#tl;dr fisk is just the Worst but overall this season was hugely better than s2 for me

[theladyragnell]

Thoughts on Daredevil s3

Which I have finished at last, several months later than the rest of the world!

1. Overall, this was so, SO much better than season 2. There was some stuff about it I really loved, and if there’s some stuff about it I didn’t love, well, again: significantly better than s2. So let’s start with things I loved!

2. I feel like this season, for the first time, they really made good use of Matt’s soundscape, consistently and well. His hearing loss after Midland Circle in the beginning, and how that was conveyed, and then throughout--his hallucinations of Fisk, the ways he overheard and eavesdropped, it all felt like a much better use of his superpowers and of the soundscape (I wish I’d been listening on headphones like I’d been in the first two seasons, I bet it would have been even more pronounced there). Since they never use much/very obtrustive background music, it was nice to have some Interesting Sound Stuff to consider. (Though music-wise, they occasionally called up the theme music, which I appreciated, and I think it was kind of an orchestral version of it playing somewhere at the end there during the funeral scene somewhere?)

3. I also feel like s3 managed a more consistent arc than season 2, which was a bit of a mess story-wise for me. Matt got an interesting, if exasperating, arc throughout the season, and his speech at the funeral felt really satisfying and also like a good ending for the show, honestly! I’m not very sad about cancellation, with the ending we got, other than knowing that Vanessa would have been a more interesting Kingpin and I would have liked to see that. It felt satisfying and full-circle and like Matt was in a good place, and I was really happy to leave him there, in the end. He was a dick along the way, but that’s just part of The Murdock Charm(TM).

4. And other people got good arcs too! Nadeem, of course, was really really amazing, more on him in a bit, and they did such a good job making him real and sympathetic and a foil for Dex. Foggy got an interesting plot that takes advantage of his strengths! (We got to meet the Nelsons!!!!!) Karen got some good moments! We had MAGGIE, who really deserves her own bullet point!

5. How about I give her that bullet point, actually? Not so much because I want to talk about an arc for her but just because I deeply appreciate her and her presence in the story? She’s fucked up, in her past, and dealt with untreated mental illness (just like her son), and she’s a woman of deep faith and also above all just a lot of fun? She’s such a valuable addition to the cast, and I like where they left things with her and Matt, too.

6. Karen. I liked getting to see her backstory, even if it took me out of the tension of the plot some and it could have been done in a different way for sure. (This show never learned how to use its flashbacks, except in one case, below.) I loved her telling Foggy and Matt about Wesley, and getting those secrets out in the air for them! I also love that, after Matt treating her like she was innocent, like she says, her argument against his killing Fisk is that there’s a kind of innocence she wants him to preserve. Both of them knowing that she’s the one who’s crossed that line where he hasn’t leaves their characters in a more interesting place for me than they’ve been pretty much all along. Though I still can’t say that it is A Thing I Ship, particularly.

7. The One Flashback This Show Ever Did Right: the Dex episode, with Fisk strolling through his memories and the tapes and everything! I can’t say I was wild about the CONTENT of the flashbacks, but mechanically, they did great with that whole situation.

8. And now onto Things This Season Did Less Well. Let’s start with a minor gripe! Look. I enjoyed Foggy/Marci in this season. It was sweet! But it 100% did not feel like the Marci we were presented with in the first two seasons to me. It feels like somewhere she and they could maybe have ended up, but only a matter of months down the line from the end of s2? That I have more trouble with. It felt like they wanted Foggy to have a very serious girlfriend and put Marci in the role. Maybe other people do not agree! But the Netflix MCU has problems with consistency in its female characters particularly, and this feels like a small example of it.

9. (Speaking of Women Netflix MCU Has Done Dirty, I miss Claire so much. She and Sister Maggie should bond over all the bullshit Matt was spouting for the first 2/3 of this season.)

10. Look. The villains. There were points when Dex was interesting (by which I mean chilling), and there are points at which the PLOT was interesting, but there was no point at which I found Wilson Fisk interesting. Every time he opened his damn mouth to make another gravel-voiced speech my brain just started making static noises. He was just. So bad. But then again, I have always found him boring, so maybe I just resent having to sit through all of his shit again. And Dex was chilling, but also at times unintentionally ridiculous, and I did not know what to do with all that nonsense at all. At least Vanessa was there in the end, being chilling and fascinating and The Villain We Deserve.

10a. I am hesitant to mention this because I really have no right to be speaking on the matter, but I am so uncomfortable with everything that happened with “Rabbit in a Snowstorm” in those last few episodes? They put this fascinating woman on our screen, a Holocaust survivor, and had her face down Fisk without fear, and had him, in the end, buckle gracefully and choose, for once, the bare-minimum right thing to do. And then, off-screen, Dex kills her. And Fisk is ... distantly displeased, but it does nothing but show us that Dex has been molded into a monster, which was ALREADY FUCKING KNEW, since that was the point of him killing a priest and other people in a church. Or maybe it was supposed to show Dex falling out of favor in Fisk’s eyes, which we also knew just from the acting and the dialogue. Or maybe it was just to fucking show some blood on the painting as foreshadowing, in which case it was in even MORE poor taste. So it was just this senseless death so they could have the painting as a set piece for Fisk’s blood? And probably other people whose voices on the subject matter a lot more than mine have already weighed in, so I’m going to leave it there.

11. Wandering back into Things I Am Torn About from Things I Outright Dislike: Nadeem. I love him, and I pretty much knew he was going to die (and then I did know when an anon kindly confirmed it for me), and was pissed off that he was going to die. I’d heard something about a deathbed confession when I went looking for spoilers after my confirmation, and I had painted a scene in my head where he was surprised, shot somewhere not immediately lethal, and made his confession While Dying, possibly at Matt’s behest. So I actually really appreciated him knowing and planning and getting to choose the manner of his death, if they had to kill him. He was an actor, not a reactor, and he was a true hero in this season, which was nice especially in the beginning of the season when Matt was being a first-class dick.

12. This is quite long enough, but I would like to mention my favorite moment of the season, which is Matt’s tiny soft little “Foggy?” when Karen finds him after the Bulletin massacre. The stuff ships are built on, tbh.