As a matter of fact, one of Daredevil’s most consistently impressive features is its ability to stage and shoot conversations in a visually engaging and communicative way. Take a look at the exchange between Matt and his mentor Stick in which the old man finally divulges the nature of “the war” he’s been issuing ominous warnings about for decades. First of all, what kind of recruitment technique is that? If you want to indoctrinate at-risk youth into your apocalyptic cult of holy-man assassins, you might try telling them the cool origin story at some point before they grow up and decide you’re a dangerous lunatic.

But second of all, the scene is shot with both intimacy and urgency. As the green-gold light that’s the show’s visual go-to bathes their faces, revealing Stick’s crags and crevices while simplifying Matt’s silhouette into a smooth and elegant series of curves, the camera moves almost constantly, up and down, back and forth, slowly enough not to make you seasick but emphatically enough to convey the lack of solid ground on which these two men’s relationship currently stands. This is only enhanced by the lack of the customary eyeline-match crosscutting; the basic pattern is there, but since these are two blind men, no eye contact is implied, leaving you unmoored in the words rather than rooted in their experience of each other. Throughout, Stick is usually placed at the far left side of the frame, while Matt will alternately be shortsighted toward that end of the screen or situated on the opposite side, again evoking his competing curiosity and skepticism. Forget the ninja stuff — this is fight choreography, alright.

I reviewed episode eight of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

“Semper Fidelis,” the seventh episode of Daredevil’s second season, was the most subduded and uneventful of the lot. Sure, the show attempts to ratchet up the drama in the beginning, marching the Punisher into court in slow-motion to tune of Inception-style BONNGGGGGGs, and positioning him in front of an American flag with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast. But hey, this is the Punisher we’re talking about. Subtlety is neither his strong suit, nor the strong suit of stories that wish to use his blunt-force allegory effectively.

I reviewed episode seven of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

Amazingly, Daredevil has joined Mad Men, The Affair, and Outlander in the pantheon of television shows that accurately convey the feeling of what my friend and favorite cultural critic Alyssa Rosenberg once described as “fuck fever”—an all-consuming lust so strong an actual human connection forms around it. Watching young Matt and Elektra together, or hearing them jokingly describe a future when they’re married with children whom they blow off in order to “spend our time doing better things…like sex,” you can see how sex really is enough fuel to sustain a relationship, even a serious one—at least until Elektra’s sociopathy intervenes and brings Matt to the brink of killing someone.

Daredevil is the sexiest show on television (or whatever Netflix is) right now, and I explained why in my review of Season 2′s fifth episode for Decider.

Okay, so maybe it’s overstepping to name this review after both the subject of the greatest Mad Men Don Draper pitch of all time and the title of the episode it came in. Entire books have been written on that series using the Carousel—Kodak’s slide-projector product and Don’s speech’s central metaphor for the mental time-travel loop of nostalgia—as an emblem. But consider the alternatives: I could have gone with “Drill, Baby, Drill!” or “Face-Off.” You’re welcome!

Put the ultraviolence aside, though, provided the images aren’t lodged in your brain. What makes “Penny and Dime,” the fourth and best episode of Daredevil’s excellent second season so far, so effective really is Draperesque. What is Frank Castle, after all, but a tall dark and handsome antihero with a shadowy past, hypercompetent at his job but discovering this cannot compensate for the happy family he’s been denied? And what is the Central Park Carousel but a larger version of the slideshow Don uses to remind himself of the people he loves, and the poor job he’s done at loving them?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Daredevil season two for Decider.

The most compelling thing about Daredevil and Punisher’s rooftop heart-to-heart is what doesn’t get said. As many critics have noted, their argument centers on the relative lethality of their respective brands of vigilante justice: The Punisher kills, Daredevil doesn’t. Anywhere outside a superhero story, this is a pretty thin reed on which to hang a system of morality, since Daredevil routinely beats the living shit out of people, and tortures someone for information at least as often as Sarah Koenig posts new episodes of Serial Season Two. No matter how much Matt waxes eloquent about hope and redemption, forces that Frank snuffs out when he takes life, isn’t this a ridiculous, hair-splitting argument to have with a masked man who hurts people in the name of helping people?

Well, yes, it is — and just as it always has, the show knows this. “I don’t do this to hurt people,” Matt tells Frank, who responds with skepticism: “Yeah, so what is that, just a job perk?” “I don’t kill anyone.” “Is that why you think you’re better than me?” Frank presses. “No.” “Is that why you think you’re a big hero?” “It doesn’t matter what I think or what I am,” Matt insists “Is that a fact?” When pushed on the question of whether beating people is heroic, Matt simply refuses to answer. It’s just like when instead of telling Wilson Fisk that yes, one man really could change the system, he simply knocked the dude out. Daredevil the show knows that Daredevil the heroic figure is a mess of contradictions and impossibilities, and to its credit it never shies away from this, nor offers a half-assed explanation or excuse. It goes out of its way to point this out repeatedly, both in dialogue scenes like this one, and in its use of violence, which is uniformly ugly rather than antiseptically thrilling. Like Game of Thrones, it brings to the audience’s attention the brutality that genre pieces of its ilk usually would like you to forget, and like Game of Thrones it gets lambasted under the assumption that depiction equals exploitation, if not endorsement. But it’s the only superhero show I can think of that asks us to think about what happens when people hit people to stop them hitting back.

I wrote about Daredevil’s willingness to stare vigilantism straight in the face for Decider.

They call him the Punisher, and he’s got the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe in his crosshairs.

Don’t get me wrong: In “Dogs to a Gunfight,” the second episode ofDaredevil’s second season, the vigilante’s victims are still primarily career criminals, with the consciences of less lethal extralegal do-gooders like Matt Mudock (Charlie Cox) and company serving as collateral damage. But a character like the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) doesn’t just challenge the acceptable bounds of superhero violence and morality — he threatens the structural integrity of the shared superhero universe itself.

Fictional worlds like the MCU thrive on the idea that its characters can meet, team up, and/or fight, whether those crossovers are theoretical or actual. But in general — particularly in the comics, where massive “event” crossovers, however common, are still dwarfed in number by the month-to-month sagas of individual series — every hero stays in their own backyard, dealing with their own stable of villains, many of whom just so happen to be mass murderers. The Punisher, a mass murderer of murderers, upsets the applecart. With this guy floating around, why are the Green Goblins and the Wilson Fisks, the Jokers and the Lex Luthors, still alive and kicking? Wouldn’t he make tracking them down and taking them out a priority? Wouldn’t that force the other heroes to defend their worst enemies, vicious killers all — or reveal those heroes as choke artists, whose precious but deeply weird morality (punching people into unconsciousness or dangling them off rooftops for information is fine, killing mass murderers in the midst of a firefight is beyond the pale) is a meaningless, if not outrightly deceptive, fig leaf over the choice to let monsters roam free for the sake of further adventures?

This, even more than the violence he perpetrates, is what makes the Punisher such a fearsome figure. Superhero comics have numerous cracks in their suspension-of-disbelief bridges upon which it is ill-advised to lean too heavily: mutants, for example, have served as inspiring and empathetic audience-identification figures for generations of outcast groups — black, Jewish, queer, disabled, merely geeky, you name it — by fighting to protect both themselves and the world that hates and fears them. But none of the aforementioned groups can shoot laserbeams from their eyeballs, you know? There’s a reasonthe people of the Marvel Universe hate and fear mutants: They’re dangerous as fuck! This makes their appeal as a metaphor for civil rights or what have you more emotional than intellectual. We simply agree to look past that, the same way (say) we accept that a superheroic society in which gods and ghosts and sorcerers supreme routinely roam around in city streets is fundamentally the same as our own, in which the existence of the supernatural remains resolutely unverifiable. The Punisher, then, is a one-man distillation of a similar faultline in the superhero-universe metafiction, a perplexingly undeployed human drone strike against the countless metahuman Bin Ladens whom the Avengers or the Justice League allow to roam free. In his way he’s as threatening to the fabric of superhero-universe reality as a Lovecraftian god or Lynchian demon is to ours. He should not be, yet there he is.

I went long on the role of the Punisher as shared-universe spoiler in my review of Daredevil Season Two’s second episode for Decider.

Time to give the ’devil his due: Season One of the Marvel/Netflix Daredevilseries was the best live-action superhero adaptation since Tim Burton’s firstBatman movie in 1989. In Charlie Cox, Deborah Ann Woll, Rosario Dawson, Vondie Curtis Hall, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ayelet Zurer, Toby Leonard Moore, and (eventually) Elden Henson, it boasted the strongest cast of any Marvel project; The company’s actors are virtually always charismatic, but rarely are they called on to deliver the shading and subtlety these people were capable of. D’Onofrio in particular just slew it as Wilson Fisk, his pause-laden pressured speech and overgrown-baby bulk as far from a cookie-cutter villain as the genre has ever risked going. The cinematography enhanced the more restrained and refined mood created by the performances, lighting their faces like some DiBlasio-era Rembrandt.

The story, too, zoomed past the traditional good guy vs. bad guy set-up to tell the tale of two surrogate familes formed in the New York City crucible — one centered on Matt Murdock and his crime-fighting alter ego, the other on magnate/philanthropist/crime boss Wilson Fisk. Like any circle of friends, both groups truly cared about the city, and about each other. It’s just that for the latter crew, that love was ultimately selfish, toxic, and lethal. Their conflict was ultimately expressed in fight scenes that featured the finest choreography in any superhero film or TV show ever, hands down. Like all great fight scenes, they made spatial sense, took advantage of their unique environments, and served as physical metaphors for emotional turmoil. Put it all together and you have one of the vanishingly few superhero projects outside of comics that feel, to quote Boogie Nights, like “a real film, Jack.”

So yeah, you could say I’m a fan.

All this preamble is a way to lay down my markers for my review of Daredevil’sSeason Two premiere for Decider.

Game of Thrones (HBO, April 24)

The cable network’s dark-fantasy juggernaut has left a long trail of dead characters and shocked audiences in its wake, though readers of George R.R. Martin’s books always knew when to duck. All that changes when the show returns for its sixth season this year — because The Winds of Winter appears to have hit the proverbial Wall, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have been free to plan their own red weddings this season. While the show will continue to be based at least in part on future plans revealed to creators by Martin, it had already begun deviating from the source with increasing regularity and boldness. (Is Jon Snow alive or dead? Who the hell knows?) Look for an even stormier winter than usual.

I joined forces with ace writers David Fear and Rob Sheffield to run down the year’s most anticipated TV shows for Rolling Stone.

Can a random vigilante change the system? No. Can he do some damage to one asshole who embodies it? You bet your bald ass, Wilson. This is the basic logical substitution that all superhero stories ask us to make in exchange for the enjoyment they provide, but few, if any, cinematic examples of the genre have ever examined it more thoughtfully, morally, or, frankly, beautifully. Fantastic fight scenes, luscious cinematography, a host of very human performances, a refreshingly honest take on the violence that underpins it all: Daredevil Season One is the best live-action superhero story since Tim Burton’s first Batman movie. That’s a pretty heroic achievement.

I reviewed the season finale of Daredevil, which was an excellent series, for Decider.

It’s not Gao’s abilities that horrify Matt Murdock, though — it’s her brutality. After tracking her operation back to its warehouse base with an impressive rooftop-parkour sequence, he infiltrates the building, only to find a small army of blind workers toiling away on behalf of her evil empire. Gao attributes their voluntary blindings to “faith…in something beyond the distractions of your world.” To Matt, though, there’s nothing mystical about it — this is humanity at its worst. If you want an image of Daredevil’s fatalist streak, you can’t do much better than a mob of men and women swarming the superhero on Gao’s orders. They are a people who don’t want to be saved.

Even this morbid spectacle contains a sliver of hope, though. In the end, Matt evacuates the building, which has caught on fire during his fracas with Gao and her guards, with the help of one of the druglord’s enforcers. This was the episode’s most affecting moment, a sign that even the nameless thugs Daredevil’s constantly beating up have human, humane cores that can be tapped at times of great need.

I reviewed Daredevil‘s genuinely surprising penultimate episode for Decider.

Director Nick Gomez put together Daredevil’s best-looking episode since the pilot, and one of the best-looking episodes of anything I’ve seen in forever — just gorgeous shots from start to finish. Dig the sequence when Karen visits Matt at his apartment for the first time since his “accident” (aka getting beaten like a red-headed stepchild by Wilson Fisk and a freaking ninja). As she enters, the shot is split bicamerally, with her and the man who’s lying to her in separate rooms on separate sides of the frame.

As they continue to talk, Matt’s two gigantic windows emphasize their separation:

Until she breaks out of her box and approaches him, touching him for the first time in episodes. Sure, if you’ve read the comics you know this is the first of many touches to come, but the staging tells you everything you need to know.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of Daredevil, the best and most beautiful of the bunch, for Decider.

…it’s a big episode for actor Elden Henson, whose had previously been the weak link in a very strong ensemble. With the bad jokes on mute, his Foggy loses the comic-relief baggage and emerges as the kind of basically happy, basically decent, basically successful young guy you simply don’t see on prestige dramas that often. When he questions Matt for going outside the law, or attacks him for lying to him for years, or cries because he’s been so badly betrayed by someone he trusted, it feels all the more real because it comes from a character who’s not accustomed to these kinds of personal traumas. This is, quite convincingly, the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

I reviewed the tenth episode of Daredevil, and extensively quoted “What About Your Friends” by TLC, for Decider.

True to its title, “Speak of the Devil” is an episode that cuts right to the heart of the questions of morality it’s toyed with since the start of the season. And the moment Matt Murdock decides to answer those questions with “Fuck it, I’m killing the Kingpin,” he gets slashed and beaten to within an inch of his life. If you think that’s a coincidence, I’ve got a story about an elderly tenant getting stabbed to death by a random junkie I’d like to sell you.

I reviewed the ninth episode of Daredevil for Decider.

“I didn’t do it for her,” he admits of the killing. “I did it for me.” He’s not proud of this, and he sports his dead dad’s cufflinks as a sort of penance. “That’s why I still wear these. To remind myself that I myself that I’m not cruel for the sake of cruelty.” He’s building up steam. “That I’m not my father! That I’m not a monster!” Then he pauses. “Am I?” You can hear it in his voice: He has no idea.

Listen, maybe there are some of you out there that aren’t plagued with the sinking suspicion that you’re every bit as big a piece of shit as you fear you may be in your worst moments. If so, hey, bully for you. Me, I found myself feeling sympathy for the devil. That’s right, the Kingpin made me choke up. Who’d have thought?

I reviewed Daredevil Episode 8 for Decider. This show is somethin’, man.

…But the biggest and funniest riff [“Stick”] played off the Daredevil comics involves the title character himself. Played by the wonderful Scott Glenn — who between this and his similarly weird role on HBO’s The Leftovers appears not so much to have aged with time but dried out like beef jerky — Stick was the martial-arts mentor who transformed Matt Murdock from a blind kid with uncontrollably sensitive senses into the black-clad badass we know and love today. As such, he’s given to a lot of portentous pronouncements: “You’ll need skills for the war,” “Surrounding yourself with soft stuff isn’t life, it’s death,” “They’re gonna suffer and you’re gonna die,” etc. In other words, he’s not a man, he’s a Frank Miller comic in human form.

Miller was just a kid trying to make his way as a comics artist in the Taxi Driver-esque mean streets of Carter-era New York City (he was mugged twice) when he parlayed a shot at the low-selling Daredevil comic into superstardom. It was he who gave the series its neo-noir makeover, incorporating techniques gleaned from American comics pioneers like Will Eisner as well as manga, Japan’s homegrown comics scene which at the time had very little readership in the West. His interest in ninjas, which he made a core component of Daredevil’s backstory, more or less singlehandedly shoved the concept into the American pop-culture mainstream: The ninja-heavy G.I. Joe characters and comics that Marvel developed owe him a great deal, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were conceived as a straight-up Daredevil parody. (Ever wonder why the Turtles’ sensei was called “Splinter”? If you’ve met “Stick,” you know the answer.)

As time went on, Miller gave Batman an even more successful grim and gritty makeover in his seminal work The Dark Knight Returns, to which the Tim Burton and Chris Nolan movie franchises owe a massive debt. He also created series of his very own, like the hardboiled crime comic Sin City and the homoerotic historical fantasia 300, both of which became hit films. Meanwhile, Miller himself became more and more like a grizzled old hardass from one of his own comics, wearing a fedora and reminiscing favorably about the good old days when America’s heroes were of the two-fisted, square-jawed variety. So when wrinkly, stubbly old Stick compares Matt Murdock to the Spartans, “the baddest of the badasses,” it’s a 300 reference that winks as much at Miller himself as the comic in question. This helps keep his zen tough-guy routine on the show just this side of knowing self-parody, instead of the unwitting kind.

I reviewed episode 7 of Daredevil, and wrote a lot about Frank “The Tank” Miller, for Decider.

Daredevil spends much of the hour trapped in a vacant building with Vladimir, the vicious Russian mob boss who until recently had been his number one target — and who, indeed, he’d beaten the living shit out of not even an hour before. Daredevil dragged him to safety and saved his life for several reasons. First, the crooked cops who are trying to kill him on Wilson Fisk’s orders are after DD as well. Second, the vigilante needs the gangster to live long enough to cough up details about his mysterious puppetmaster. Third — and this is the key part — that tough-guy line he laid down about how it’s not okay to kill but it’s perfectly fine to let people die? It’s bullshit.

The thing is, it’s not just bullshit in Matt Murdock’s book, whatever bluster he throws at Vladimir to bluff him into talking. It’s bullshit all the time, in every superheroic circumstance. Yet that didn’t stop Christopher Nolan from making it the climactic moral argument of Batman Begins, the initial entry in his genre-redefining Dark Knight trilogy of Bat-blockbusters. Remember? Batman and Ra’s al Ghul are trapped in a subway plummeting to the ground, and the Dark Knight kinda wisecracks “I won’t kill you…but I don’t have to save you.” Yeah you do, you cape-wearing murderer! It’s not okay for anyone to let a person who’s completely in their power die to punish them for perceived transgressions, let alone if that person is dressing up in costume to serve as an ethical exemplar for their community. Daredevil is no one’s idea of an ideal hero — he has way too much fun taking a road flare to Vladimir’s wounds for that — but he senses, correctly, that selectively blowing off his responsibility to save lives is, ahem, not so different than taking them directly. (Stick that in your Batsignal and light it, Bruce.) This novel, moral answer to the whole corny “what really separates a hero from a villain” question made it worth asking in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if it helps Daredevil supplant the Dark Knight as the street-level super-ethicist of choice.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Daredevil, and complained about Batman Begins, for Decider.

As Fisk, Vincent D’Onofrio leans into his ogreish physique in a way he probably hasn’t since Private Pyle went Section Eight in Full Metal Jacket. But by introducing him to us via his night out with art-gallery owner Vanessa (played by the sort of preposterously sexy Ayelet Zurer), the show uses his bulk to make him look soft, even awkward. It’s the same endearing alchemy James Gandolfini employed as Tony Soprano, whose size made him simultaneously convincing as a big lug from the suburbs and a terrifying rageaholic.

Which is a side of Fisk we certainly get to see.

I reviewed Episode 4 of Daredevil, aka My Dinner with Kingpin, for Decider.

Let me see if I have this straight. The heroes of Daredevil so far are two criminal defense attorneys (one of whom has a disability), a corporate whistleblower, a Latina health care worker, and a crusading African-American newspaper reporter who can’t afford medical coverage. The villain is a faceless conglomerate that’s exploiting economic instability to earn lucrative contracts and threatening leaks with criminal prosecution (and worse). Is this Marvel’s Daredevil, or Howard Zinn’s?

I kid, but only slightly. So far, Daredevil is an antidote to years of superhero movies about billionaires and black-ops supersoldiers saving us from ourselves. It’s a street-level show not just in the subgenre sense—“street-level superheroes” steer clear of intergalactic/extradimensional menaces in favor of the villains next door—but because these people look like us, live like us, and (with the exception of the occasional Russian mafia assassin) have the same enemies as us.

Daredevil is the People’s Superhero.

I reviewed episode three of Daredevil, which is really quite good, for Decider.

Only two episodes in and it’s already official: Daredevil has the best fight scenes in the history of live-action superheroes. Honestly, it’s not even close, which is both a compliment to the show and an insult to its genre. After all, fights are to superhero stories what singing is to opera: the part where all the characters’ emotional energy takes physical form and, ideally, knocks your socks off. Yet some 15 years into the modern superhero-movie era, we’re still saddled with either weightless CGI-enhanced acrobatics or blurry quick-cut Christopher Nolan Batman bullshit. So when that final five-and-a-half-minute spectacular of a slobberknocker finally ended, all I could think was this: It’s about time.

I reviewed episode two of Daredevil for Decider. God that fight is fantastic.