[COLUMN] Daredevil: Born Again Lacks Faith and Insists on Certainty | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Born Again, up until the fourth episode, which streamed this week on Disney+.

What an adaptation changes is often as revealing as what it chooses to keep.

Daredevil: Born Again draws from a wide variety of sources. Wilson Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) tenure as Mayor of New York, along with Matt Murdock’s (Charlie Cox) retirement from his role as Daredevil, is lifted from Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s recent run. Fisk’s campaign and the villain Muse (Hunter Doohan) come from Charles Soule and Ron Garney’s preceding run. And the Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes) story is adapted from Brian Michael Bendis and Manuel Gutierrez’s “Trial of the Century” arc.

There are obviously other influences in there as well. Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James) was created by Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera, and it seems like Karen Page’s (Deborah Ann Woll) move to San Francisco is also an allusion to Daredevil’s history with that city. However, those are the big influences, to the point that Zdarsky has joked about receiving a cheque for his contributions to the story underpinning Born Again.

However, the show makes a number of significant changes in how it executes those story beats, and it’s interesting to explore why it does that. There are plenty of reasons to change a story in translating it from panel to screen. For example, costumes that look great on the panel and animation may not look good in live action. It might also be necessary to simplify the narrative flow, move some details around, and shift the emphasis to play to the strengths of a different medium.

The biggest changes that Born Again makes in adapting these plots for the screen concerns the characterization of Matt Murdock. In Zdarsky and Checchetto’s recent run, Matt’s retirement is prompted by a disastrous error in judgment. On patrol, Matt is tired. While taking down a suspect during a routine crime, Matt miscalculates the strength of his blow. This results in the death of the young man. This weighs on Matt’s conscience, causing him to give up the cowl.

It's a genuinely bold choice, and one of the most compelling features of Zdarsky and Checchetto’s extended run is that they refuse to exonerate Matt. There is no easy or convenient revelation that this was some secret plot by Wilson Fisk to undermine Matt. The dead man is not miraculously resurrected. Matt has to live with the fact that, while doing something that was always inherently reckless and dangerous, he made a split-second error in judgment, and a person died.

Born Again opts to rewrite the terms of Matt’s retirement. Matt retires after the murder of his close friend Foggy Nelson (Eldon Henson) by the assassin Benjamin Poindexter (Wilson Bethel). Matt fails to save Foggy, and then throws Poindexter off the roof, smashing him into the pavement. However, because Poindexter is the popular comic book character Bullseye, Matt doesn’t actually kill Poindexter. He beats him no more or no less seriously than he has ever beaten Wilson Fisk.

This is a strange choice, because it completely reworks Matt’s decision to retire from being Daredevil. Indeed, while Zdarsky and Checchetto framed Matt’s retirement as a sort of justified penance, Born Again frames it as a selfish indulgence. Karen Page refuses to speak with Matt after he retires, acting as if it is a completely unreasonable thing to do. Indeed, Hell’s Kitchen seems to call out for a vigilante. There is no reason for Matt to have stopped. It makes no logical sense.

This lack of sense is perhaps understandable, given that the entire opening sequence of Born Again was added in reshoots after six episodes of the show had been completed. Given that Poindexter was only added to the show in reshoots, it seems likely that Matt’s retirement (which was seemingly always part of the show) was motivated by different factors in the original version of Born Again. The version that plays out on the released show has been clumsily stitched together.

Over a cup of coffee with Fisk, Matt states that “a line was crossed”, which is a very strange way of framing his decision to retire. Surely, Foggy’s death just proves that Hell’s Kitchen needs more vigilantes? A later confrontation between Matt and the vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), who was seemingly also a late addition to the show, is similarly logically fuzzy. The argument seems to be that Matt is just really sad that he lost his best friend, but there are clumsy gestures at other ideas.

“You hate yourself, because it’s eating you up and you ain’t done a goddamn thing about it,” Frank yells at Matt. “You know you didn’t do a goddamn thing.” Frank seems to be suggesting that Matt might have retired because he didn’t kill Poindexter, even though he literally threw the assassin off a roof onto the pavement. “I ran him down,” Matt protests. “I did what I had to do, and I let the system take care of the rest.” Matt repeats, “He got life.” It is very strange.

There are similarly weird choices made in the show’s adaptation of “Trial of the Century.” In the comic, Matt uses Hector’s trial as an egocentric way to put his own superhero persona on trial. It is reckless and self-serving, using Hector to try the very concept of a vigilante. Matt’s driven to defend himself, not his client. The story ends with Matt’s arrogance and selfishness getting Hector convicted, and Hector is shot while fleeing arrest, as a direct consequence of Matt’s selfishness.

In contrast, Born Again exonerates both Matt and Hector. Hector is found not guilty by a jury of his peers. He is released. Matt doesn’t destroy Hector’s life, he saves it. Hector is then murdered extrajudicially by a member of a secret organization within the New York City Police Department who styles themselves after the Punisher, one of the show’s genuinely provocative choices. However, as with Matt’s retirement, the reworking of the story is designed to ensure that Matt remains “likable.”

Bendis’ extended run on Daredevil is built around the idea that Matt is having a nervous breakdown and engaging in self-destructive behavior that is actively harmful to the people around him. This is a recurring motif in Daredevil comics. Under Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, Matt ends up leading a cult of undead ninja assassins because it is easier than dealing with the mess that he has made of his life. Matt is a deeply ambiguous character, a superhero who makes mistakes and has errors in judgment.

This is what makes Matt Murdock so interesting as a character and Daredevil so fascinating as a franchise. Matt is a character who is allowed to make mistakes and to suffer the consequences of those mistakes. Because Daredevil is a less marketable brand than, say, Spider-Man or the X-Men, Marvel could historically afford to take risks in terms of how Matt was characterized and written. Matt could be unsympathetic. Matt could be unpleasant. Matt could be reckless.

Even on Netflix, Matt Murdock was allowed to be ambiguous. Much of the tension of the first season of Daredevil arose from the recurring sense that Matt was more interested in justifying his violent impulses than he was in pursuing any notion of justice. The series leaned hard into the contradictions of Matt Murdock. He was a Catholic who dressed up as a devil. He was a defence lawyer who operated as a vigilante punishing the accused.

These contradictions and paradoxes are central to the character. Writer and artist Frank Miller is credited with emphasizing Matt’s Catholicism, arguing, “I decided [Daredevil] had to be a Catholic because only a Catholic could be a vigilante and an attorney at the same time.” Matt’s character is built around very Catholic notions like doubt and faith. There is no certainty, no fate, no predestination. Matt is constantly lost, and having to find his way out of the darkness.

Born Again sands down so much of what makes Matt Murdock and Daredevil unique within the framework of superhero storytelling. There is a sense that is because the show is perhaps uncomfortable raising broader questions about the concept of vigilantism and extrajudicial violence. After all, in moving from Netflix to Disney+, Matt Murdock is now part of the larger tapestry of a shared universe built around the assumption that superheroes are an unqualified good.

Born Again features Wilson Fisk waging a war against the vigilantes in New York City, another plot point lifted from Zdarsky and Checchetto’s run. “These vigilantes are a threat to any society based on the rule of law,” Fisk insists. “These vigilantes, they are not heroes.” It seems like Born Again is very anxious to avoid giving Fisk any credible support for that argument, and so is afraid to have Matt make mistakes or miscalculations.

Instead, Born Again consistently argues that these masked vigilantes are a necessity for the safety and security of the city. Asked to justify what he does, Hector insists, “The people need a hero.” In examination, Matt observes that Hector “could have just walked away, ignored the problem.” In contrast, Hector insists that he simply does not have that ability within his character, arguing, “It’s who I am. It’s a calling. I didn’t choose it. It chose me.”

In the source comic, when Matt puts the concept of vigilantism on trial through the proxy of Hector, he loses; the jury rejects his arguments. In Born Again, the jury embraces them. This is very true to the narrative rhythms of a Marvel Studios project, where the protagonist will experience a second act setback and, rather than learning to evolve or change themselves to overcome that obstacle, they will merely insist that they are correct and the narrative will affirm them.

There is a sense in which Born Again is not really about Matt Murdock, and instead Matt Murdock serves as a proxy for the existential anxieties of the larger studio, in much the same way that the “what now?” midlife crises of movies like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder and Eternals tapped into the mood of a company looking for a direction after the triumph of Avengers: Endgame.

Marvel Studios is in a somewhat precarious position, following the underwhelming box office results for The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World, so there is no longer any room for doubt. Born Again does not have the luxury of questioning its central superhero or the idea of superheroes, as the entire brand of the company depends on the belief that superheroes are essential. To introduce any doubt – no matter how Catholic – is to risk undermining the enterprise.

Born Again leaves no room for ambiguity or uncertainty. Matt cannot be the compelling flawed character that he was in the comics or even during the Netflix show. Matt’s break from superheroism cannot be anything that the narrative entertains as a viable or credible choice. The jury cannot be out. There is too much riding on Born Again to let anything remain a matter of faith.