Rushed, slapdash, illogical, and — horror of horrors — even poorly fight-choreographed, “A New Napkin,” the final episode of Daredevil‘s enthusiastically received third season, feels less like a considered episode of television than a mistake someone made along the way to making one. The funny thing is that it has the opposite problem of most shaky-to-downright-bad Marvel/Netflix episodes, which bloat and drag tediously along to the closing credits. This one feels like the writers went to work one day and realized they’d lost track of how many episodes they’d already done, forcing them to wrap things up as quickly, and therefore as clumsily, as possible. It’s a suitcase packed by someone who overslept their alarm and has a flight to catch in 45 minutes, in television form.

[…]

Daredevil is a fun, and usually fine, show, don’t get me wrong. It and The Punisher are the only live-action franchise superhero things I’d recommend to anyone with any enthusiasm at all since the first Tim Burton Batman movie, and this doesn’t change that. Some of those fight-centric episodes and the Karen Page spotlight were killer, and Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Deborah Ann Woll have all been fantastic from the start. But man, what a letdown — and what a bucket of cold water on the very popular idea that this season represents some sort of major breakthrough for the ailing Marvel/Netflix cinematic universe. Daredevil was better than people gave it credit for being before, and it’s not as good as people are giving it credit for being now. No bullseye, in more ways than one.

So there you have it. I reviewed the finale of Daredevil (for now or forever, who knows) for Decider. A good series goes out on a bad note.

“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.

Written by Tamara Becher-Wilkinson and directed with both restraint and explosiveness by Alex Garcia Lopez, “Karen” is one of the best episodes in the series’ history. Actually, divided into segments designated “Before” and “Now,” it’s almost two of the best episodes in the series’ history.

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All in all, this is as good an hour of superhero entertainment as you’re likely to see. The raw and nuanced performances of Tergersen and Woll, Garcia Lopez’s proficiency with both New England light and hand-to-hand combat, and a structure in which the realistic and fantastic work together to make each other better than they would be alone — it’s a model the unending onslaught of Marvel and DC movies and shows, up to and including the forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen from the Leftovers team, should seek to emulate. Amen.

I reviewed the Karen Page flashback/church fight episode of Daredevil for Decider. If the series really is over (i.e. Marvel doesn’t restart it when it launches its own streaming service), hopefully some smart casting director gives the brilliant Deborah Ann Woll the showcase she deserves.

NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*
NUN SEX FLASHBACK!
*CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*

Okay, I lied: There isn’t any actual sex in the flashback sequence that dominates the first reel of “Revelations,” the ninth episode of Daredevil Season 3. And I’m sorry, but this isn’t just a dropped ball, this is a Bill Buckner–level debacle. It’s not just that Isabella Pisacane, the actor cast to play the young Sister Maggie as she falls in love with local boxer Battlin’ Jack Murdock, looks like a cross between actual young Joanne Whalley (the modern-day Sister Maggie) and Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams, which is to say she’s stunning. (Ol’ Battlin’ Jack is definitely punching above his weight class, if you’ll pardon the pun.) It’s that the tension between Catholic iconography and guilt on the one hand and raw physicality on the other is Daredevil‘s stock in trade. I believe it was Chekov (or perhaps Sasha Grey?) who said that if you have a sexy nun on the mantle in the first act, she’d better get off by the third.

I’m joking, but only a little. Co-written by Sam Ernst and showrunner Erik Oleson and directed by Jennifer Lynch, a name I remain amazed to see in television credits whenever it pops up, “Revelations” is another one of those oddly structured episode that feels more like a botched solution to the problem of Marvel/Netflix’s overlong seasons than a cohesive unit that needs to exist on its own. There’s some good stuff in here, and some stuff that could have been better, and some downright baffling stuff too.

I reviewed the Sister Maggie flashback episode of Daredevil for Decider.

They call this episode of Daredevil “Aftermath” for a reason. As seemingly mandated by the by-now anachronistic 13-episode model all the main Marvel/Netflix series —the few that remain standing, anyway— follow, the seventh installment of the show’s third season is at least fifty percent conversations between characters about things that happened in the sixth installment of the show’s third season. At least Wilson Fisk gets to watch it on the news all at once instead of spreading it out over the course of 45 minutes of streaming television.

I reviewed the mixed-bag over-the-hump episode of Daredevil S3 for Decider. This series too is no longer standing.

Does Dex’s devolvement into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit scan, as far as psychological motivation goes? Well, no and, uh, no. A hard “no” in the sense that, as witnessed last episode, his backstory and history of mental illness is kind of sketched-in and scattershot and hard to swallow. You can’t methodically pick apart a character who was never a cohesive whole to begin with, no matter how hard Daredevil showrunner Erik Oleson, writer Dylan Gallagher, director Stephen Surjik, and actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Wilson (!) Bethel work to prove otherwise.

But also a soft “no,” in the sense that no human being in the history of human beings has everdevolved into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit, because there are no superheroes. There are also no supervillains whose unerring aim and throwing capacity enable him to turn any household object into a lethal weapon, whether they’re dressed up as Daredevil or have their own snazzy black-and-white costume to do their killings in.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this season, Daredevil decided it needed Bullseye, so Daredevil created Bullseye. It could have gone the route of both the comics and the original Ben Affleck/Colin Farrell movie version and had the Kingpin hire an out-of-town hitter with a badass reputation, but it tried to grow one organically from within, tying his origin directly to both the protagonist and the antagonist of the show. Is there any way to do that in a wholly realistic manner? Not when your show is Blind Radar Ninja, Attorney-at-Law there isn’t.

So, y’know, have a little fun with it! Do some creepy voices and camerawork, put some baggy eyes and flopsweat on your handsome new actor, give your main heavy a chance to play master manipulator and guide a new killer to follow in his footsteps a la Hannibal Lecter. Kinda churlish to complain that the end result isn’t in the DSM, no?

I reviewed episode six of Daredevil S3 for Decider.

Dex’s brain is revealed to be a cocktail of conditions that sound spooky to the layperson: borderline personality disorder, psychotic tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder. He killed his beloved baseball coach for yanking him from a perfect game as an orphaned kid, and was laboring under the delusion that said perfect game would bring his parents back somehow while he did it. (I’m gonna guess he killed his parents, too, because why not.) The only person he’s ever really cared about since then was his therapist, who he threatened to kill when she was dying of cancer because he was so angry at her for leaving him. He worked at a suicide-prevention hotline, just like real-life serial killer Ted Bundy, and would occasionally steer suicidal callers into thoughts of homicide instead, or at least daydream about doing so. He’s a stalker, as we learned in the previous episode, but what we learn here is that the woman he’s stalking — a former colleague from the hotline, where he no longer works — is someone he barely knows. When she gets a job at the hotel where Dex is guarding Fisk (clearly his handiwork), she recognizes him from the hotline and asks him to meet her for dinner after their shifts; within about two minutes he’s letting slip all kinds of personal details about her he could only know if he stalked her, and he physically tries to stop her from leaving before she shouts loud enough to draw the attention of other diners and force him to let her go.

You can add all this to the fact that he uses unnecessary lethal force on the job — a job he has because none of this was picked up during the FBI’s background checks for some reason. He served in the military first, and that I can buy since the Forever War we’ve been fighting since 2001 has seen the standards for enlisting get lowered considerably, but the Bureau’s stringent requirements for its agents are already a plot point on the show, in the form of Agent Nadeem getting passed over for promotion because he’s too deep in debt and thus a recruitment target for enemy agents. I’d love to hear how a fairly obvious basketcase like Dex sailed through.

But then, there’s a lot going on this season that, shall we say, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. (Blind ninja lawyer aside, I mean.) Fisk has used phones and computers while under house arrest. He was only convicted of RICO violations when he staged a gigantic lethal firefight against the police on a major metropolitan bridge. Despite having enough hitmen after him to level an entire FBI motorcade, he’s placed inside an operational hotel that’s open to the public for safekeeping. The Feds bust down Matt Murdock’s door on the basis of Fisk’s word and a single paycheck they found from when Murdock & Nelson accidentally represented someone on Fisk’s payroll, but the security-camera footage of him blind-ninja’ing his way through a prison riot apparently slipped their notice, even though they know he was there and that he used Foggy’s name to get in and that he saw a low-level Albanian soldier while visiting.

Well, whatever. You don’t come to Blind Ninja Lawyer for a tightly written procedural.

I reviewed the wonky black-and-white Bullseye origin flashback episode of Daredevil for Decider.

You knew the time would come. Ever since Daredevil established the template in its first season, Netflix’s Marvel shows, good bad and indifferent, have staged elaborate single-take fight scenes in which their protagonists battle their way through hordes of assailants in cramped indoor spaces, typically hallways. (Stairways, warehouses, storage facilities, and hospital wards will do in a pinch.) I’m no statistician, but with a fight that spans one single unbroken shot that lasts for over ten and a half minutes, “Blindsided,” Daredevil Season 3 Episode 4, may have just taken the crown.

HALLWAY FIGHT! HALLWAY FIGHT! I reviewed, y’know, the big hallway-fight episode of Daredevil Season 3 for Decider.

There’s a bit in Daredevil Season 3 Episode 3 (“No Good Deed”) where the FBI agents assigned to guard Wilson Fisk after he’s been relocated from a prison to a stripped-down penthouse suite in a Manhattan hotel where they get McDonald’s to eat, since the hotel room service is out of the Justice Department’s price range. I don’t eat McDonald’s anymore because I’m a vegetarian, but I know my way around meatless fast food options, that’s for sure, so I can relate. It’s not just that it’s relatively cheap — it’s that it’s reliable. Once you’ve found an item or a meal you enjoy, you can order it basically any time you want to enjoy eating, and guess what? You’ll enjoy eating.

Daredevil works the same way. Despite all the people getting punched in the head until they lose consciousness, it’s comfort viewing. You know what you’re getting, and if you like it, you’ll like it. Reader, I like it.

I reviewed the third episode of Daredevil’s third season for Decider.