Movies & TV Daredevil: Born Again Daredevil: Born Again Makes Us See Red in “Requiem” This episode has enough choking to inspire half a Weeknd album… By Leah Schnelbach | Published on April 22, 2026 Image: Marvel Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Marvel Studios Welcome back to Daredevil: Born Again! Your faithful recapper is Leah again, returned from a fabulous visit to Matty Murdock’s ancestral homeland. (I mean Ireland, not Hell’s Kitchen, I’m in Hell’s Kitchen all the time.) Many thanks to my beloved colleague Emmet Asher-Perrin for taking care of the last two weeks, and pointing out all the same stuff that pissed me off when I caught up on the episodes. And Emmet is right: I was pleased about the inclusion of Saint Lucia! And I am annoyed by Not-Father-Lantom and his willingness to give up his parishioners to the AVTF thugs—but I’m wayyyy more annoyed by the retconning of Buck “Absolutely-Not-Our-Beloved-Wesley” Cashman. This week’s episode is “Requiem”, and it was written by Devon Kliger & Jesse Wigutow, and directed by Angela Barnes. And I wish I could say things were looking up but hoo boy is this episode rough. A Spoilery Recap We open on Fisk sitting beside Vanessa who is, unfortunately, still dead. As ever, let me say that D’Onofrio makes this character live in a way that I don’t think anyone else could. The doctor comes back in and muses that “They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it” and “death cannot kill what never dies”—which is a nice sentiment, and if he’d left it at that and simply left he might still have a functional spine and everything. Instead he goes on to says something about Vanessa having “gone to the beautiful darkness that awaits us all” which I think really exceeds his pay grade as a medical doctor, and then… he tells Fisk it’s been an honor to accompany him on this whole journey, and he hugs Wilson Fisk. Even in a “normal” end-of-life situation, this is way way way beyond the bounds of what the doctor should do with someone who’s sitting in shock next to newly-dead person! And Fisk responds pretty much exactly how I would, albeit more successfully, because he crushes that doctor like a spent PBR. Somehow an impeccable Buck is already waiting outside to clean up the mess, back from cleaning up the previous mess with Daniel. I guess there’s never traffic between Albany and New York City in this universe? Then the show has a priest intoning the “Requiem Aeternam” or “Eternal Rest” prayer in Latin over Vanessa’s blinding white coffin. The scenes of her funeral are intercut with Matt watching Bullseye sleep, Mr. Charles realizing Fisk stole all his smuggled weaponry back, the AVTF guys celebrating receiving said weaponry, and finally back around to Fisk placing a single red rose on the casket. Image: Marvel Studios After the credits, thugs of some sort show up to a nice house in a suburban neighborhood. They throw a beeping grenade through a window, where a delightful little kid in fairy wings waves it around like a wand. Outside, the thugs are having their various asses handed to them—we hear bodies hit walls, and see blood streak down windows. The clearly superpowered person comes in just in time to disengage the grenade, and guess what? It’s Jessica Jones! She tells the kid—presumably her daughter—that the grenade isn’t a toy, and they grin at each other. Well shit what if this is a good epi— awwww, dammit. Matt and Karen are arguing about the ethics of murder again, this time right after Not-Night-Nurse Soledad finishes stitching Bullseye up and Angela heads back out into the street. Matt actually says “Vengeance isn’t justice, Karen” cause apparently we just say the themes now. Meanwhile at Vanessa’s wake, Buck tasks a shellshocked Daniel with determining whether BB’s the leak (“WHO ELSE COULD IT BE THERE ARE ONLY LIKE FIVE OF YOU” I wail at my TV screen) and tells him that “the big time will take care of you if you take care of it.” He also explains the idea of a Barium Meal Test which Daniel, hilariously, thinks is a meal plan his mom is on. But no, in espionage terms, it means you plant false information to see who leaks it. Meanwhile, on a roof, Matt glowers out over HIS CITY when a rad pair of boots walks up. And inside those boots, once again, is Jessica Jones! She tells him about the raid on her house, says “You told me it wouldn’t touch me” which, what? How could he guarantee that, and how could she trust that guarantee? She goes on to say that a “sketchy” guy called, who was “interested in people like us. I told him to fuck off. Not everyone I know did.” She stares at Matt meaningfully, he takes a beat, and says: “Oh.” (Don’t worry, I’ll yell about this plot point further down.) Then she says her powers drop out sometimes since she had Danielle, so I guess I’m not done being furious. Then the two of them raid the warehouse below, I’m still unclear why because don’t they need those weapons to prove nefarious shit about Fisk? They blow the warehouse up, but not before Jess’ power winks out again and fucking Powell is able to knock her down, and Matt has to leap in and save her. Back at the wake, Heather Glenn is creeping creepily around the Fisks’ bedroom, and steals some of Vanessa jewelry. We all grieve in our own ways? Buck finds her crying in the room, and, in a scene that genuinely felt imported from some other, very different show, he makes Heather sit on the Fisks’ bed, tell him exactly what Muse did to her, and then he encourages her to choke him so hard his face turns purple. Image: Marvel Studios Between this and last week’s foot conversation I really want to hang out in the Daredevil: Born Again writers’ room. He asks if she feels better and she bolts out of the room. But wait! We’re not quite done with Daredevil: FetLife! After a brief scene of Daniel planting a fake story for BB to share, we’re back in Frank Castle’s Sadness Basement. Karen is manspreading in a chair over Bullseye’s prone, shackled body, pointing a gun right at him! She kicks him awake. She climbs on top of him. She puts the gun to his forehead. She flashbacks about Foggy a whole lot. He whispers: “Thank you.” The whole thing is weird and charged and uncomfortable and then, of course, Matt shows up just in time to knocks the gun out of her hand with one of his batons, which should really break her wrist, no? But nobody’s losing their immortal soul on Matty Murdock’s watch, no sir! And all I can think is how much better would this be from Bullseye’s POV? Handcuffed to a cot for hours and hours, you’ve just begged yet another person to kill you, they almost did it, and now you’re watching the Alpha Couple rehash their murder argument, again, like you’re not even in the room anymore. BB has gone to Daniel’s mom’s house on Staten Island for his birthday, where Mom-of-Daniel is selling her on a Spectrum Vitamin MLM scheme that I think is based on the idea of ingesting all the colors of the spectrum? BB seems to genuinely like her. She goes upstairs, sneaks into Daniel’s room, and see all the detritus of his life: a photo of him with his late father, wrestling trophies, posters of mob bosses, a How High poster, a Casino poster on the back of his door. She deletes the “scoop” that she was about to send to Ellison. Of course this doesn’t matter because she still had the SD card in her coat pocket, and while she was snooping in his room, Daniel rifled through her shit and found it. So now he knows that the only person who could possibly be the leak is in fact the leak. I still think their relationship is on firmer ground than Matt and Karen’s right now, though. He says he’s wants to protect her, and BB, ludicrously, says “From who?” and he waves his incoming call from Buck in her face. Mr. Charles confronts the Governor, she tries to posture at him and it doesn’t work, and they both agree to dump Fisk. (As long as all the plots get wrapped up neatly, I was scared to death we might have to stay in some character development for a minute.) The protests grow at Gracie Mansion, and finally, somehow, the Resistance projects their recorded testimonials of AVTF victims onto the walls of the building itself. They also project the words “Resist” and “Rebel”. This galvanizes the protesters, but somehow Fisk is able to leave and go back to his murder catacombs, and he stares at Rabbit in a Snowstorm as, obviously, the AVTF gets the OK to get more violent. Somehow Powell knows that Saunders was the mole and kills him and blames the protesters which is just… stupid? They’ve already got guns trained on the protesters, plausible deniability is way out the window. Somehow in the clash Angela’s friend Javi seems to be the only one killed, which is why Karen is tending to him when her wig flies off, and Powell finally recognizes her and arrests her. And for some reason Matt confronts Wilson in the murder catacombs, tells him “I’m sorry for your loss, Wilson”, and after a very brief attempt at negotiation, they battle in front of the painting. Again. Wilson finally gasps out that Daredevil “cannot” arrest him, and “will not” murder him. We end with Karen kneeling on the ground with her hands in the air, and Matt and Fisk bloodied in the murder basement, gasping for air, with no clear winner. Grace Image: Marvel Studios Watching Fisk crush that doctor like an empty PBR was excellent. We all grieve in our own ways, man. The raid on Jessica’s home, and seeing her destroy all the thugs in the background before she came in to disarm the grenade Danielle was waving around like a wand? Pretty great. Danielle herself was extremely great. Seeing Matt and Jess fight side-by-side again, even if only briefly, was fun… up to a point.   Daniel’s home in Staten Island, the quiet birthday with his mom, the utter lack of other friends, the way BB looks through his bedroom and realizes he is, actually, a person—all of that is very good. Her decision not to send Daniel’s fake scoop (to Ellison???) was both a sigh of relief for those of us who are rooting for her, and a sweet moment of her choosing to try to be his friend for real. The decision to project detained people’s video testimony onto Gracie Mansion itself along with the words “RESIST” and “REBEL” was genuinely stirring. And again, before I get into all of my rage, let me say that all of the acting and fight choreography is stellar. I just wish the scripts trusted us to engage with the show instead of, I don’t know, sitting on our phones and doomscrolling through the reality that the show is mirroring? Retribution Image: Marvel Studios And now for the rest of the episode. Why are Matt and Karen still having the same goddamn argument they’ve been having since the Punisher first waltzed into Season 2 of the Netflix era? Karen knows that Matt will never willingly resort to murder. Matt knows that she thinks violence is sometimes necessary. Why does he leave her alone with the man who killed their best friend? Why does she think she can shoot an unarmed man who’s handcuffed to a cot when her boyfriend will immediately know it wasn’t self-defense once he comes back and hears her heartbeat when she lies? Why does Karen climb into Bullseye’s lap to shoot him through the forehead? Why the hell did BB keep the SD card in her pocket??? Especially when she’s going into Daniel’s house??? I guess we can all assume Surfshark VPN isn’t sponsoring her fucking Phisk broadcasts, cause she clearly knows dick all about security. Why the hell is Heather Glenn stealing Vanessa’s jewelry during the wake? And then choking Buck Cashman on the Fisks’ bed??? I mean, I guess I finally understand what Matt saw in her, but come on. Why does Karen go to the protest when she’s one of the heads of the resistance and needs to stay absolutely underground in order to coordinate shit??? And leaving the women aside for a moment: why do Matt and Wilson need to have a redux of their fight from the end of Season 3??? That fight was great! We saw it already! Do something else! Also, where the fuck is Bullseye now? Is he just… tied to the cot in Frank Castle’s Sadness Basement while everyone else marches off to protests and murder catacombs? OK and about the protest: how many people are on the side of the Resistance? Because I feel like at this point there should be a much larger throng of people gathered, and that the AVTF’s inevitable turn to violence should result in even more chaos, but also in the sheer numbers of protesters tipping the scales a bit. New York City has close to 9 million people in it, and, at least in our timeline, the vast majority of them would be anti-Fisk. So where are they? How is the crowd small enough that Powell is able to wade through the protesters to spot Karen after her Alias wig flies off in the fray? But now back to my real rage: IS THE SHOW TELLING US THAT MOTHERHOOD ROBBED JESSICA JONES OF HER SUPER STRENGTH. And if so, why is it telling us that. Because I need a real, good, thematic reason that I’m watching Matt goddamn barely superpowered Murdock rescue Jessica fucking Jones during a fight in between his usual titanic gasps for breath. I maybe wouldn’t be quite so angry about this if every other woman in the show wasn’t either acting like they had tapioca between their ears or was, you know, DEAD. Actually, fuck that, I would be that angry. You promise me Jessica Jones and she shows up to infodump shit the audience already knows and then lose a fight with Powell? And have to be rescued???? Even if Powell is, um, enhancing himself, which seems likely, you’ve taken a great idiosyncratic troubled anti-hero, tied her powers into her motherhood in a way that I really don’t like, and now had the worst of the AVTF thugs give her a bloody nose and pull a gun on her. Not cool, television show. And on top of alllll that, are you seriously implying, television show, that Luke Cage—LUKE CAGE—would get in bed with the United States government after everything he’s lived through? Have you met the United States government, television show? You’re telling me that Mr. Charles could call LUKE CAGE on the phone and he’d even stay on the line for a second, let alone agree to work with the man? (If it turns out Jess is talking about Danny Rand, fine, I’ll retract my anger. If it’s Trish Walker, well, yeah, she’s already compromised, fine. And if this is some kind of deep cover espionage situation, I might retract my anger—but why would Jess withhold that info from Matt while she’s already recapping the plot?) I just don’t know. I was extremely excited for the show to tackle an underground resistance narrative, I was excited about the AVTF aspect, and about Jessica coming back, and hell, even about Bullseye coming back. But at this point I spend most of each episode saying WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT??? out loud to fictional characters whom I’m pretty sure can’t hear me. Fiorello’s Desk Image: Marvel Studios Fisk has now attempted to double-cross Mr. Charles by handing the weapons shipment straight off to his private AVTF Army, and Mr. Charles has retaliated by going to the Governor’s house and saying that they need to pull all their support for him. So… what now? Fisk attempts to go full feudal lord over the nation-state of New York City, and is pretty much immediately crushed by the US military? Quotes! Image: Marvel Studios “What if this doesn’t end until one of you goes down?”“I can’t think about it that way.”“Well you’re gonna have to! He has proven that he will not hesitate!” —Karen and Matty return to a theme “What the hell is wrong with you? You keep choosing the wrong people! Fisk???—[gestures at Bullseye] this thing—over the people who love you!”“What? H-how can you say that?”“Because it’s true! Because you let them live, and people die. Please, just. Let me do this…[l]et me carry this for you.” —Karen and Matty return to a theme, AGAIN, this time with a frisson of Murder Samwise “You want to know what happened to me? I grew up.” —Karen will never let a good theme die! Unless it murdered Foggy. “I don’t think the little fish tells the big fish how to swim.” —Mr. Charles, off in a different episode of a different television show. Closing Arguments Image: Marvel Studios What’s bothering me is that there are good ideas here, but the show isn’t giving any of them the space to breathe. Karen leaning back into her ruthless side, especially as a counterpoint to Matt’s lost love, Elektra? Very cool! But not when the only result is the two of them rehashing the same argument they’ve been having since literally 2016.   Matt wrestling with his own violent tendencies, especially with a partner who encourages him to give in? Cool! Unless that’s expressed through a replay of his “You’re getting redemption whether you want it or not!” argument that was so powerful when he had it with Punisher, but much less so when he keeps having a shallow replay of it with Bullseye—particularly since his history with Bullseye should make this argument riveting. Matt finally confronting Fisk? Well, again, we’ve seen this so many times! But I will say the fight between them is great, and they’re both giving this their all. Daniel gives us an interesting opportunity to see a kid who clearly grew up with pop culture about the mafia (and my guess would be that he glamorized it a bit—which shows he wasn’t actually paying attention during those Scorsese movies, but whatever) find himself living the life he thought he wanted, only to realize he doesn’t have the stomach for it. For him to realize that his only real friend in all of this is the girl who’s trying to take the whole organization down—and he can’t really trust her, either? That’s a rich text! And Michael Gandolfini is doing great work with it. But instead of sitting with the themes, we see Buck confront Daniel with a scene that is, literally, straight out of Goodfellas. I guarantee you Daniel has watched the scene with Henry Hill and Jimmy and Tommy stopping off at Tommy’s mama’s house and borrowing a knife roughly 1,000 times. I would bet real money that the dialogue about a deer’s paw was playing through Daniel’s mind as he gazed into that trunk. But the episode doesn’t make us stay with him while he lives the reality of hacking a corpse up. We don’t see him bury it. We don’t even see him washing the blood off. After all the protracted build up to last week’s trunk reveal, we only get two brief scenes of him trying to process the emotional fallout this week, and then the focus shifts to his relationship with BB. And we don’t see BB wrestling with her burgeoning friendship with Daniel, she just seems like she’s using him until she suddenly isn’t—but she’s so inept that she’s startled when he says he’s protecting her from Buck. Like, girl. You know Fisk murdered your uncle. You are here to bring down Fisk. You should be terrified all the time, not just when Daniel tells you there’s trouble. And as long as I’m here… in the Netflix Era, Matt’s questions about his faith, justice, mercy, the existence of the Devil—they animated his decisions. In Born Again, the writers have given him two accurate, specific saints to pray to, which i appreciate, but if the wrestling isn’t there it starts to feel like stained glass window dressing. His relationship to Bullseye is animated more by a memory of Foggy than anything else, and since Karen is very clearly #TeamMurder, all of Matt’s internal moral struggle gets outsourced into an argument with her. But again, they already had that argument, and I’d be way more interested in watching Matt Murdock, Hero in Hiding, Symbol of Hope, Pretty Lapsed Catholic At This Point Let’s Be Real, struggle with the problem of Bullseye within himself. Bullseye murdered Father Lantom, tried to murder Karen, murdered Agent Nadim, murdered Vanessa, and murdered Foggy, and now he actively wants to die. This should be agonizing for Matt. WE COME TO THIS PLACE FOR AGONY, MARVEL. I’ve talked for a long time, I’ll shut up. But I formally request a spinoff prequel about the adventures of poor hapless Dr. Doomed.[end-mark] The post <em>Daredevil: Born Again</em> Makes Us See Red in “Requiem” appeared first on Reactor.