“We’ve been manipulated by a sociopath who doesn’t care about the truth, or about who he hurts, or about anyone other than himself,” said the publicly shamed woman about the crooked New York billionaire hotel owner who seems able to flout the law and inflict suffering at will, in an episode where the judicial system is undermined and a sadistic white man murders a brown man and a Holocaust victim in cold blood. Sometimes, a show writes your review for you.
Directed by prestige-TV favorite and Daredevil veteran Phil Abraham, the penultimate episode of Daredevil Season 3 (“One Last Shot”) feels painfully familiar. It’s not so much the specific details that hurt, though despite the disparity between when the show was made and when I watched it, it’s hard for certain similarities between recent events in its world and ours not to hurt. And I tend to be skeptical about any writing premised on the idea of franchised corporate art speaking truth to power; if you thought, say, Black Panther had a message worth hearing, you and the CIA have something in common.
It’s the mood of the episode that makes the metaphorical resonance between Wilson Fisk and Donald Trump so strong. The odyssey of fear, shame, confusion, rage, horror, and despair through which Agent Ray Nadeem travels on his way to court, and then to his death — the sense that anything could happen at any moment, that it will almost certainly be bad, and that nothing that’s supposed to stop it actually can or will — this is the emotional tenor of our age.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Daredevil for Decider.