Daredevil: Born Again S02E07 Review: The Trial of Karen Page

Daredevil, Born Again, Season 2, Episode 7: The Hateful Darkness

So this episode is an... interesting one. The trial of Karen Page is an interesting one. Again, as I've emphasized throughout all the different Daredevil episodes, I don't have much in terms of knowledge or interest in courtroom drama, but the performances of the actors tend to be able to elevate it and make it interesting. And this episode has part of Karen's trial under the anti-vigilante laws, which is... all right. Kirsten McDuffie and mean DA Hochberg get to trade barbs, but it only really gets interesting when Matthew Murdock decides to enter the courtroom as a co-counsel. I don't know if this is a valid legal strategy, but it sure looks cool. Again, having the climax of the season be Wilson trying to bring down Karen Page and break her through the law system is an interesting one. We also start off with a rare scene in this series of Kingpin and Karen interacting with each other, leading to a brief choke-hold but otherwise a relatively civil one. 

The trial itself is... it's whatever. Presumably we'll get more excitement next episode. Apparently, the cameras rolling and it being public means that there's a proper jury of public opinion (but the Swordsman trial was also broadcasted live, so I dunno). Oh, and the AVTF -- in full uniform -- try to straight-up assassinate Matt, Kirsten and Cherry in the parking lot. That's gotta be dumb. 

A less... well-built-up story is the Daredevil/Bullseye connection. Daredevil ends up trying to forgive Bullseye and lets him go. Which... uh... there's a huge jump from not murdering him in cold blood and letting him loose, isn't there? He's still a murderer? Matt talks a bit about how there's a good thing that Bullseye can do, and in this episode it's protecting the Governor from Wilson Fisk's assassin. (His one lone ninja assassin... the governor didn't warrant Buck, apparently). While I did enjoy the other stuff in we had from previous episodes with Bullseye and Daredevil, this encounter felt muted. 

As the court trial is going on and Matt undoubtedly runs around to gather evidence and build a case, we get a bunch of side-plots going around. After being built up across the entire season, the Daniel Blake / BB Urich storyline finally gets a conclusion. Blake almost goes through with bringing BB to get killed mafia-style by Buck Cashman. His morals get in the way at the last minute, and he gives a USB to BB before telling her to disappear. He meets up with Buck anyway, and actually gets killed for his trouble. 

BB herself has been such a reactive character, which is the big problem with this plotline, really. But Daniel Blake's actor does manage to deliver quite a great performance in the last couple of episodes. It's just such a shame that this ultimately doesn't really connect emotionally with the Daredevil/Kingpin plot, but it's well-performed if nothing else. I'm quite happy that this is over, frankly. 

Jessica Jones also gets a couple of scenes. She confronts Mr. Charles about sending troops to her house, and Mr. Charles gets away unbroken because he's also Luke Cage's government handler. Thanks to the previous episode, though, Mr. Charles and the government has pulled out their support of Fisk and Jessica gives this message to Matt... before buggering away from the show. Again, I really wished that the episode 6 and 7 Jessica Jones cameos were wrapped up together cause this just feels so off and weird. 

Officer Brett Mahoney also gets a welcome cameo as the police officer protecting Karen. This is a much more subdued -- and honestly, sensible -- cameo than Jessica's, which really goes back and forth between her wanting to help and just buggering off every episode mid-point. 

Heather, who has been a bit of a nothingburger this episode other than the slow and obvious buildup that she's going to be Muse II, gets a face-to-face scene with Karen. Karen does ham it up quite a bit in this encounter, and I love that. I still think Karen needs a bit more focus than just arguing with Matt as the Frank Castle surrogate, but this conversation with Heather is a neat (if forced 'our original love interest is the better one' shipping bit) conversation that shows off why Karen's a major supporting character. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Recurring police officer Brett Mahoney was last seen in The Punisher, season 2. He's gotten a promotion since! 
• Again, the establishing shots of New York show off the Thunderbolts' Watchtower. 
• In addition to Foggy's murder, Father Lantom and Ray Nadeem's murders on Bullseye's hands on Daredevil Season 3 are brought up by Matt.
• In addition to bringing up Karen's killing of James Wesley, her flashback episode and Kevin was brought up by Heather.

Blog update: Out with the old, in with the new... old?

So this has been a bit of a whirlwind of a couple of months. A lot of the stuff you see being published -- particularly the D&D and Digimon reviews, and any Pokemon let's play -- were all mostly done prior to my hiatus. They were all mostly just produced out of order, which was why I haven't published them before. Peeling back behind the curtain, I wrote the first reviews for the Liberator series Digimon in April; and more than half of the Mordenkainen D&D entries were done all the way back in last November.

It's just that getting things in order, formatting them (which is a nice little thing to do in-between work that doesn't require much brainpower) and spacing them up to cover my hiatus is what keeps a stream of posts here.

It is a nice pace for the blog, though. I do enjoy having longer, more substantial articles that are more... 'timeless', so to speak, compared to chasing whatever episode was newest or whatever. Some things like the One Piece live action or Marvel shows might still crop up here and there, but it will be the minority.

Seasonal reviews have also been good for me. I know that I am doing Daredevil and Bleach episode-by-episode, expect seasonal reviews for some other TV shows. I know that's how I'm going to handle some shows like Spider-Noir, and if I ever finish the CW-DC catalogue.

I also have been doing a bit of a cleanup for my older posts -- circa 2014 to 2017 I did a lot of quantity over quality, rapid-firing posts to ratchet up the numbers. Not all the reviews were good, particularly manga reviews that I did to catch up with weekly reviews. If you've been noticing the numbers changing in the older posts, that's because I've been quietly archiving and deleting the older reviews. Some were just essentially one or two paragraph forum posts anyway, and a lot of them used strong, crass reactionary language that I don't really reflect who I am currently. I really was trying to ape youtube reviews back in the day, I think.

So yeah... My Hero Academia, Bleach, Nanatsu no Taizai, Fairy Tail, Toriko, Attack on Titan and Black Clover reviews are now no longer on this site. They are archived, and if you ever feel the need to see them I'm happy to zip over my old reviews to you. Honestly, they were very weekly and reactionary, and I don't think anyone's looking at them anyway, If you feel the burning desire to check out my opinions of them more than a decade ago now (...time, god) I'm happy to lob them at anyone who asks. I thought of doing the same thing to some older One Piece content, but I need to find a nice cutoff point to where I started giving actual effort into those particular reviews. 

Also gone (or soon to be gone) are some old one-off TV and movie reviews that aren't superhero related, and many had... very poor writeups. If you know what they are, you're free to ask me for them too. I have them archived in my hard drive, and I'm not exactly ashamed of them...  but they are a product of my past. I was just trying to review everything, trying to talk about everything, and many of these reviews weren't made with any real understanding, analysis or much of a discussion beyond what's essentially a summary of the episode and about as much content of a forum post. Some of the lengths were about that of a forum post as well! Some older DC/Marvel animated movies were also similarly reviewed that way, and those have been removed as well.

There were a couple of other older superhero live-action TV shows who have been merged into 'season' reviews as well, since a lot of them were quite short and reactionary. I don't want to do this to every TV show just because I don't have a high opinion on the CW-DC stuff nowadays, but it's just to tidy up the blog so each individual post has a decent length. 

Ditto for a chunk of the reactionary Hearthstone content, particularly reaction/review stuff which definitely aren't relevant around three months after any given expansion. I did make a concession with the 'lore' articles, outdated as they are (and irrelevant as they are since the tcg has moved beyond actually adapting the Warcraft franchise and going into 'hats' territory) can stay. I did put in quite a bit of effort into them, and while Hearthstone has moved away from being particularly tied to Warcraft lore in terms of its themes (and WoW has moved through way too many expansions, toned down their novel production, and cycled their characters to be appealing to me) I feel like I'm proud enough of those articles to leave them up. 

There are also a couple of monster review pages whose wikis have gone belly-up and what is left is a mess with broken image links. For the most part I've been trying to host images either from larger wikis or from an imgur account, and that's a lesson I didn't learn until recently. 

By my notes, a total of slightly shy of 1000 (yes, that is one thousand) articles have been deleted (and a small portion like the D&D and some Digimon reviews were converted into newer articles). If my selections are right, you won't miss any of those thousand articles. 

It really boggles my mind how much I was trying to do -- manga, live action TV shows, monster reviews, card games... at this point, the identity of this blog, my writing interests and the engagement around them seems to be quite defined and I do want the backlog to reflect that.

I also feel like I might merge some of the articles, particularly super-old and rushed reviews for the older superhero shows, into huge mega half-season articles. I won't do it for everything, but some of my older DC/Marvel stuff are admittedly quite rushed... I don't have the desire to rewrite everything, but they look much neater in chunks like what I did with the recent Supergirl and Black Lightning final season reviews. So expect that to maybe hit some of the oldest of my superhero TV content, and probably things like Dragon Ball Super episode reviews.

But enough about removing stuff... what about adding stuff?

As anyone that might be paying attention to my... extremely disorganized Digimon review revisions, I'm paying attention to some of the older articles. Many stand up quite well, but not all of them! I just did a big rewrite of D&D and did a bit of a MTG rewrite; and republished both of those. But some others could use a bit of a polish. It really depends on whether I feel like essentially republishing a majority of the rewritten articles, which I did with D&D and MTG since I rewrote everything more or less in order. But for everything else? Especially when I'm just rewriting parts of it? The older Digimon reviews will slowly get revised and reshelled out over time. It is a bit of a problem with the reviews that I have specific numbering systems! It's also... a lot less fun to be rigidly reviewing everything as per a system, which burns me out quite quickly, hence me rethinking how I want to revise or republish some monster reviews.

(For D&D, Fizban's -- which didn't need that much work but was still substandard, shorter reviews, is also up for a rewrite)

But in addition to refurbishing my old stuff... I also do want to move back to finishing up D&D 5th edition and finishing up on all the books I've never covered on this site! New stuff! Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Barrier Peaks, Vecna, Mind Flayers, all sorts of weird stuff! And that's before moving on to new (or rather, old) material as I'm quite excited in covering the 2E Monstrous Manual. 

There are a couple of new 5E D&D discussions I do want to do -- the 5E player races is a bit of a bug on my side that I do want to do at some point. I don't think I care enough to do classes, though. But 'appendix' style reviews for beast statblocks released in the adventures, and a "Rogues Gallery" of the named bosses I removed from my older reviews might be an option. That one will just take a particularly large amount of work.

And beyond that? I've been thumbing through a brand new 3.5E Monster Manual I find, and the Pathfinder 2E Monster Core... it'll be fun to go through a different set of ttrpg monsters!

Digimon, now -- my rewrites will continue. It will be sporadic, and some rescorings and rewrites will take priority. I did get through a chunk of the Olympos XII,  Frontier characters and 02 Armor evolutions, but not all of them. Video game bosses, baby Digimon and non-show lines that debuted without a significant media counterpart have also had poor reviews by my standards. These little extra rewrites will, hopefully in time, Ship-of-Theseus my entire Digimon review catalog pre-2026 without me needing to rewrite everything in a regimented way like my D&D and MTG articles. 

Also in general, all the introduction segments for the Digimon articles suck. I will rewrite them and make them less of a anime series review perspective, but rewriting intros is a lot less interesting to me than actual monster reviews, so that would probably take a while. (This extends to a lot of my older content like Pokemon, Resident Evil and MTG where my intros really try hard to summarize entire chunks of lore; when the same things tend to either get repeated or be entirely irrelevant to the monster review).

The X-Antibody articles are dire. I know. They are also some of the ones that are a bit less interesting to rewrite. Being numbered "episode X" now means those are probably ones I will re-publish and move the release date to a future time, depending if I ever get to the mood about talking about the X-antibodies.

Currently, the plan is to finish at 2025's releases -- I've done most of the legwork all the way up to Liberator and New Century's releases, but while I have a draft up for some of the Beatbreak partners, I won't be publishing/finishing those until the anime has finished airing it; so expect the Digimon reviews to go on another (hopefully shorter) hiatus after I hit the Toho Braves/Pendulum Warriors series. I think we went on a pretty good run for the Digimon reviews this time around, and particularly so with the engagement and the additional revisions to older articles. 

And, of course, my MTG rewrites is always a thing.

I'm done re-reviewing the entire Mirage block, after a massive, well, writer's block back in 2025 when I was doing a lot of the MTG. But I'm through with that, and with us entering the Weatherlight saga and me taking these reviews at a much slower pace to preserve quality, I do hope to get through all of the pre-Mirrodin blocks over the next couple of years, and catch up to where I stalled back in 2020 or whatever when I had my massive MTG hiatus.

I do love talking about Magic; it's just that the MTG articles really take a bit longer to write due to the average length of one of those. I suspect once I move past Mirage and through a bunch of the slower Weatherlight-themed blocks that I can blast through the older sets a bit faster. 

There have been questions about Yu-Gi-Oh as well, which I think is also overdue for a revamp. I did significantly less Yu-Gi-Oh than MTG, though, mostly because of how different the Yu-Gi-Oh release format is and how annoying it is that some cards that are significant in the anime/manga just only appear in random bonus side-booster sets. That said, I do want to take a crack of at least doing those articles again, at least the main expansions all throughout the original first series and maybe the GX era -- with more consistent image quality, too, which was a problem back in the day. 

I do think a lot of these older reviews that I am rewriting are all essentially new content enough that I can justify essentially reposting them if I do enough changes. One on top of mind are Resident Evil reviews, particularly the post-RE7 games and the remake series. I've since played through almost all of them (plus RE5) since I've done the reviews the first time around. These, I feel, will change quite significantly that I can justify to myself republishing them.

Anyway, a long self-indulgent talk about what I've been doing with my little corner of the internet. Over the next week, more reviews as usual!