tied together with Nadeem's investigation of Matt Murdock the dirty lawyer, and... and I really want to say that I think that Nadeem's an interesting character and an alternate point of view, but so far he just seems to be as antagonistic as the plot needs, and kind of bland. He breaks into Matt's apartment (Matt has escaped, of course), and ends up investigating both Foggy and Karen, bringing up how Murdock and Nelson had unknowingly worked for Fisk that one time in season one, a detail that I actually genuinely forgot. Also, interestingly and something that I remember far more vividly, was the fact that Karen killed James Wesley, the disappearance of whom the FBI is also investigating. Karen deflects with her own investigation about how Fisk has brought the hotel he's kept in, but Nadeem did notice things that's not quite right about Karen.

And it brings a lot of interesting angles about Karen. How much about Felix Manning's condemnations of Karen is true? He claims to know everything about Karen's life, about how "drug addicts destroy families", and that there's that... whole mystery past with her brother. There's the fact that Karen actually did kill Wesley, out of self-defense, but she did cover it up.. and it's definitely a huge,  huge move for the show to bring it up now.

And the conversation between Karen and Foggy, with them bonding over shit-talking Matt and Nadeem, and Karen eventually telling Foggy that he "always believed the best for people", and finally spilling out the fact that he killed Wesley... it's going to lead to a similarly potentially-destructive segment similar to how Dex has dealt with Julie.

It's a different episode, and it might be a bit self-indulgent with the flashback sequence, but I for one love it -- another very solid episode of Daredevil.