But the problem with Secret Invasion’s AI credits isn’t just one of ethics, or of ugliness. It’s a waste of some of the most valuable creative real estate any television show has. Throughout television history, thoughtfully crafted opening title sequences have set the tone for the shows to follow, conveying valuable information about everything from the mood you can expect to the plot of the show itself. Some are woven so deep into the fabric of the series they kick off that the two become synonymous. The best function like short films, artistic statements on their own. Speaking plainly, AI just doesn’t have the juice.

When Cheers wanted to show you a place where everybody knows your name, they relied on a carefully curated and edited selection of illustrations and photographs depicting nostalgic good-old-days revelry created by James Castle, Bruce Bryant, and Carol Johnsen. Monty Python member Terry Gilliam established his troupe’s style of surrealistic inanity with animation that would become a staple of the show. David Lynch and Mark Frost used second-unit footage and the evocative music of close Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti to transport you to Twin Peaks.

I wrote about the ethical and, above all, artistic failure of Disney’s decision to use AI to “create” the opening credits for its new show Secret Invasion for Decider.

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.

“Some people are so rich and powerful the system simply can’t handle them,” Matt says by way of explaining why he feels he has to kill Fisk rather than risk him beating additional charges if he’s simply re-arrested. “They actually are above the law.” Foggy, ever the idealist, doesn’t buy it, arguing that this is what the rich and powerful want you to believe in order to drive you to despair and preventing you from using the system to take them down.

I think it’s pretty clear that the opposite is true, and that the rich and powerful promulgate the fiction that the law applies equally to everyone; if this is the case, well, if they break the law and nothing happens, they must not have done anything wrong to begin with, right? The system works!

Daredevil operates with a compelling tension on this point. I have a hard time believing a corporate-owned superhero property will ever really challenge the validity of the entire system; like all the Marvel/Netflix shows, Daredevil has enough heroic cops and feds to demonstrate that several times over. In the case of this conversation, too, it seems we’re meant to see system supporter Foggy as the voice of reason.

But Daredevil relies on the military and law enforcement for its villains, which is also like all the other Marvel/Netflix shows. Dex the crazed soldier turned FBI agent; Frank Castle the berserk black-ops veteran, his commanding officer who became a druglord, and his best friend turned nemesis who started a mercenary company when his tour ended; that guy from Jessica Jones who was a soldier turned cop who got super-strength and roid rage from experimental pills; the prison that used its inmates as guinea pigs in Luke Cage; and on and on and on. In many cases they’re augmented by entire FBI offices, police precincts, or military units that are thoroughly corrupted or downright sadistic. The whole system’s out of order, as the saying goes. Daredevil is like an extended experiment in how far the fantasy of The Last Honest Warrior setting it all to rights can be taken.

I reviewed the antepenultimate episode of Daredevil for Decider. I like the word “antepenultimate.”

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.

[…]

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.

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.

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.

I’d imagine this episode will test the patience of anyone who isn’t as sold on the rhythms of this cast and this concept as I am. I know how they feel: Every time characters on Luke Cage are filmed walking half a block just to talk to someone and then leave, every time Jessica Jones had a scene of its dully sardonic protagonist making quips and shooting daggers at someone while wearing the same pair of jeans, every time one of these series stalls out seven or eight episodes into a season because they basically dispatched the most interesting villain and have to figure out how to drag it out for another school day’s worth of screentime, I rue the day superheroes went from nerd culture to monoculture too.

But the thing is I am sold on the rhythms of this cast and this concept. I love looking at the faces of Charlie Cox and Deborah Ann Woll as Matt and Karen, love their soft beauty, love their warm voices. I love how Elden Henson quickly grew into the roll of their friend Foggy, who turned from an obnoxious comic-relief character into a bonafide character with an engaging way of moving through their weird world while still seeming basically normal.

I reviewed episode two of Daredevil Season Three for Decider.

That simple pleasures are, in fact, simple makes them no less pleasurable. On the contrary! Drinking the last beer in the fridge at the end of a hard day, listening to the first ten or so Beatles singles, playing Rainbow Road in Mario Kart Wii for the 500th beautiful lunatic time — there is great satisfaction in the straightforward, great fun in the familiar. And as television, Daredevil is exactly that: satisfyingly straightforward, familiarly fun. Returning for its third season (third and a half, if you count the characters’ involvement in the Defenders crossover miniseries), it is simple, and it is pleasurable.

I covered Daredevil for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the premiere. 

Dr. Robert Ford, ‘Westworld’

Smile, and smile, and be a villain. As the co-founder and chief narrative architect of the Westworld theme park, Dr. Robert Ford is not unfamiliar with Shakespeare; he’d recognize Hamlet’s description of evil every time he looked in the mirror. Or would he? As played by Anthony Hopkins, who taps the quiet menace he mined so effectively decades ago as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Ford spends the bulk of the HBO hit’s first season manipulating and murdering everyone, human or android, who threatens his control. But late-game twists hint at an even more disturbing truth behind Ford’s highly erudite villainy, this time one out of Nietzsche: To fight monsters, is it necessary to become a monster yourself?

I wrote about Cottonmouth, the Punisher, Agent Dom DiPierro, Sarah Wittel, Detective Dennis Box, and Dr. Robert Ford for Rolling Stone’s list of the 20 best new TV characters of the year.

SPOILER ALERT

A superhero story is only as good as its villain. Actually, pretty much any genre work based on conflict with a “villain” is subject to this same dependency. The X-Men didn’t take off as a concept for 15 years or so, until writer Chris Claremont and artists Dave Cockrum and John Byrne beefed up Magneto as their archnemesis and transformed leading lady Jean Grey, aka “Marvel Girl,” into the godlike Dark Phoenix. Once Lost cycled through its initial season of nonstop mystery and frustrated viewers with its Schrodinger’s Hatch, the introduction of Benjamin Linus midway through the second season sustained the show for years to come. And if you wanna get highfalutin about it, where would the great religious works — or the great religions themselves — be without Satan? Paradise Maintained just doesn’t have that same ring to it, you know?

In general, this principle has served Daredevil very well. Its first season was marked by an all-time-great character-meets-performer act of villain creation in the person of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk; its climax was driven by putting these two completely incompatible yet equally compelling figures together in an alley and having them pound on each other until one of them stopped moving and the other was left standing. Season Two flipped the script by using DD’s fellow vigilantes as villains, with the Punisher, Elektra, and Stick’s unrepentant lethality driving Matt Murdock apart from his friends, his firm, and his entire normal life as he battled either to stop or save them.

But with Frank Castle cut free from the storyline that bound him to Murdock, Nelson, and Page and both Elektra and Stick firmly in pocket, these threats are neutralized, dramatically speaking. That left Daredevil to battle the faceless horde known as the Hand and its leader, the physically powerful but emotionally inert Nobu, for the season’s grand finale. And that made “A Cold Day in Hell’s Kitchen,” the Season Two finale, a chilly farewell.

I was left a little flat by the final episode of Daredevil Season Two, which I reviewed for Decider. That said, it’s still the best live-action superhero adaptation in nearly three decades.

SPOILER ALERT

Both of the ultraviolent vigilantes at the center of this season’s dueling narratives, the Punisher and Elektra, reached a point at which they could decide to become the cold-blooded killers people said they were, or figure out another way to fight. Frank Castle chose what was behind door number one, murdering his mentor-turned-enemy and seizing his arsenal of military-grade weaponry for his own. “If you do this,” Karen had warned him, “you are the monster they say you are.” Well, that settles that.

In fact, Frank takes the metaphor a step further. “You’re dead to me,” Karen shouts in dismay when it becomes apparent he plans to kill Schoonover for his role in the gang shootout that (coincidentally? it’s unclear) wiped out the family of his former subordinate. “I’m already dead,” Castle responds, allegorically identifying himself with both the grim reaper his superhero costume evokes and even with zombie-like warriors of the Hand, who pursue their bloody quest for domination from beyond the grave. Frank Castle can relate. The whole sequence is shot like a cabin-in-the-woods horror movie, leaving Karen as the “final girl” who survives the killer’s rampage.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

Eleven episodes deep into the season and with only two more to go, Daredevil’s plotlines are proliferating at an alarming rate. The Blacksmith, a sinister druglord I’d previously assumed to be just a McGuffin to keep the moving parts running, has now taken on central importance as both Daredevil and Punisher attempt to track him down. The Kingpin is in play, as is his old associate Madame Gao, who’s simultaneously battling the Blacksmith herself and issuing dire warnings about “the real threat” to the city. Said real threat is most likely the Hand, run by another former Fisk running buddy, Nobu, and his ninja army. They’re re-kidnapping brainwashed teens, murdering nurses, and fighting Daredevil, who is also busy fighting Gao’s men, the Blacksmith’s men, and the Punisher. Some mysterious person, likely the Blacksmith but yet to be confirmed as such, is murdering people and framing Frank Castle for it, including the district attorney and medical examiner who covered up the government’s involvement in the shootout between the Mexicans, the Irish, and the bikers, orchestrated by the Blacksmith and responsible for the deaths of Castle’s family. Karen Page is another of their would-be victims, though she’s now been saved twice by the Punisher. Matt’s other ex-girlfriend, Elektra, is similarly the survivor of a hit ordered by her and Matt’s old mentor Stick, who is also fighting the Hand. She’s now tracking him down to kill him, a confrontation Daredevil is racing to stop. Also Karen Page got a new job as an investigator for the Daily Bulletin, Claire Temple quit her job after the Hand bought off her hospital, and Foggy Nelson got a job offer at the law offices of Jeryn Hogarth from Jessica Jones from his sexy ex-girlfriend. Does that about cover it?

So it’s a testament to Daredevil and to this episode, “.380,” that the chaos feels planned — that it’s Daredevil’s world, not his show, spinning out of control.

I reviewed episode 11 of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

Daredevil is the only superhero show that matters.

I explain why Daredevil is the best there is at what it does for Decider.

Of all the things that “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” the ninth episode of Daredevil’s second season, does well, restaging the sensational hallway fight from Season One with the Punisher as its protagonist may be the smartest. Nothing drives home the moral, philosophical, tactical, and phyiscal differences between the two vigilantes quite like watching each of them tear through a small army of opponents in an enclosed space: With Daredevil, the worst that happens is that one of his foes gets beaned with a flying microwave oven; with Punisher, dudes get their eyeballs gouged out. As if to make the point that this fight scene reveals who Frank Castle really is even clearer, the sequence ends with an ersatz Punisher skull logo emblazoned on the man’s chest. It’s red on white rather than white on black, but I think we get the picture.

I reviewed episode nine of Daredevil season two for Decider.