Movies & TV Daredevil: Born Again Daredevil: Born Again Forces Flashbacks On Us in “The Grand Design” Everyone is smoooothed and Matty is wearing a deeply offensive wig. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on April 15, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share One more week on the Daredevil desk! This time, our episode is “The Grand Design,” and it contains mostly flashbacks. It’s written by Jesse Wigutow and directed by Angela Barnes. A Spoilery Recap No preamble this week: We start with the credits sequence and move on to a beach. You know, one of those sequences that is always half-memory, but also a metaphor for death? So that’s not a great sign. Then we flash to the present and Vanessa is being taken care of in a hospital while Wilson Fisk rages, and has to be forcibly restrained so doctors and nurses can do their jobs. Later, while she is resting following her first surgery, Wilson tells Officer Powell that when they catch Bullseye and Daredevil, he wants them alive. Daredevil shoves Bullseye into a restaurant kitchen and asks the staff for prep towels (awfully specific for a guy who I’m pretty dang sure has never worked in a restaurant) to help staunch his bleeding. Dex doesn’t care much what happens from this point, but Matt is going to keep him alive, dammit. As you can see, there’s something of a theme popping up around who is going to stay alive this episode, with Fisk and Daredevil both determined to keep that special someone around. Image: Marvel Studios At the hospital, Daniel is currently on the phone with the press, snapping at them for asking if the Mayor’s wife is alive. BB texts him to meet her by the vending machines and asks the same question, which hurts Daniels’ feelings a lot. BB realizes she’s misstepped and gives him a real hug, which allows them both to be normal people for a moment. Daniel tells BB that Vanessa is in critical condition; BB tells Daniel that they’re lucky to have him. Wilson meets with Vanessa’s brain surgeon, who tells him that the situation is precarious, but he’ll do everything he can. Flashback! You can tell because the screen ratio has changed! Vanessa (who is visibly smoothed and shaved down via de-aging tech) is in the gallery where she worked when she met Wilson, taking over for the current proprietor while she’s away. She sees “Rabbit in a Snowstorm” in a basement and wonders why it’s not on display, believing that a man who saw his own emptiness reflected back at him would happily buy the piece for much more than it’s worth. The proprietor is intrigued but unmoved, and refuses to push the piece upstairs. Dex and Matty are arguing about whether it was okay for him to try and kill Vanessa. Dex believes that he’s balancing the scales because he was supposed to die when Matt threw him off the roof after Foggy’s death. Matt says that’s not the Grand Design. Dex makes the mistake of saying Foggy’s name, so Matt chokes him a little to make sure he knows that’s not okay (and to give fuel to ship wars for another few years). Image: Marvel Studios Flashback! Ratio change! It’s Nelson and Murdock (who are less smoothed and shaved via CGI—which feels like some weird sexism, honestly—but Matt’s wig is horrifying) in their early years, taking on an avocado-at-law case for Landman and Zack. The guy is supposed to plea out and not go to trial; said guy is Lionel McCoy (Ray, to his home buddies), who grew up in Foggy’s building. (Ray calls him “Foggy the Fembot,” a choice that we get no further information on.) His little brother Connor was one of Foggy’s friends in childhood. Ray promptly informs the duo that if he goes to prison he’ll be killed, and that they don’t realize who they really work for… Wesley picks up the phone. (What did I say last week? Feeling extremely vindicated right now.) He tells Wilson that they have a problem with “the Lion.” Wilson, however, is caught up in asking about Bitcoin—he wants to diversify their funds after the problems they’ve been having with the Russians. Wesley knows someone, of course. They own an art gallery. He’ll make all the necessary calls. We’re back in the present and Dex and Matt and still fighting and making their way through a random city tunnel (where are these tunnels? I’m sure most of us New Yorkers would love a different commute option) for all the same reasons, but this time the script is really worried that you’re not getting it: When Dex gives Matt a hard time for helping him after trying to murder him, Matt just point blank tells him, “I’m trying to save you because I tried to kill you.” Yeah no, we got that! It’s very clear, what with the whole Catholic-hero-who-never-kills deal. They continue on their way to mutual penance. Flashback! Nelson and Murdock are getting ready for the weekend, and adding to their allowance box where they stash funds for their future firm. They’re stopped from clocking out by Jeff Levine, who gives them hell for not getting Lionel “Ray” McCoy to plead out. The result is that he’s a public defender’s problem… but also that all the firm’s paperwork on the guy needs to be collated and delivered to the PD by Monday, which is their problem for screwing up the assignment. Now Matt and Foggy are hanging out in the office after hours with beers, going through all the case files, and we get the best exchange of the episode, one where they gripe about Jeff, and Foggy insists that he’s probably into weird stuff, like feet, prompting Matt to ask, “What’s wrong with feet?” This exchange continues. Matt Murdock needs his dear buddy, Foggy Nelson, to know that he is maybe a-okay with feet. Of all the things that I expected this flashback-laden episode to reveal, Daredevil’s foot fetish was not on the bingo card. So thank you for that. Immediately following, Foggy finds a smoking gun: The warrant that got Ray arrested has the wrong address on it, making everything that was found with it inadmissible. They’ve got him off the hook, but they’ve got to argue about it. Matt doesn’t think that Ray deserves release, but Foggy knows what kind of life he had and doesn’t think it’s fair—not to mention the fact that they’re his lawyers and it’s their job to do everything they can to help him legally. When Matt insists that consequences are needed in this instance because the guy was in with the mob, selling drugs and poisoning the neighborhood, Foggy points out that Matt is Catholic and should care about mercy. That, predictably, works a treat. Meanwhile, Wesley has a solution for “the Lion,” and tells Wilson that the man who can fix their problem is very good. Wilson tells Wesley to use the man more often, if that’s the case. In the present, Vanessa’s condition is leaked to the press and Daniel is horrified. A reporter approaches immediately, but Buck is there to stop him. Wilson is told that Vanessa’s procedure went well, and that the surgeon is hopeful, but Wilson doesn’t need hope—he knows she’ll be fine. Flashback! Vanessa is going against her boss’s wishes and hanging “Rabbit in a Snowstorm” up front in the gallery. More flashes to Wilson and Vanessa, married, on a beach. Then we’re back in present and Buck is having Daniel drive them to Albany—he assures Daniel that Wilson knows what they’re up to. He tells Daniel about his background doing night raids in Afghanistan. He tells Daniel that there are moments that define a man’s life, blah blah, etc. Daniel clearly thinks Buck is going to kill him for the leak; Buck goes and buys a shovel and a buzzsaw on their way. Image: Marvel Studios Flashback! Wesley meets a younger Buck (also wearing a heinous wig), and gives him the assignment to kill Ray. Foggy gets Ray out of prison and asks him what he’s going to do. Ray leaves without giving him much comfort about how good his prospects are for staying alive. Later on, Foggy comes to Ray’s apartment and gives him all their saved allowance money to help him escape the city and start over. This is intercut with a conversation between Matt and Dex, now back at Matt’s church to hide. Dex doesn’t get the whole vigilante thing; he thinks they’re all just people trying to beat their personal demons and doing a terrible job of it. Ray tells Foggy that he never had a friend like him, the way his brother did. Foggy knows and tells him to go find his brother upstate. The AVTF arrives at the church door, and the priest in training tells them to hide. Dex tells Matt to leave him and let him die—after all, he killed Foggy and didn’t think twice about it. Matt apologizes that he can’t save them both and leaves Dex to bleed out in the church. In the flashback, Matt is waiting at the bottom of Ray’s apartment building stairs because he noticed the money was missing and knew what Foggy had done. He says that he thought the fund was about the future, and Foggy agrees—it’s just not only about their future. (Cue dramatic cut to Bullseye dying on the church floor and Daredevil’s torn expression outside.) Nelson and Murdock head to Josie’s for drinks, arm in arm, ready to toast mercy. That’s when Matt suggests that they swap the firm names. Matt is back in the church, offering Dex a hand and leading him out. The taskforce only finds a streak of blood on the floor. Up in Albany, Buck and Daniel pull the car into the woods. Daniel is begging for his life, assuring Buck that he can disappear. Interspersed with this is a flashback sequence of Buck arriving at Ray’s door to kill him for Fisk… but the man has fled and there’s no one for him to kill. Buck tells Daniel that he needs to show unwavering loyalty. Buck tells him to make a choice: saw or shovel. They’re in the trunk with Savva’s body, which they’re about to bury. Matt brings Dex to Punisher’s sadness basement, where Karen is practicing her punches. She is… shall we say, displeased, that Foggy’s murderer is getting sanctuary in her dang house. Image: Marvel Studios Vanessa wakes after surgery and Wilson is an absolute wreck, as he thought he might never see her again. She wants pineapple juice, which is odd because she normally gets the itchy mouth reaction to it and never drinks the stuff. There are clues all over the following sequence that something is wrong, even without the juice. She seems surprised by Wilson’s behavior, and a little confused in general. (More on that, um, below.) She asks Wilson to tell her the story of how they met and they laugh about how they overpaid for the painting. He says it was a very lucky day, but she insists it was the Grand Design—just like Matt said about Dex earlier. But then Vanessa asks for the story again, as though she’s forgotten their discussion. And the she begins to seize. Wilson screams for help as they both remember their first meeting. We end on the abject grief in Wilson Fisk’s face as Vanessa dies. Grace Image: Marvel Studios Myriad issues aside… Vincent D’Onofrio. Argh. The man is just flawless. The craft is flawless. Every choice he makes, flawless. It drives me bananas how little I care about the character of Wilson Fisk within the comics and how much I care in these shows because Vincent D’Onofrio is playing him. The way his voice shifts on Vanessa’s waking—how he loses his deep baritone entirely and at once sounds like a terrified child—how are we supposed to deal with that? How are we supposed to watch him break in realtime and walk it off afterward? He’s the primary reason this corner of Marvel storytelling works at all. No matter how heinous the Kingpin’s deeds, we get to watch Vincent D’Onofrio dig in, every episode. The very obvious ploy between Buck and Daniel, where you knew he wasn’t about to kill the kid, but clearly wanted to rattle him, was pretty great. On the other hand, after making the point that Buck is no Wesley last week, it’s incredibly silly that this script is clearly trying to baptize the guy more clearly by showing us that he was hand-selected by Wesley. And not even in an interesting way! He’s just a murder thug who can do a job (and then doesn’t do said job). If they were trying to create resonance, there needed to be a stronger and more interesting connection there, and instead it was just… bleh. It was nice to see Nelson and Murdock again, back before they even had their firm, just paling around and being ridiculous. The foot convo was exactly what I want in the middle of serious conversations about mercy and justice, and you can only get them when Foggy’s around, sadly. But I was a little dismayed at the fact that we were getting a very common argument between Matt and Foggy that usually ran in the other direction in the previous series—those moments where Foggy was constantly trying to get Matt to make them a little money. We know that the point is meant to be that they hold each other accountable, a common mark of the most meaningful relationships in a person’s life. But this argument skewed so close to what we’ve already seen half a dozen times over, mostly because the criminal they were defending was tied up with Fisk (again), before they ever knew the guy’s name. It’s that need to connect the dots that prevents fresher vantage points. You can always reiterate a dynamic—it still has to feel new. Image: Marvel Studios That said, I always love watching Elden Henson bring Foggy’s awkwardness and compassion to life. The scene with Ray was actually the best piece of the flashback because we don’t need Matt around to be reminded of what made his best friend special—he does that better on his own. The tears in his eyes when Ray acknowledges that he never had someone like Foggy in his life is this wonderful balancing act where Foggy knows the importance of what he provides, in a manner that exists without ego: he understands that all people need care and competence and support, and so he’s here. Showing up is always what he did best. Karen’s face on seeing Matt and Dex should be framed and put in Vanessa’s gallery. All her faces, really, she went through the full spectrum of human emotion in the space of three seconds. Retribution Image: Marvel Studios They had a shot to cleverly redo one of the previous show’s best episodes, and they blew it. Once Matt had Dex in those tunnels and the taskforce was after them, I assumed we were getting a new version of Matt’s night trying to keep Vladimir alive after the bombs went off across the city in “Condemned.” It could have been so good. But the dialogue between the two of them was subpar, with a lot of repeated grievances, and Matt simply dragging Bullseye across town. Dex’s wounds were also baffling? Is he bleeding out and about to die, or not? You’ve got to pick a lane here, how bad are we talking. The ending makes it far worse, landing on a stumble when they could have stuck the whole thing. It’s easy to see what they were going for, intercutting with flashbacks where Foggy is telling Matt that what they do isn’t only about them. But Matt suddenly decides that he can’t help Dex anymore, rushes away, changes his mind and rushes back, and we get no indication of why he really gave up in the first place. You’d assume it’s because it was too difficult to get them both out of the building undetected, but clearly it wasn’t because we don’t even get to see them make their escape. So he just abandoned Dex the first time… because he felt like it? He got too grumpy before he remembered his best friend? There’s a lot of over-explaining in this episode, which is becoming a hallmark of the current era of television. This entire script reads like a reminder for everything we’ve already watched, which makes all the flashbacks feel grotesque and cheap—and that’s without getting into the weird de-aging scrub they did on the actors. Which they did far more pronouncedly on Ayelet Zurer, and boy did that piss me off. The woman is gorgeous and all bodies change over time—why are the men getting less smoothed out here? We already know the answer, but I want Marvel to own up to what they did. The biggest mistake is in making the entire flashback segment interconnected—we could have avoided a lot of sloppiness by allowing it to take place in roughly the same period, but without bringing these things together. Having Buck be the guy who was assigned to kill Ray is silly, and suggesting that this is how Buck was brought into Fisk’s orbit is even goofier because it does nothing for the narrative; it’s only connected for the sake of connecting. And getting the background behind Vanessa’s choice to hang “Rabbit in a Snowstorm” in the gallery for sale ultimately kills so much of the magic in her meetcute with Wilson, as does the acknowledgment that Wilson getting involved with art was all part of a thought toward diversifying funds. I don’t need or want to know any of this! It was better without the extra knowledge. And that’s without getting into the fact that this whole setup seems wrong timing-wise? Unless there’s a significant jump between Ray’s case and Wilson pulling up to the gallery. Fiorello’s Desk Image: Marvel Studios So it looks like they did actually kill Vanessa, but did an entire episode of fake-out to get there, and I’m livid over it. This wasn’t well-conceived in any direction. The whole plot is cheap emotional manipulation to get Fisk to do what the narrative needs (which is to become entirely unstable so he can be more easily toppled). But, moreover, if you’re going to kill off a (fantastic) character and you don’t spend your entire flashback giving us more information about that character—particularly when the character has been positioned as a love interest and that results in very little background given—you’ve missed a step. I didn’t need this episode to flashback to When Vanessa Met Wilson, I wanted to know more about her childhood, or even her affair when Wilson was away, or why she started working in art galleries. Anything! More of her. Also, the beach metaphor? Really? There’s a slightly more personal peeve here for me in how brain surgery is depicted, where cinema likes to do its cinema thing and suggest that stuff is wrong because a character seems slightly off or confused following their procedure, but that’s… not necessarily a red flag in all this. Because, you know, she had brain surgery. (Weird note: The reason I know this is due to experience with the procedure myself. If we’re getting into accuracy, nothing about this scenario fits—you definitely cannot just wake up and demand juice.) It’s all bad dramatization all the way down. And now this is going to result in a wider manhunt for Dex and Matt because… you know, they couldn’t think of any other reasons for Wilson Fisk to come down hard on the city in a way that would make enough people angry, even though it’s already under martial law. There’s an extra problem in here, where New York City is being used as a stand-in for the entire country to critique what’s going on in the world right now. But this premise is stretching credulity for anyone who lives here right now, I’ll tell you that. Quotes “I think it’s pretty obvious why I chose not to include it, but if you feel differently, by all means, why should I put it up?” —The gallery proprietor pretending to hear Vanessa out on “Rabbit in a Snowstorm” while having no intention of listening to her because she’s clearly a great boss “And I’m ready for judgement.” “Oh, good for you!” —Dex, who is excited for death, and Matt, who needs him to shut up “Just, uh, for the record? I don’t have a problem with feet.” “You’re also not not weird, so…” —Classic Matty and Foggy Closing Arguments Image: Marvel Studios The thing is, I was worried when I heard this season was going for flashbacks, and it turns out that I was right to be worried, but for none of the reasons I expected. The industry needs to have some conversations about how they use weird de-aging CGI in the future. But moreover, flashbacks don’t have to be puzzle pieces that snap together—it’s cool when you can achieve that, yes, but not everyone has the skill to make it work, which is part of why this episode is a mess. We better get to see Karen chew Matt out for bringing Bullseye home with him. We also better get Vanessa resurrected, stat. All that work to bring her into this series, just to waste it—they’ve got a lot to fix for that, and I’m a little worried that it’s all downhill from here. The characters I’m most curious about at present are BB and Daniel, because that’s clearly a hinge for this season: Whether Daniel doubles down into Fisk’s cadre, or if BB is capable of deradicalizing the guy. I’m interested in either possibility, but I’m not sure it’s going to work in any direction given how many characters we’ve got on the board with only four episodes left. Image: Marvel Studios Also, I’m not sure what the point was in rescuing Dex when he seems this keen to die? His whole speech about how they’re all just people trying to resist their natures and failing feels like dialogue that works better for the Punisher. It’s hard to understand what makes Ben Poindexter interesting in this mix when you remove his killing of Foggy from the equation; without that key action, his whole character arc isn’t doing much of anything. Next week, Leah is back! Hopefully, they’ll get an upswing, episode-wise.[end-mark] The post <i>Daredevil: Born Again</i> Forces Flashbacks On Us in “The Grand Design” appeared first on Reactor.