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Please allow me to introduce Wilson Fisk.

He’s a man of wealth…

…and taste.

And he knows that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Or heads.

This episode, titled “Shadows in the Glass,” is Daredevil’s biggest leap of faith yet into the idea that it can transform its main character’s archnemesis into his co-protagonist. Though not without precedent — see Ben Linus on Lost or Gus Fring on Breaking Bad — it’s still a risky proposition considering the context. If your enemy’s a superhero instead of a bunch of castaways or a rogue chemistry teacher, that makes you a supervillain. I mean, really: Dude just blew up half of Hell’s Kitchen. Now we gotta feel bad for him because he had a rough childhood?

Well, yeah, yeah we do. A series of flashbacks takes us to the Rolling Stone–soundtracked ‘70s, where as “Brown Sugar” blares among the brownstones, young Wilson gets a lesson in power politics from his dad, Herc from The Wire.

The elder Fisk at first seems more like a blowhard than an out-and-out bully, unless you catch the bruises on his wife’s arms. The camera, admirably, doesn’t make a point of them; they’re just there, seen and not seen, a fact of the Fisk family’s life. His primary focus is running for local office, for the sole purpose of the financial windfall from those juicy bribes if he wins. Already, the future Kingpin is learning firsthand how easy it is to buy and sell even the citizens you’d expect to be upstanding, which comes in handy when he pays crooked Detective Hoffman to murder his partner and childhood friend Blake.

Enough cash and you can make anyone’s tears dry up. But when you’ve got no money, you’ve got to stop that sadness by any means at your disposal. That’s another lesson from dear old dad, whose loss in the election leaves him up to his eyeballs in debt to the mob. Mr. Fisk teaches his bullied son to stand up for himself by literally kicking people when they’re down.

But as with Matt Murdock and his mentor Stick in the last episode, the student soon becomes the teacher. Forced to sit and stare at the white wall of their apartment (well, that explains the painting) as his father brutally beats his mother, Wilson snaps, grabs a hammer, and takes his father down.

Notice a pattern with this stuff? Note to Daredevil: If you fight Wilson Fisk, do not fall down, or you’ll wind up a stain on the rug. And best to stay away from tables, just to be sure.

After the hammer party winds down, Wilson watches his mother dismember his father’s corpse, which, he tells a teary-eyed Vanessa in the present day, he helped her dispose of a piece at a time. “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 where 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?

Apparently, Vanessa’s on my wavelength…

The thing is that Wilson Fisk really is a monster. His self-doubt is wholly justified, his lack of enjoyment a dodge of the fact that he’s doing it anyway. But he’s internalized the warped moral universe that formed around his father just as permanently as Matt Murdock learned the martial-arts moves Stick taught him as a tween. He can question the horror he perpetrates and convince himself it’s a necessary evil.

Murdock and his new reporter friend Ben Urich, of course, disagree. Together they’re preparing to drag Fisk out into the light, with a scorching column in which Urich talks about a people “struggling to claw our way back to a middle class that no longer exists because of those who take more than they deserve.” My God, this is a line of dialogue from a superhero TV show! Occupy the Marvel Cinematic Universe!

But Fisk beats his enemies to the punch by outing himself as Hell’s Kitchen’s savior before they can smear him as its destroyer. And when he does so, his internal moral calculus checks out. He may be a murderer, a terrorist, a druglord, a gentrifying scumbag whose best friends in the world are his hilariously sleazy lawyer and accountant Wesley and Leland. But when he presents himself as a hero, he’s showing the world a face he believes to be true. He’ll convince them, like he tries to convince himself, that he’s no monster, even as the hammer falls.

PREVIOUSLY: ‘DAREDEVIL’ RECAP, EPISODE 1: JUSTICE IS BLIND (AND, NOT SO COINCIDENTALLY, SO IS DAREDEVIL)
‘DAREDEVIL’ RECAP, EPISODE 2: FIGHT NIGHT!
‘DAREDEVIL’ RECAP, EPISODE 3: (SUPER) POWER TO THE PEOPLE
‘DAREDEVIL’ RECAP, EPISODE 4: SAY HI TO THE BAD GUY
‘DAREDEVIL’ RECAP, EPISODE 5: DATE NIGHT!
‘DAREDEVIL’ RECAP, EPISODE 6: I JUST CALLED TO SAY I HATE YOU
‘DAREDEVIL’ RECAP, EPISODE 7: STUDENT-TEACHER RELATIONS

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

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