Just one year after the Man Without Fear and his eternal struggle with Wilson Fisk finally arrived in the MCU, Daredevil: Born Again is already back for its second season.
Since WandaVision became Marvel Studios’ first TV series in 2021, 12 other live-action shows have followed. Of those 13 series, just two have lasted longer than one season: Loki and Born Again. Although Season 2’s eight-episode run doesn’t begin until Tuesday, Born Again was renewed by Disney+ for a third season back in September, setting it up to be the longest-running live-action MCU series to date.
Marvel’s show of confidence in the Daredevil reboot is consistent with the studio’s ongoing shift in TV strategy. After the first few years of the MCU TV era saw Marvel Studios struggle to translate the successful formula it had found with its blockbuster films during the Infinity Saga to the small screen, Marvel leaned into a more traditional TV-making approach, including hiring showrunners and placing a greater emphasis on multi-season, serialized TV. The first season of Born Again was produced amid the early stages of this transition, and the final product reflected all of the chaos that was transpiring behind the scenes.
Born Again was initially led by head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman (Covert Affairs), who designed the reboot as a legal procedural that eschewed connections to the original Netflix series. But when Kevin Feige and other Marvel executives reviewed the footage of the six episodes that had been shot by the time production was halted during the 2023 writers strike, they decided that the series needed a significant overhaul. Ord and Corman were let go and replaced by showrunner Dario Scardapane (The Punisher), Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Moon Knight, Loki) were hired as lead directors, and most of the original actors from Netflix’s Daredevil—who had previously been left out of the new cast—were brought back as the series started to embrace the history of the original that ran for three seasons and 39 episodes from 2015 to 2018.
Rather than scrap the six episodes of footage from Ord and Corman’s version of the series, Marvel decided to film three more episodes’ worth of material under Scardapane’s new creative vision and stitch everything together. The result was an uneven season of television that felt like two different shows happening at the same time. Even though the seams were apparent in its inconsistent, nine-episode Season 1 slate, Born Again still had its fair share of highlights and was a nostalgic reprisal of the project that established Netflix’s Defenders Saga, which spanned six TV shows, including a crossover series. And in Season 2, Born Again is back under a more unified creative vision, with Scardapane overseeing the process from the jump.
In Season 1, “we had to make changes, we had to pivot, and we had to do some kind of surgery,” Scardapane said on the Born Again official podcast. “But Season 2 is truly 100 percent the show it wants to be.”
Before Tuesday’s Season 2 premiere, let’s take a look back at what happened in Season 1, reintroduce a major character from the Defenders era who’s set to join the series, and preview what else might be in store for the upcoming episodes.
Previously on … Born Again
The series premiere began with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) living a happy life together after starting a law firm in the years that had passed since the events of Netflix’s Daredevil. It was a joyful, nostalgic return to the past, as the central trio carried out the dream they’d envisioned in the closing moments of the original series. But before the main story line of Born Again started in earnest, the reboot killed its past to make room for its future.
While the old Daredevil crew is celebrating the retirement of NYPD detective Cherry (Clark Johnson) at their favorite bar, Josie’s, Foggy receives a call from a distressed client who’s worried about his safety. It turns out to be a trap laid by Benjamin Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), a.k.a. Bullseye, to lure Murdock away from the scene so he can take out his true target: Foggy. The plan succeeds without a hitch. Well, almost. Bullseye shoots and kills Foggy, but he nearly dies when Murdock—who dons his Daredevil suit in the show’s first, CGI-heavy action sequence—tosses him off a roof in an act of vengeance. After crossing the line in his attempt to kill Bullseye, Murdock gives up his hero act for good—or so he thinks.
Born Again resumes one year after Foggy’s death, as Murdock lives his new civilian life. He’s started a law firm with former district attorney Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), and Karen has moved to San Francisco. Meanwhile, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) has returned to New York to make a career change of his own: running for mayor. With his wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), back at his side, Fisk wins the election and seeks to leave his criminal past behind. But as the season progresses, Murdock and Fisk find themselves fighting against their inner demons (devils?) and resisting change as they renew their unfinished fight for New York City.
When a serial killer named Muse (Hunter Doohan) rises to prominence, Murdock and Fisk finally surrender themselves to their old ways and their ever-flexible views of the law. Murdock takes up the mantle of Daredevil again, while Fisk assembles an anti-vigilante task force of crooked cops and empowers them with unchecked authority. Everything comes to a head when Bullseye breaks out of prison and targets Kingpin at the mayoral ball, where Murdock also discovers that Vanessa had been responsible for hiring Poindexter to kill Foggy. Murdock ruins his fancy tux as he takes a bullet for Fisk, and the mayor later repays him by sending the task force to hunt Murdock down at his apartment shortly after he returns from a brief stint in the hospital.
The finale is highlighted by a classic team-up between Daredevil and the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), a.k.a. Frank Castle, who backs up his old frenemy in the ensuing fight against the anti-vigilante task force. Although Murdock and Castle manage to escape the bloody conflict, the first season concludes with the Punisher getting captured by Fisk’s goons as the mayor unveils his Safer Streets Initiative, which features citywide curfews, the outlawing of vigilantes, and a declaration of martial law. Grossly outnumbered by Fisk’s forces, Daredevil and Karen—who’s back from the Bay Area—decide to delay any bold moves against Fisk in favor of regrouping with more allies to lead the resistance against Mayor Kingpin.
In a post-credits scene, Castle wastes little time in finagling a way out of the cage that Fisk is holding him in at the port in Red Hook, but there are still dozens of other hostages being held under flimsy suspicions of being vigilantes—or simply for being dissidents during Fisk’s reign of terror.
The first season of Born Again acts as a sort of origin story for both Murdock and Fisk as they’re resurrected in the MCU. The series breaks down the core of their characters as they attempt to start new lives far from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, only for them to be pulled back into their traditional roles of hero and villain who forever clash over the city they both love. Although there’s no shortage of drama in Season 1, it all amounts to a setup for the full-on war that Fisk will wage against vigilantes in Season 2.
More on ‘Daredevil’
Reintroducing: Jessica Jones
Ever since Cox and D’Onofrio reprised their Daredevil roles during guest appearances in separate MCU projects (Spider-Man: No Way Home and Hawkeye, respectively) within one week of each other in late 2021, fans of Marvel’s Netflix era have been wondering if and when other leading actors from the Defenders Saga would follow them into the MCU. Bernthal joined them first as he returned as Castle in Season 1, and Marvel Studios hasn’t been shy about promoting which title character is next to arrive: Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter).
When Season 1 concluded with a tease of Daredevil’s army in the fight to come, it featured a rather unimpressive group composed of a few current and retired cops, Karen, and a bartender. (No disrespect to Josie.) But early teasers have highlighted that Jones is set to reunite with Murdock and become the second member of the Defenders team to enter the MCU. And given that Jones served as the star of Netflix’s second Marvel series, Jessica Jones, it’s only fitting that she’s next in line.
Jessica Jones—which started its three-season run in 2015, the same year as Daredevil—centered on the show’s titular private investigator, who acquired superhuman strength (and some serious hops) after undergoing an experimental treatment as a teenager while recovering from a car crash that claimed the lives of her parents and her brother and left her comatose. The show’s first season follows Jessica as she tries to piece her life back together after her brief superhero career ended in a collision with Kilgrave (David Tennant), a much less noble superhuman who uses mind control abilities to manipulate his victims into doing his bidding.
Jessica is emotionally, physically, and sexually abused by Kilgrave. Under his spell, she kills a woman who is married to the man she later falls in love with: the unbreakable Luke Cage (Mike Colter). (Clearly Jess has some issues to work through. It’s kind of her whole thing.) As Jones deals with her PTSD, she takes on cases for her detective agency, Alias Investigations, until Kilgrave returns to New York City to try to ruin her life in a twisted attempt to get her back. Although much of the season finds her looking for a way to bring Kilgrave to justice, she eventually sees no other option than to kill him. In the season finale, she snaps Kilgrave’s neck to free a group of hostages held under his mind control, including her best friend, Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor).
Jessica Jones peaked in its first season, but the subsequent two seasons had their moments, as Jones continued her journey as a crime-fighting PI with an attitude. She didn’t meet Murdock until their stories intersected in 2017’s The Defenders, the crossover miniseries that failed to deliver on the promise of Marvel’s first four Netflix shows—Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist—aligning, as their eponymous heroes joined forces in New York City to fight the rise of an ancient criminal organization known as the Hand.
Jones has far too much history from the 39 episodes of her three-season solo series and the eight installments of The Defenders for Born Again to cover as she reemerges in the MCU in a supporting role. A long time has passed both within the characters’ shared universe and since Jessica Jones was canceled in early 2019, and there’s no telling how much Born Again will even attempt to address what Jones has been doing since then. While it remains to be seen what’s in store for her future in the MCU, Scardapane recently told Entertainment Weekly that he’d always been interested in bringing her back into the fold.
“Jessica has been part of the conversation since when I started,” Scardapane said. “She’s part of this particular world and, in this case, when you're doing a story about ‘vigilantes are now being hunted,’ ‘vigilantes are now underdogs,’ what does that look like with that particular underdog? And that just puts a smile on a writer's face.”
Unless Scardapane and Co. are saving some surprises for Season 2, Jones is set to be the sole Defender to join the series—at least for now. When Entertainment Weekly asked Scardapane why Jones was selected out of the three options, he praised the writing of Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg while adding that his team was interested in exploring how these characters have evolved since the conclusion of the Netflix shows. “Jessica Jones, in particular, has interesting life events that we wanted to explore, and the banter between Charlie and Krysten is so damn good,” Scardapane explained. “We needed to get that flavor in.”
Born Again Season 2 and Connections to Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Early looks at Season 2 have also teased bigger roles for Karen Page and Bullseye, the latter of whom managed to finish the first season as a free man. Although neither character was featured in Ord and Corman’s initial version of the series, which limited them to small parts in Season 1 once Scardapane took over, Page and Poindexter appear to be getting brighter spotlights in Season 2 as Scardapane continues to build on the foundations left by the original show. The main teaser trailer also highlights the returns of two of Fisk’s closest allies, Buck Cashman (Arty Froushan) and Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini), as well as a mysterious new antagonist named Mr. Charles (Matthew Lillard).
Born Again notably returns just one week after Sony and Marvel Studios dropped the first look at their highly anticipated summer blockbuster, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which has some interesting implications for this Daredevil season.
Early in the teaser for the film, which is set after the events of Born Again Season 2, Spider-Man receives the key to the city from the mayor. But instead of Kingpin smiling for the photo op with the former Avenger, it’s his top aide, Sheila Rivera (Zabryna Guevara), which certainly doesn’t bode too well for Fisk’s chances against Daredevil and Co. in Born Again. It feels like a pretty significant spoiler just before the new season gets underway, but the connections don’t end there.
The Brand New Day trailer also features the return of Bernthal’s Castle, who’s set to make his big-screen MCU debut. Born Again producer Sana Amanat has already confirmed that Bernthal won’t be reprising his role in Season 2, as he’ll be starring in his own Marvel Studios television special (written by Bernthal), which is also set to arrive later this year. Before its release, Brand New Day might just explain what Frank has been up to since his escape in Born Again—and why Spider-Man is on a first-name basis with him.
Lastly, the end of the Brand New Day teaser features a glimpse of the Hand, which appeared not only in The Defenders but also in Daredevil’s original run on Netflix. There are far too many villains in the span of the 160-second trailer for us to tell how much of a role the criminal organization will have in the movie, but the Hand’s involvement represents more evidence of the MCU placing Daredevil and Spider-Man in the same New York City for the first time since Murdock’s brief cameo in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. While these connections may amount to little more than Easter eggs, the events of Born Again could also be reflected in Brand New Day, situating the series in the larger MCU in a more tangible way than before.
But unlike Marvel’s promos, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here. After the studio buried a strong miniseries in Wonder Man by releasing all eight of its episodes at once in late January, Marvel is pulling out all the stops for Born Again in this rare instance of an MCU show’s second-season return. For the first time, Disney+ will publish a companion video podcast series that will be released alongside the eight TV installments. Given that production for Season 3 is already underway, Marvel is clearly betting on Scardapane and Born Again to lead this new era of MCU TV. Over the next eight weeks, we’ll see if that gamble pays off.
