Week 34: Into the Ring, Cut Man

Into the Ring: I've seen the first two seasons of this show already, so I can only discuss it from that perspective. The budding friendship between the three appealing leads was the best material here, followed by Karen's murder mystery. The vigilante scenes and criminal underworld stuff was definitely less interesting, although I appreciated the well-done montage at the end hinting at the scope of the operation. The best scene might have been in Matt's apartment under the neon-purple glow of the billboard; what fantastic set design and cinematography.

I don't know what was up with the guy on the lawn chair eating a sandwich during the human trafficking scene, even after a vigilante started beating everyone and guns started going off. Put the sandwich down, man! Back when AOS premiered, there was a lot of promotional talk about how it would explore the margins of a world of superheroes, and this episode has the same vibe, from New Yorkers compartmentalizing the events of The Avengers as "The Incident" to Owlsley celebrating more heroic violence as being good for business. (Dumb comic-book criminals get beaten up by superheroes; smart ones figure out how to profit from it.) It's a little jarring to see such intense, bloody violence at this point in the MCU, but I don't think it's a spoiler to say that there's more to come. I'm so very curious to know, if this is your first time seeing this, what do you think of it, especially as a tonal shift for the MCU? (7/10)

Cut Man: Wouldn't a fire extinguisher dropped from the fifth story cause a fatal head injury, or at least such a catastrophic one that the man wouldn't just wake up and have a conversation soon afterwards? And what happened to the men on the other end of the call, who the Russian was informing that he just found the man in black? They wouldn't think, as he stopped mid-sentence with a loud clanking sound, "Oh he's probably fine. Let's catch up with him later and not go immediately to his location." I'm also skeptical about Matt's ability to time the dropping of the fire extinguisher. His super-powers give him the ability to hear the man from five stories up, not the ability to calculate the velocity of a dropped object and how many seconds until the man will be in position. So as fun as it was, that scene was nonsense.

But otherwise, this was a really good and really intense episode. This series was determined to prove itself right out of the gate, particularly with that spectacular hallway-fight oner, which was as widely praised for showing the combatants exhausted (unlike too many action movies) as it was for its technical difficulty. I liked pretty much every scene in this hour except for the torturing of the criminal by cutting his facial nerve; that was too unnecessarily intense for my taste, as there were other ways to demonstrate that Claire was all-in on Matt's mission. I could also do without the English subtitles calling the hero "Masked Man" as if we don't know the title of the show we're watching. But I quibble about small things when, in fact, I'm quite entertained by this.

Here's the MCU Project connection that I'm only getting on rewatch: Battlin' Jack Murdock's opponent in the ring, Carl "Crusher" Creel, already appeared in AOS. He was in a few episodes at the beginning of season 2, the man who could change his molecular structure by touching an object, until he touched the Obelisk. Obviously he had to be in his twenties in Daredevil and his forties by the time of AOS, but it's intended to be the same character. Neat. (8/10)

Cut Man

I do enjoy seeing a superhero that isn't invincible. Murdock gets his ass kicked on the regular (which he learned from his dad).

I didn't realize Rosario Dawson was part of the MCU. I can get behind that. She's a good actress.

I'm enjoying the trickle feed of backstory we're getting on Murdock. Kid went through some rough times, man. Finding his dad dead in a back alley gave me a poor man's Bruce Wayne vibe.

That final fight scene was BRUTAL. Murdocks always get back up. Again, I like seeing him get his ass kicked, as if it's part of his fighting style. Was Daredevil in the comics like this? Or was he the typical quasi-invincible guy solving crimes and defeating bad guys?

Hear, hear to Rosario Dawson being welcome in the series. She rose to fame in unserious movies like Adventures of Pluto Nash and Josie and the Pussycats, but she revealed hidden depths around the same time in 25th Hour and I've been a big fan of her ever since. She hasn't been in anything that she hasn't made better, including this corner of the MCU.

Regarding Matt getting beaten up: I'm not an expert on Daredevil comics, and even less so on Catholicism for that matter, but my impression is that the character is intended to manifest his Catholic guilt by willingly suffering for his cause, which means taking more of a beating than the typical hero. But suffering injuries varies from character to character: Larger-than-life heroes like Thor and Hulk rarely get hurt because their invulnerability is part of their appeal, while unstoppable killing machines like Deadpool and Wolverine and Punisher suffer a ridiculous amount of graphic injury because shrugging it off to kill some more is their whole deal. Daredevil belongs to a category of relatable regular-guy underdogs like Spider-Man, for whom we are meant to identify with every blow. When they get hurt, we feel it.

And just to be clear, if I'm correct about the show's (and the comics') interpretation of Catholicism, I regard it entirely as a silly Hollywood convention. What, if you're Catholic, you're supposed to like getting beaten up? You're supposed to think you deserve it? How weird. It's about on par with how accurately writers portray neurodiversity, homosexuality, ethnic customs, or just about anything else they're not familiar with.