Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 wrapped last night with its finale, “The Southern Cross,” and the creative team delivered the most overtly political season of any live-action Marvel project to date. The showrunners said so themselves before a single episode aired.
First, the facts on the ground. Luke Cage does not become mayor. The rumor circulating online is wrong. Wilson Fisk is forced out of office and exiled from the country under a deal brokered by the governor and a CIA fixer. The new mayor introduced in the Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer is Sheila Rivera, played by Zabryna Guevara. Luke Cage appears in the finale’s final minutes to reunite with Jessica Jones and their daughter, setting up the Defenders reunion in Season 3. He has no involvement in the mayoral storyline.
What actually happens in the finale: Matt Murdock, defending Karen Page at one of Fisk’s kangaroo-court tribunals, declares himself Daredevil in open court to corroborate evidence that Fisk smuggled weapons aboard the Northern Star. The declaration ends his legal career and his freedom. Governor Marge McCaffrey and a CIA operative named Mr. Charles use the moment to pressure Fisk into resigning and renouncing his U.S. citizenship. Fisk barricades himself in the courthouse, livestreams what amounts to a war speech, and goes on a rampage through a mob of protestors who have stormed the building. Daredevil saves him from the crowd, then offers him the deal: leave New York forever. Fisk accepts. Matt walks into prison. The season ends with Matt in a cell, Connor Powell in a nearby cell glaring at him, and Cole North giving Matt a silent nod of respect from the corridor.
The closing minutes set up Season 3 in three beats. Heather Glenn, who has been unraveling all season, puts on Muse’s mask in front of a mirror. BB Urich is welcomed into Ben Urich’s old office at the Bulletin. Bullseye boards a plane with Mr. Charles for international wetwork. Luke Cage walks into Alias Investigations.
That is a strong finale on paper. The problem is what the season built toward it.
Showrunner Dario Scardapane told Entertainment Weekly, The Wrap, and SFX Magazine that Season 2 was built on the historical playbook of autocrats, and named Nero, Pinochet, and Franco by name. The Anti-Vigilante Task Force, dressed in black tactical gear, raiding bodegas and running detention facilities in Red Hook, was designed to parallel ICE operations. “The raids that we wrote a year and a half ago,” Scardapane said, “and then it’s like, you go from editing and look at the news, and the imagery was almost exact.” Executive producer Sana Amanat told the same outlet she asked Scardapane to stop writing because the parallels were getting too intense.
Matthew Lillard, playing CIA fixer Mr. Charles, called the season “a battle cry for everyday citizens to do the right thing and fight the oppression that a lot of people right now are feeling.” Vincent D’Onofrio said the season’s content would be “truly frightening for a New Yorker” if it were real. Brad Winderbaum, head of Marvel Television, offered the boilerplate: “Any kind of reflection on reality is coincidental.”
None of this was coincidental. The creative team said it wasn’t coincidental. Multiple times. In multiple publications. Before the season aired.
The season also staged what SlashFilm called “a reverse January 6th” in its finale, with a mob storming a courthouse to forcibly remove a sitting official, captured in TikTok-style cell phone footage, framed unambiguously as righteous popular uprising. The bodega abduction sequence in Episode 3 was described by Scardapane as a deliberate homage to Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station. One of the raid sequences was explicitly meant to evoke the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. This was not a show about a guy in a red suit punching criminals. This was a show using the trappings of a Marvel property to make a very specific political argument.
Critics loved it. Rotten Tomatoes settled around 91% from critics. Audiences were largely aligned at 87-89%. The reviews were glowing across most mainstream outlets.
Nobody watched it.
Luminate data shows Season 2 drew approximately 4.5 million views and 10.8 million hours watched across its first five episodes, against Season 1’s 8.3 million views and 24 million hours in the equivalent window. That is a 46% drop in views and a 54% drop in hours watched. The show failed to chart on the Luminate Top 10 streaming originals. It also failed, again, to chart on Nielsen’s weekly streaming Top 10, making this two consecutive seasons of a flagship Marvel property that could not crack a chart that year-old episodes of other shows manage routinely.
Season 3 is already filming. Matt is in prison, which creates the obvious question of how Daredevil operates from inside a cell. Heather Glenn as Lady Muse is the new villain. The Hand is being seeded through the Spider-Man: Brand New Day continuity. Set photos confirm the full Defenders reunion: Mike Colter, Krysten Ritter, and Finn Jones are all back. Fisk will likely return — set photos show D’Onofrio with a new beard, the standard visual shorthand for an exile-and-return arc.
Scardapane has also confirmed that Season 3 will move away from the topical political mode. He told SFX Magazine: “Getting into the realm of politics, New York politics… as it becomes almost too topical it feels like it’s going away from the large, mythological genre stuff.” The man who spent two years making the most explicitly political Marvel project in the franchise’s history has decided that the topical approach may have pulled the show too far from what made it worth watching.
The Netflix Daredevil ran three seasons on a simple formula: a blind Catholic lawyer fights street-level crime and wrestling-grade supervillains in Hell’s Kitchen with a level of violence that broadcast television wouldn’t allow. The show understood that Matt Murdock’s faith, his legal career, and his masked vigilantism were in constant tension, and it built stories out of that tension. Born Again inherited the goodwill of that formula, partially restored it in Season 1 despite a notoriously troubled production, and then used Season 2 to argue about ICE raids while the viewership dropped by half.
The Season 3 setup is the strongest the franchise has had since 2016. The Defenders reunion, Lady Muse as a new villain, Matt in prison, the Hand returning — all of that is promising. Whether the audience that walked away during Season 2 comes back is a different question.
What would it take to get you back watching Daredevil: Born Again for Season 3?
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I got a headache reading through that.
Political nonsense aside, how much plot does the MCU need at this point? It's crossed over from "homework" to a weekend job, picking up casual hours on the side, or putting in volunteer time at the senior center.
Even if it was good and not alternate reality, bizzaro world, Hollywood fan-fiction, I would still hard pass on this.
Who has the time and patience for such things?