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Strictly speaking, not much “happens” in “The Path of the Righteous,” Daredevil’s eleventh episode. Not until this, anyway:

Before Karen Page turns Terminator, though? It’s a calm-before-the-storm special if ever there was one, full of characters pairing off and talking it out. Hell, even the one big fight scene, between Daredevil and Wilson Fisk’s mentally ill armorer Melvin Potter, goes from hand-to-hand…

…to heart-to heart.

You might call it meditative.

And as in meditation, the relative quiet enables us to see some things clearly, perhaps for the first time.

For starters, the episode’s constant coupling of characters for conversations reveals a series that, like many crime stories, is a saga of warring families — but they’re families of a different sort. They’re surrogate families, the tight circles of friendship that people in the city so often form around themselves when the real thing is, for whatever reason, no longer an option.

It stands to reason: Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk are nothing if not the consummate New Yorkers, as characters continuously tell them. Matt’s nurse friend Claire calls him “the man this city made.” Fisk’s confidant Wesley says he loves the city in a way the rest of us can’t even fathom. They’re both as apt to count on their crew as any Brooklynite transplant.

So on one side we’ve got Fisk, his art-dealer girlfriend Vanessa, and his work wives Wesley and Leland. Vanessa spends the episode in a coma, taking Ayelet Zurer out of the picture, but Vincent D’Onofrio, Toby Leonard Moore, and Bob Gunton are all compulsively watchable throughout the episode. How often do genre stories let you see the big boss bad guy’s underlings talk to each other about how worried they are for the guy, let alone his girlfriend? Moore’s smile of relief when he realizes Vanessa’s going to pull through is pretty deeply endearing, considering his character’s repulsive actions elsewhere in the ep, while Gunton perfectly captures the blend of awkwardness, irritation, and genuine concern unique to situations where you’ve got to comfort a coworker. (I’m guessing his comfort’s of the crocodile variety, but still.)

And D’Onofrio…jeepers creepers, does any actor on television make riskier choices? He grins his way through a speech about how he finds it impossible to pray, which was clearly written to be some agonized cri de coeur — and the grin makes it more so, not less. He dismisses past attempts at piety by saying “But it was falssee” as if the he’d inserted the words into his mouth from outside while they were too hot and is trying to avoid them burning his tongue. Search D’Onofrio’s name on Twitter and you’ll find an audience evenly divided between people who think he’s self-evidently awful int his role and those who think he’s brilliant. I know where I stand.

The rival “family” is a more ragtag bunch. One by one, Matt and Karen talk to all their confidants: Claire, Ben Urich, Foggy, the priest, each other. Every actor involved sells the mix of tenderness and emotional exhaustion this group feels in one another’s presence, like friends who’ve been through hell and back. Particular points go to Elden Henson, who continues to grow into his role as Foggy (his half-asleep, “well, I guess this was a good idea?” demeanor when he wakes up in the bed of his cheerfully amoral ex-girlfriend Marcy is priceless), and Peter McRobbie, who’s the most genuinely priest-like of any priest this lapsed Catholic has seen on TV in a long time.

But it’s not just who they talk to, it’s how they look when they’re doing it. 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.

Karen herself functions in part as the episode’s muse, or at least its cinematographer’s. She’s the subject of several sumptuously lit sequences. Here she is in Josie’s Bar, having a moody meeting with an equally photogenic Foggy:

Here she is on the street afterwards, reaching a rapprochement with Ben Urich that’s reflected in the warm glow of the streetlights:

And here she is in that final wire-taut scene with Wesley, who kidnaps her, blackmails her, and eventually dies at her hand:

“Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?” she asks, the season’s second reference to her apparently checkered past; the high-contrast overhead lighting on Deborah Ann Woll’s sculptural masterpiece of a face sells the shadowy morality of the scene.

Perhaps Daredevil’s quality is a curse in disguise. Eric Reynolds, editor of the alternative-comics powerhouse publisher Fantagraphics, tweeted the other night that superhero stories are coming to dominate film the way they’ve dominated comics for decades, much to the medium’s detriment. Daredevil is very, very good — not just by superhero standards, but by normal “good TV” standards. What if its creative success is the fig leaf that gives us a dozen more Gothams? For now, put that aside. This is a thoughtful, careful, beautiful show. With any luck, it will serve as a symbol in the same way as its title character: “a warning to us all to tread the path of the righteous.”

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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