Movies & TV Daredevil: Born Again Daredevil: Born Again Needs to Commit to the Bit in “Shoot the Moon” and “The Scales & the Sword” If you’re going to give us a room full of cages, GIVE US A ROOM FULL OF CAGES. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on April 1, 2026 Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ Daredevil Born Again is back with two episodes this week! “Shoot the Moon” was written by Dario Scardapane and directed by Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson, and “The Scales & the Sword” was written by Heather Bellson and directed by Solvan “Slick” Naim. And this week… is a mixed bag. Let’s get into it. A Spoilery Recap “Shoot the Moon” opens on Cherry being loaded into an ambulance as Daredevil watches from above, pensively fiddling with Bullseye’s “You’re Welcome” knife. We cut to a glowing stained glass-lit church. A man stands with his back to the altar, and a priest approaches asking if he needs something. First, the man asks for Sister Maggie, but we’re told she’s “on a sabbatical year in Rome”. Then he asks for absolution. And turns, revealing himself to be not Matty but Poindexter. The light in the church turns blue. Fisk is at a boxing practice with his coach, who I fear is not long for this world. Buck shows up, and the coach tells Fisk he can have a 30 second break. Yeah, no, dude. Buck tells the Mayor about Cherry going to the hospital, Fisk immediately understands that Bullseye was the one who took the AVTF thugs out, and suggests that other thugs should go to the hospital to deal with Cherry. The coach, who really cannot read a room, attempts to taunt Fisk into coming back to practice by saying “You giving up???” and Fisk replies by punching the man across the room into a wall of mirrors. Karen is on a call about Cherry while Matt muses on Bullseye not wanting him dead. Karen snaps that Bullseye was the one who killed Foggy, as though Matt might have forgotten that, and then they resolve to go to Astoria to help Ariana. But the AVTF thugs are already arresting Ariana, because Matt and Karen cannot get anywhere in time to help anyone, apparently. After Buck suggests that they can close in on Daredevil by revealing his secret identity, Fisk personally announces a hunt for Matt Murdock—but with the spin that Murdock is a hero who saved Fisk’s life before going missing, and has been targeted by Bullseye. So now there are posters of Matt everywhere, and Karen has to usher him back out of Astoria right after they get there so he’s not spotted. Once again, Fisk has thought a bunch of steps ahead of them. In rapid succession we get a BB Report of a woman asking what the “Resistance” is actually resisting because “I’ve lived here for 30 years, and New York has never been this great” (once again I see through the obvious bullshit—no one who’s lived in New York that long has a single nice thing to say about this City, unless a non-New Yorker insults it) and another masked Phisk resistance video. Fisk meets with Powell, who promises “Matt Murdock in this office, and Daredevil’s head on a spike”. Fisk respondes that either of those would be sufficient. Over at the hospital, the AVTF thugs puff their chests out and insult the patrol cops who are already guarding Cherry’s room, then open the door to find an assemblage of seasoned detectives, including Detective Kim, all just hanging out with Cherry. The thugs tell them to leave, the cops won’t, and then for some reason the thugs back down and leave, after threatening to call for backup. We follow them into an elevator and they talk about the kinds of banalities fascists talk about as a panel opens above them. When the elevator doors open they fall forward with holes in their skulls. The light turns blue, and here’s Bullseye flipping his knives around like a gunslinger. And then he leaves, the blue fades out, and we’re left with a realistically lit scene of elevator door repeatedly opening and closing on the corpses of a pair of fascists. Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ Meanwhile, Fisk gently threatening Daniel over the Phisk videos, which of course he’s seen. Then we cut to a scene of Buck and Vanessa going over guns together. Matt and Karen watch the harbor and gently argue about methods of resistance; Fisk and Vanessa discuss how big of an impact they’re required to make, as Important People in the World. It’s all very choppy. Then we cut to one of the most complicated scenes in the series so far. Anela del Toro and her Tia Soledad are walking and talking about Hector Ayala. They duck into a bodega, and of course there are three boys there doing stupid teen shit, in this case swiping a bottle of wine. Soledad tries to call them on it, they sass her, and for plot reasons the bodega owner decides to bust out a whole shotgun and take aim at a child. And then naturally the AVTF thugs show up, knock out the owner, pin the terrified boy to the floor, and when Soledad lightly touches a thug’s arm to try to reason with him, he tells her she’s “assaulting an officer” and grabs her. Then they’re all being loaded into vans while Angela is pinned to a wall by another thug, and the neighborhood films and yells at them but doesn’t do anything. Meanwhile Heather and Vanessa are talking about rich lady shit, and Vanessa can somehow sense that Bullseye is watching her. Kristen McDuffie hears someone in her office and immediately grabs her trusty baseball bat—but it’s Angela, sobbing that her Tia’s been taken. When Kristen realizes that it was AVTF thugs and not regular cops, her face crumples. She gives Angela Hector’s White Tiger suit and talisman, telling her “Soledad didn’t want it.” Daniel makes dinner for BB, claims he doesn’t know how to cook but he just followed the directions (to which I once again say bullshit) and he repeatedly tries to get her to admit she’s the one making the videos, while she repeatedly tries to get him to admit he’s afraid of Fisk. Matt, Karen, and Josie are sitting in Josie’s bar drinking and talking about Foggy when there’s a knock at the door, Josie grabs her trusty baseball bat, but it’s Detective Kim, who has come to tell them that Cherry’s safe, and who says “Resist, rebel!” pretty freaking loud as she leaves, which seems like the best possible way to get followed and reveal their secret lair. We cut to another Phisk video that features Fisk offering the audience red and blue pills. He tells them that all the people the AVTF thugs are arresting have gone to live on a farm upstate with all your childhood dogs, and that “the more you resist, the more you rebel, it hurts my feelings.” And then the person gets up and turns the camera off, pulls the mask off, and it’s BB under there. Huh. Why show us this already? Why kill the mystery??? Vanessa has a way-too-literal dream about Bullseye hunting her, and when she wakes up, her conversation with Fisk about whether they could have another kind of life is intercut with AVTF thugs raiding Josie’s bar. (So did they follow Kim?) Daredevil is able to  suit up and fight them off, but Karen disappears in the melee, and he thinks they took her. But no! She was able to fight an AVTF thug, subdue him, and tie him to a chair. They unmask him and interrogate him, and Matt quickly confirms her theory that the man, who is much younger and more scared-looking than most of them, has come to them as a mole to try to help the Resistance. He gives them a key card for the vigilante prison, and Matt explains that he’ll have to punch him and put the hood back on so he’ll be found by other thugs. The kid says “You’ve got to stop Fisk! You’re the only one who—” and Matt knocks him out. Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ “The Scales and the Sword” opens on Heather Glenn, who has Muse’s mask for some reason. I’m sure it’s fine. She and Kristen have a tense conversation about Matt, his lies, and vigilante-ism as a concept, and man is she ever hanging by a fraying thread. Kristen finally gets to meet with her client, Duquesne. BUT. In order to do that she has to wear a giant mask, and be escorted (or, really, manhandled through dripping corridors and up and down stairs, in heels) by Powell. She’s finally led to the holding cell where Duquesne previously met Heather Glenn. He looks good, clean, well-dressed, and pleased to meet her. She confirms that he’s the first “vigilante” to be tried—not by a jury of his peers, of course, but in a tribunal. “Which means I have no idea how this is gonna go,” Kristen tells him. Which, yes you do, Kristen. Come on. He tells her that this all started as a standards shakedown, that Fisk wanted him to invest in the Red Hook project and he refused, and they agree that this trial is a convoluted path to “forfeiture of criminal assets”—i.e., Fisk gets to seize all of Duquesne’s money as soon as he’s convicted. “When do they loot St. Patrick’s now?” he asks. “I think that’s scheduled for Tuesday,” Kristen replies. The show slowly dials up the Zone of Interest-esque screaming from outside, and we fade through the wall into the room full of caged, terrified prisoners. Karen’s made an Unhinged Red Thread Conspiracy Wall, which naturally makes Matt compare her to Frank Castle. “Know your enemy, cause they’re all ya got” she says, quoting him. Then, slowly, she asks if Matt thinks Frank is dead, and Matt replies that if Fisk had gotten the Punisher he’d “hang his corpse from the Brooklyn Bridge”. And then of course we get into yet another debate about Frank’s “methods” (you know, straight up murder) and how Matt and Karen can’t do that, even though Karen clearly wants to start killing people, but That Won’t Bring Foggy Back, and What Would Foggy Want, etc. Buck visits Daniel in his tiny crappy office, and they talk about strategies for that night’s dinner with the Governor and her people. Daniel thinks he can get gossip about her. Buck reminds him that the only thing that matters is finding the person who’s creating the Phisk Blip videos. Daniel also tries to get Buck to admit what sort of super secret government security work he’s done, which is not a thing one of those people would actually admit to. Buck wavers between being slightly threatening and kind of… fatherly? It’s weird. There’s another Phisk Blip, with Phisk calling Duquesne a “bargain basement Zorro” and ending, as usual, by saying that he loves New York. The Vigilante Trial comes, and is exactly what you’d expect. There are three judges. One is clearly very unhappy to be involved, popping painkillers and rubbing her temples. The other two are older white men who comment on her discomfort. Heather sits and watches, her eyes getting that anti-vigilante glaze they get. BB sits and watches with the press, and is openly upset in a way that she shouldn’t be if she’s playing double agent. Kristen tries to build a real defense of Duquesne, she’s threatened with Contempt of Court; D.A. Hochberg smirks his way through; Duquesne, an extremely rich and cultured man who’s been held in a chicken wire cage for who knows how long, mutters ironic commentary and doesn’t seem bothered by what’s happening to him. The only thing is: the trial seems to be being broadcast. We see people watching on their phones and laptops; Fisk watches on a TV in his office, Karen and Matt watch in their lair. Karen seems to have some hope, somehow, and Matt says “hearts and minds win the war”. When Duquesne is inevitably found guilty, Fisk laughs gleefully, then reins himself in. And… that’s it. It’s one small scene. We don’t really get enough of a sense of how the citizens of New York are responding, we don’t get an idea of this being broadcast nationwide. None of the Avengers or Spider-man show up to this trial that effectively makes them illegal in the City most of them call home. Later at the dinner, Vanessa—who is weirdly obsessed with Heather Glenn’s love life—seats her next to Buck. Heather doesn’t seem terribly into it, but the two try to banter, as Buck gazes around the room and maps the Fisks, the governor, Daniel, and Sheila onto the members of a royal court. When Heather asks who Buck is, he replies, “I’m the knight”—and amends that to Man-at-Arms when she challenges him. Meanwhile across the room, the Governor sees that Fisk is about to make a toast and leaps to her feet to do it instead. Yeah, that’ll bring him back in line. Kristen’s trying to drink her sorrows away (in a bar down the street from me, I think) when someone buys her a drink. She turns to toast the man just in time for Karen to knock into her, spill the drink, and look down to find a napkin that says YOUR OFFICE NOW in fairly frantic handwriting. Obviously she bolts right over. But now I have to ask—does this lifelong New Yorker ever lock her office door? Like what’s going on here? Daredevil lurks in the shadows, looking and sounding exactly like her former partner Matt Murdock. She insists she doesn’t want to get tangled up with him and the resistance, but, as he points out, she already is. (Come on. Trying to do a real defense of Duquesne has made you Fisk’s enemy, Kristen. You’re fucked. Don’t be naive.) He asks her to walk him through her experience in the prison. She says she can’t tell him much because they made her wear a mask, but he insists that won’t be a problem. (YOU KNOW WHO ELSE THAT WOULDN’T BE A PROBLEM FOR, KRISTEN? YOUR FORMER PARTNER, THE BLIND LAWYER MATT MURDOCK.) And here’s where my real beef with the episode comes in, because as she recounts the details she remembers (we see flashbacks to her earlier scenes—a breeze here, some roosting pigeons there) it intercuts to show us Daredevil working his way inside. So, the show telegraphed that it was going to give us a big break-in scene, a la the prison escape from Season 3 of the Netflix series, and then it just… tweets it out. Suddenly Daredevil is just breaking in with almost no resistance given what this place is. Once inside, he hears the ticking watch he left in the munitions box—but then he also hears the screams of the captives, in the opposite direction. Again, with wayyyyy too little resistance he ends up in the Cage Room. He breaks open the cages and the traumatized screaming people immediately start opening their fellow prisoners cages. Some guards come—nowhere near enough, and luckily it takes several minutes for THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY HAVE GUNS to arrive—and he and a newly-freed Swordsman fight them off. We see the bodega owner among the prisoners, but the whole scene is blurry and too rushed to get a sense of who anyone is—but Frank Castle isn’t among them. They get out, which seems to be a matter of running through a few corridors. We cut to Karen in the car. She and Matt weren’t expecting a room full of caged people, some of them are gonna have to sit in laps if they’re all going to fit for the ride home. Of course, as soon as Karen hears anything suspicious, she hops right out of her easiest method of escape and walks away from it cursing. She sees someone, whips her gun out, and it’s poor traumatizes Angela del Toro, wearing her Tio’s talisman and carrying a bag full of guns and walkie-talkies she swiped… somehow. Karen’s able to use the walkie-talkie to contact Matt, and then Angela hotwires an AVTF wagon so they’ll be able to get everyone out of there. (I think? This part happens offscreen.) Once again they’re able to herd everyone into the van even as reinforcements arrive, because there are nowhere near enough reinforcements, and they barely shoot at them. Are they letting them escape??? Karen whips her gun out again and shoots at least one of them, which cause Matt to jerk to a stop for second, which he shouldn’t do, and Angela finds her Tia and they hug instead of getting in the fucking van, GET IN THE VAN. Karen tells Swordsman to drive the truck without finding out if anyone else can, presumably because he’s the character we know. They all escape, and Powell calls Fisk to give him the news. Fisk doesn’t seem that upset, and says Powell “knows what to do” about the crew on The Northern Star, and the episode ends on Karen and Matt reacting to the ship exploding as they speed away from the East River. So clearly Fisk is going to blame the ship explosion on the newly escaped prisoners, and double down on them being terrorists just as they’re being returned to their families. Grace Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ Not as much here this week, I fear! I thought Bullseye’s attack on the AVTF at the hospital, paired with him showing up at a church, was super fun. I love how the blue lights glow around him because that’s clearly what’s happening in his own mind, where he’s a superhero, only to fade out as he leaves the room. That elevator attack was maybe the only moment in these two episodes where I felt like the show was becoming the best version of itself. the doors opening and closing on the AVTF thug corpses was objectively hilarious, but once again I wish we’d stayed in the moment longer, and dealt with the aftermath more. Karen and Matt’s interrogation of the AVTF kid was pretty good! Their attempt at forming a real resistance felt lived in, AND it allowed their old sparkiness to come through. The AVTF attack on the bodega was good… kind of. I’ll get into it more below. And I thought the futility of Duquesne’s trial was good, though way too rushed. That trial should have been an entire episode, and the infiltration of the prison site needed to be its own episode. Retribution Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ OK. Every time I start to feel confident about this show it undoes me. The tension between Karen’s desire for violence and Matt’s insistence on non-lethal force is trotted out yet again. Like, we KNOW Karen’s killed people, we KNOW she has a thing for Frank. We really don’t need yet another conversation about this while Matt takes his shirt off so his cross can glint in the light. They clearly telegraph that Matt would have to fight his way out of the vigilante holding pen by showing us Kristen walking down with the mask on. Cool, but then they cram that whole sequence into less than ten minutes, with Matt’s descent into the prison intercut with his conversation with Kristen? He gets in like it’s nothing, frees a bunch of people, then he and Swordsman are able to fight the guards off with no problem. The scene, which really should have been an entire centerpiece episode, is given no room to breathe, no room to tell its story through the fighting, or to show Matt and Duquesne figuring out how to work together on the fly. Obviously, I am a BIG FAN of seeing AVTF thugs gets hit in the face with things, but it needs to add to the story! Also, where is Ariana during the bulk of the prison break? The show makes a whole scene of her getting arrested, but she’s seemingly not in the room with the cages, and only suddenly appears as they’re hopping into the AVTF van. Angela del Toro has had no training, and is clearly in over her head. I think my second biggest issue, three episodes in, is that our Daredevil show doesn’t have enough Daredevil in it. The writers are so busy checking in with the Fisks, with Daniel and BB, with Bullseye, with Heather Glenn, with randos commenting on how New York is better than ever, that Daredevil feels like just one of the ensemble rather than the star of the show. I’ll get to my biggest issue in the Closing Arguments section below. Fiorello’s Desk Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ Everyone seems to just accept that these Vigilante Trials are political hit jobs by Fisk. The Governor makes a bunch of noises but does nothing. No one above them steps in. None of the billions of superheroes we’ve been introduced to over the course of the MCU shows up outside the courthouse. Daniel makes dinner for BB to try to get her to come clean about being the person behind the Phisk blips, and then Buck shows up in Daniel’s tiny dingy office to try to convince him to ferret the person out. Guys! There are only so many people it can be! Come on! I love Lili Taylor, but the Governor is given very little to do other than make a toast. This show needs more Mr. Charles, and it needs it fast. Quotes! “Do you feel the need to protect anyone in this office?” “Yes! You!” “Good answer.” —Fisk and Daniel have one of their touching heart-to-hearts “How many worlds do you need to conquer?” “How many are there?” —Fisk and Vanessa have one of their touching heart-to-hearts Closing Arguments Credit: Marvel Television / Disney+ I’ll start by saying that I appreciate what the show is trying to do. It’s set up a plot that is kind of doing an even darker version of what the third Netflix season did: Fisk is incredibly powerful, utterly corrupt, and backed by a lot of people who either don’t know or don’t care how amoral he is. It’s up to Matt and a tiny scrappy group of people to fight back against impossible odds. And that’s great, BUT. If you’re going to do a show about a resistance movement in 2026 you have to show me the wounds. We stay in that bodega attack scene for way too long, mostly in a close-up on Angela’s screaming face. Not on the kids and bystanders who are getting beaten into the concrete. Not on Soledad’s hair getting ripped out of her scalp. Now on the Bodega Guy’s blood pouring out of his ear where he got hit. Not even on the AVTF thug mocking Angela as he ruins her life, daring her to try anything so he can take her too, putting a gun in her face. The things that would actually happen. Instead the show stays in the much more aesthetic trauma porn of Angela crying. Go home with her, TV show. Follow the teenage girl home to her empty, dark apartment. Sit with her terror and despair for a while. If you’re going to do this, fucking do it. The show gives us a room full of literal chickenwire cages. Each cage holds a screaming, traumatized person. Where are the buckets of piss and shit? Where are the blankets so encrusted with filth after months that they don’t fold anymore? Where are the stained clothes, the open wounds, the bruises, the sores? Daredevil, a man with extremely heightened senses, walks into that room and doesn’t react to the smell? He frees everyone and they’re all able to not just walk, but RUN after sleeping on concrete floors in cages for months? Duquesne looks perfectly crisp and chipper in his meetings with Heather and Kristen? He shows up to court looking like he’s fresh from a nice hotel room? For that matter, how are Matt and Karen holding up so well, given that they’re living in a hidden room behind a Hell’s Kitchen dive bar? How are they buying food? Where are they showering? You’re also telling me that Frank Castle broke out of his cage, somehow navigated through that whole building successfully, didn’t free anyone else, and also all the remaining people were just… left there. There was no punishment, no reprisals, no tightening of security. If you’re going to do this, fucking do it. I kept thinking about Steve McQueen’s brilliant film Hunger, about the 1981 dirty protest, and eventual hunger strike, in the Maze Prison. That movie showed a couple different kinds of resistance, some violent, some non-violent, but it was very careful to show the cost to everyone. Not just the prisoners, but also the guards, the guards’ families, the prisoners’ families. And it did that by showing the physical cost, showing the filth and the shit and the gauntlet and the bruises that never heal and the seeping wounds—not in a gratuitous way, but because that was the reality of the situation. Knowing that gives you a better understanding of what resistance actually fucking costs people. OK, I’ll stop, I’ll stop. This week’s two episodes left me with a lot of unsettled thoughts, and I’m eager to hear what everyone else thinks.[end-mark] The post <em>Daredevil: Born Again</em> Needs to Commit to the Bit in “Shoot the Moon” and “The Scales & the Sword” appeared first on Reactor.