‘Daredevil’ Recap, Episode 1: Justice Is Blind (And, Not So Coincidentally, So Is Daredevil)

The hero behind Marvel’s first Netflix Original wasn’t always so super.

When Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko birthed the Marvel Universe in a Beatles-level burst of creativity back in the ‘60s, Daredevil—blind lawyer by day, vigilante with radar senses by night—was the runt of the litter. Co-created by Lee and artist Bill Everett (with a key design assist from Kirby) as a riff on “justice is blind,” DD came across like a store-brand Spider-Man, without ever hitting the more famous NYC superhero’s heights.

But in the long run, staying out of the spotlight made the character a star. Taking advantage of Daredevil’s low profile, off-kilter creators from future superstar Frank Miller in the ‘80s to Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev in the ‘00s used him to put their own stamp on superheroes—and sparked creative renaissances in the process.

Which leads to the big question facing Daredevil’s Netflix incarnation. Is this just another superhero show, or will it follow in the footsteps of the comics that put DD on the map, allowing developer Drew Goddard (Cloverfield) and showrunner Steven S. DeKnight (Spartacus) to put forth a genuine creative vision (no pun intended) of their own? Let the battle begin!

We kick off with a flashback to Daredevil’s origin. His dad runs to the scene of a car crash and finds little Matt Murdock flat on the concrete. The boy pushed a senior citizen out of the way of an oncoming hazmat truck, but his good Samaritan routine earned him nothing but a face full of blinding chemicals.

No one said the hero business was easy, kid.

Next—and here’s where the show grabbed my attention—an all-grown-up Murdock sits in the confessional at a Catholic Church and delivers an extended monologue about his prizefighter father, shot in an attention-deficit-defying continuous closeup. He asks the priest to forgive him because he’s about to “let the devil out,” just like his old man did in the ring.

DareDeal with it.

Pretentious or intense? You make the call! Personally I’m feeling generous—a chance to sit and watch Charlie Cox act is fine by me.

So is a ringside seat at Daredevil’s first outing as a superhero. No alien invaders or Asgardian gods for this guy: His targets are kidnapping women off the street and loading them into a cargo box. (Potential crossover with The Wire Season Two?) What follows is a fight scene, but only barely. It’s mostly a menacing guy in black pounding the tar out of people. There’s no flashy choreography or wire-fu, just one dude hitting some other dudes till they drop.

Or after they drop. Not sure this counts as heroic, but beggars can’t be choosers.
When he’s not committing assault, Matt’s chasing ambulances as a fresh-out-of-law-school attorney, alongside his pal and partner Foggy Nelson. The next great comic duo they ain’t—Foggy’s wisecracks fall flat, and actor Elden Henson delivers them like he warped in from a CBS primetime comedy. But it’s all groundwork for their first client:

I woke up like this!

Her name’s Karen Page, she’s being framed for the murder of a coworker she went out with the night before, and she’s played by True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll, who’s very good here. It’s a damsel-in-distress part for sure, existing mostly to give Matt and Foggy a client to represent and Daredevil a witness to protect. But instead of a one-note freak-out, Woll convincingly conveys how Karen’s life has been completely upended in a single night.

And it only gets worse from there. She’s attacked in her holding cell by a C.O. who’s being blackmailed by a creepy-cold mob lawyer named Wesley: Kill Karen and make it look like a suicide, or we’ll send this hitman to murder your daughter.

Hi, hitman!

At first the attack is so sudden and overwhelming that I honestly thought they were killing off the female lead in the first episode, like Janet Leigh in Psycho or something. But police brutality is all fun and games until someone loses an eye:

It’s not every day a female character on a drama gets to end her own assault by poking her attacker’s eye out, so hey!

Karen winds up crashing at Matt’s place for safety’s sake. In one of the show’s best visuals, she discovers that his corner apartment is bathed in blinding purple-white light from a nearby electronic billboard. Makes no difference to him, after all.

Karen takes this as a cue that it’s cool to strip off her soaked shirt in front of him. Do Daredevil’s superhuman radar senses enable him to “hear” breasts? If so, he ain’t saying.

Now’s as good a moment as any to note that Cox and Woll are going to make a hella hot couple when Matt and Karen inevitably hook up. They’re both gorgeous, but in a kind of soft-around-the-edges way, if that makes sense? Not like the androids who populate CW supehero shows. They’re also fine actors, too, which matters whether their clothes are off or on.

Once everyone’s fully dressed again, Matt uses his hyperfocused hearing to detect the true story Karen’s not quite telling him. As a secretary in the finance department of Union-Allied, a high-powered developer that’s rebuilding Hell’s Kitchen after its destruction in the first Avengers flick, she found a file revealing massively illegal activity under cover of urban renewal. Paging Naomi Klein—it’s superheroes vs. the shock doctrine! Karen’s attackers want that file—and she’s still got a copy.

Which, inadvisably, she sneaks back to her apartment to retrieve, only to be decked by that friendly hitman—a move approved in a rooftop meeting of Wesley and his crew multiethnic mob bosses. And like clockwork, Daredevil shows up and saves the day, which in this case means nearly plunging to his death through the window…

…and winding up so exhausted by the fight that he can barely stand up to claim victory.

Ouch.

It’s a far cry from the high-flying heroics of the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This feels more like a nasty duel from Game of Thrones—a brawl where you can really tell the purpose is for one person to hurt another person so bad they can’t move anymore.
In the end, DD takes the file and the mercenary and dumps them both at the local paper, Edward Snowdening Union-Allied’s dirty deeds. Karen goes to work at Matt and Foggy’s firm as their receptionist-slash-cook or something…

Aw!

But the bad guys are still out there, led by a mysterious voice over Wesley’s carphone, and they’ve got drug factories full of blinded slaves operating 24/7.

Shhh, Marvel’s Daredevil—now every major retail corporation will want to adopt that loss-prevention strategy.

So, let’s add it up. The performances are solid and understated. The score, by Joe Paesano, is kept to a minimum, letting audiences figure out how to feel about scenes themselves. (Trust me, watch an episode of Gotham or Outlander and discover how nice it is to hear yourself think.) The fights are always unflinching, the cinematography occasionally striking. We’re only one episode in, but already Daredevil has broken away from the superhero herd.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.