Remember all the complaints I had about the Bullseye origin story? The gaps in plausibility, the slapdash psychology, the less-than-successful cinematography and staging? Well, you can say goodbye to that mess. You can, if you will, vacuum it right up.
“Upstairs/Downstairs,” the eighth episode of Daredevil‘s third season, did more to convince me — in the guts, more than in the mind — of Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter’s madness in this one shot of the man cleaning up his messy apartment in the Daredevil costume he wore to commit mass murder than it did in every other scene involving the character combined. I really can’t say enough good things about writer Dara Resnik and director Alex Zakrzewski, who spent the entire episode showing how Dex’s eggshell mind could be cracked, punctured, sucked dry, and refilled with nothing but trauma and violence, but who neatly (pardon the pun) summed up the whole thing in a single image. Here’s a very sick person clinging desperately to the simple instructions about routine and order that kept him semi-sane for years, while wearing the emblem of that routine and order’s complete and lethal disintegration. It’s a beautiful, horrible thing to behold.
I reviewed episode eight of Daredevil Season Three for Decider.
Tags: daredevil, decider, reviews, TV, TV reviews