‘Daredevil’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: Hallway to Hell

HALLWAY FIGHT! HALLWAY FIGHT! HALLWAY FIGHT!

You knew the time would come. Ever since Daredevil established the template in its first season, Netflix’s Marvel shows, good bad and indifferent, have staged elaborate single-take fight scenes in which their protagonists battle their way through hordes of assailants in cramped indoor spaces, typically hallways. (Stairways, warehouses, storage facilities, and hospital wards will do in a pinch.) I’m no statistician, but with a fight that spans one single unbroken shot that lasts for over ten and a half minutes, “Blindsided,” Daredevil Season 3 Episode 4, may have just taken the crown.

It’s a weirdly revealing sequence, too, in terms of what it says about the new Matt Murdock — who only last episode reappeared to his best friend Foggy to say he’s leaving the Matt Murdock part of himself behind. Apparently that includes the part of his brain responsible for conceiving schemes that aren’t harebrained and thinking up an exit strategy when things go south, because his plan for gathering intel about the Albanian crime syndicate, which he feels Fisk singled out and snitched on for reasons more nefarious than simply trading info for favors from the Feds, is a mess.

Matt bluffs his way into prison without a photo ID by using Foggy’s stolen wallet and legal license, despite how easy this will make it for anyone to ID them both should anything go wrong. He asks for a meeting with an old client who used to do low-level shit for the Albanians, but never stops to think that doing so in full view of other inmates will bring suspicion on the guy, who cold-cocks Matt just to make it clear he wanted nothing to do with this. He gets forced into a cursory medical exam because that’s standard operating procedure if a visitor is assaulted or injured, leaving him even more vulnerable to discovery.

Turns out that’s the least of his worries, though. The doctor has been hired to kill Matt by Fisk, who can’t forgive him for threatening to sic the authorities on Fisk’s gf Vanessa during their brief prison meeting last season. Fisk even places a phonecall from his swanky house-arrest digs, where he’s been watching the action on a monitor, to let Matt know.*

(*It’s entirely possible, and even likely given what we’ve seen of Fisk’s setup, that this is all in Matt’s head; I’d say it’s certain, but for the fact that Fisk isn’t wearing the white suit he sports in Matt’s visions when we see him on the other end of the line.)

Once Matt escapes the examination room, he finds a slow rollout of attackers waiting for him: a trio of cons in jumpsuits, a pair of guards in riot gear, and finally the Albanian crime boss himself, along with his personal muscle. These guys, though, are more curious than immediately aggressive, and Matt talks them into helping him escape the prison so he can put Fisk back in, where they’ll have access and a shot at revenge. In the process the Albanian tells Matt that Fisk staged his own shanking, giving up the guy’s name (he’s been freed thanks to Fisk’s intervention) and giving further credence to both Matt and Karen’s suspicion that there’s more to Fisk’s transfer than meets the eye.

The shot continues from there as one of the Albanians, now wearing a knocked-out guard’s stolen uniform, hauls Matt through prison to the exit. It’s not quite the True Detective Season One Episode Four hellscape the show might have been going for, but the blinking red lights, blaring klaxons, and clouds of tear gas get it close enough. The most interesting and powerful aspect of the whole thing is the violence visited not just on the guards by the now-rioting inmates, but vice versa. The Netflix/Marvel shows have their fair share of hero cops and Feds for sure, but again, ever since Daredevil‘s first season, they haven’t hesitated to depict law enforcement officers as just another gang, but with uniforms. The sequence makes it clear that in terms of brutal violence, the bulls are every bit as murderous as the cons.

Matt escapes into the cab he’d left waiting for him when he first entered, but wakes up at the end of the episode just in time to see a driver he doesn’t recognize bail from the moving vehicle, allowing it to drive off a pier. This is a straight-up Perils of Pauline cliffhanger, which is kind of hilarious, but it’s a small price to pay for ten minutes of Charlie Cox beating people up and getting beaten up himself in a hallway, an infirmary, a hallway again, a storage closet, another hallway, a rec room, another hallway, a prison yard, and so on. Variety is the spice of life when it comes to fights of this sort, and director Alex Garcia Lopez uses each space to present the combatants with new advantages and challenges, rooting the battle in intelligible physical space while also allowing the environment to shape the action. It’s the stuff all good fight scenes must do, though you’d be surprised how few bother.

Meanwhile, I dunno, a bunch of other stuff happens. Foggy tells his girlfriend Marci (a vivacious Amy Rutberg, who I hope eventually gets more to do than puff up her bf’s ego) and his pal Karen about Matt’s return, and decides to mount a quixotic — or is it??? — write-in campaign for District Attorney on Marci’s advice, the thought being that by raising his profile he’ll ensure his safety while also drawing attention to the effed-up Fisk deal that’s put him back in danger. Karen gets pretty mad that Matt lied to them, again; she also digs into a front business Fisk is using, administered by some guy named Felix, who’s the same person mentioned as Vanessa’s handler in a previous episode. She also pulls a gun on some street harassers, which is nice to see, but serves the primary purpose of reminding us she secretly killed one of Fisk’s henchmen during Season One and was once suspected of killing her brother, too, which has been mentioned a few times so far this season.

Most importantly, I assume, Fisk lies to internal investigators about the execution-style shooting of surrendering Albanian hitmen by his frenemy Agent Dex, at whom he’s been shooting creepy Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling glances all episode long, thus saving the guy’s job. In a subsequent confrontation he expresses his sympathies to the guy, whose efforts are being described as a debacle by the press. Now he’s in Dex’s head. Will a hallway fight ensue? Does the devil have horns?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Daredevil Season 3 Episode 4 ("Blindsided") on Netflix