It’s become moderately popular in certain online circles to claim to miss the “filler episode.” In this age of short streaming-TV seasons that often arrive years apart from one another, the thinking goes, writers can’t afford to pause the overarching story to do something different and low-stakes for an hour. A 22-episode season, by contrast, has room for all those great little side quests and hang-outs and diversions and distractions that can come when, y’know, the characters all go on a road trip, or they get snowed in, or they have to spend Halloween in a haunted house, or Hurley and Sawyer and Charlie and Jin fix the van on Lost or whatever.
Sure, sometimes this feels like pointless wheel-spinning, or the pejorative term “filler episode” wouldn’t have been devised in the first place. The aforementioned Lost made television history by bargaining with the network to shorten their seasons and end their overall run in order to avoid making more filler episodes.But the idea is that since they can give you the chance to get to know the characters better by seeing them cut loose from the norm a bit, the tradeoff is worth it.
I have one question for people who think this way: Where’s your God now, Moses?
I reviewed the fifth episode of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.
Tags: daredevil, daredevil: born again, decider, TV, TV reviews