Warning: Beyond Here There Be Spoilers
Season three of Daredevil was really strong television. It had a story it wanted to tell and it told it straight through, but that is also one of its weaknesses. Except for the first season of Daredevil every Marvel Netflix release has been a season long story that requires you to watch the whole series for any kind of conclusion on anything. Even season one had that issue at times, but the episodes usually built to a climax that made you want to keep going and not a conclusion and then rising action to require you to watch the next one. The overarcing stories that a binged series aims to bring can be rewarding it’s nice to have one off episodes to break up the pace and to give some resolution once in a while. The series also seems to be embarrassed about being a comic book property and avoids putting Daredevil in his suit and never lets Bullseye be Bullseye and wear a Bullseye outfit. Although he is the one person who wears the Daredevil outfit in the show. They do let Bullseye be ridiculously accurate with every thrown weapon which is awesome.
It’s kind of hard to separate my thoughts about this season from my thoughts about the Marvel shows in general. As mentioned earlier the shows all tend to have a season long story that they focus on and there is no real episodic breakdown for the series. Season 3 of Daredevil does break the trend of the shows having five or so episodes of filler in the middle because the story doesn’t have enough material to cover, but it still suffers from the same pacing issues. There are no clear ends to episodes. Many final scenes run into the beginning scene of the next episode. The worst would be the ending of episode nine going right into episode ten and then the episode is almost entirely dedicated to a flashback about Karen’s backstory. Karen is a good character in the show, but the flashback is forty minutes straight that takes us out of the action of Daredevil breaking into Kingpin’s headquarters and finding out that Kingpin has sent Bullseye to the church to kill Karen. So while it would have been nice to have some episodic breaks in the series the longer story doesn’t really allow for it. Which I’ll come back to in a bit, but I want to talk about some stuff I really liked before I get to that so this isn’t all negative.
The fight choreography in this series is awesome. Which isn’t surprising because the Daredevil series has had the best fights in all of the Marvel shows and has the best action beside Into the Badlands for western television. A lot of people have heaped praise on the fight scene from episode four that goes through the prison and is one long uninterrupted cut with some pretty intense acting scenes in it as well which is very well done. For me every time Bullseye and Daredevil fight it’s a highlight. Episode Seven is the first time they fight and it is a perfect encapsulation of what I want from a fight between the two characters. If there is any distance between them Bullseye is throwing whatever is at hand and has the advantage, but once the distance is closed Daredevil is in control and takes over the fight. It’s a brutal fight and it’s evened out because Daredevil is injured the whole season so Bullseye can get the advantage. Episode ten is bad, for the most part, its almost entirely a flashback about Karen’s life before meeting Matt and Foggy, and feels like something from a completely different show. But the episode is redeemed because the ending is Karen talking to Father Lantom and she attends church when Bullseye shows up. This brings us back to the end of episode nine where Daredevil is in Kingpins headquarters and hears that he’s sent his men to kill Karen at the church. So after forty minutes of backstory for a character who we already understand pretty well and don’t really need the show gives us an awesome fight scene. It starts with Karen distracting Bullseye from the civilians in the church and builds to Lanton sacrificing himself to save Karen. After that Daredevil shows up and we get another excellent fight scene. The best part of this fight scene is that its not about beating each other, but that Bullseye wants to kill Karen and Daredevil wants to save everybody.
The fight scenes climax perfectly with the series as the finale ends up with a three way fight between Daredevil, Bullseye, and Kingpin. Vanessa is there as well and Bullseye wants to kill her since Kingpin killed the girl he was stalking, but Daredevil always stops those attempts, but will let him try and kill Kingpin when they’re fighting. The three men all have different fight styles and Daredevil has different styles depending on who he’s fighting. Against Bullseye he’s more the martial artist and countering the trained combatant, but when he’s fighting Kingpin he’s a boxer who fights like his dad. He doesn’t defend, he takes the big shots in order to deliver his own big shots. It’s a good element of Daredevil’s character that he can’t control his emotions when fighting Kingpin. The end of the fight where Daredevil unmasks and yells at Kingpin is very rewarding and the denouement of the story provides a nice future for all the protagonists, which is good since apparently the season has been canceled.
The biggest downside of the Marvel shows and this one in particular is there seeming reluctance to embrace the comic book nature of the story. Daredevil doesn’t wear his suit at all and I just a dude in black with a mask over his face. Bullseye does imitate Daredevil, but never wears his own outfit which is a bummer. Sure it might look kind of dumb in reality, but that’s the world comics exist in. It’s especially stark in comparison to the CW DC shows which have all the characters in costume and give their villains the goofy names they have in the comics. The dedication Netflix Marvel has to being gritty overwhelms all the other aspects of the show. It lets them highlight how much damage Daredevil takes in a fight, but it kind of stops the characters from having light, fun moments with each other.
This season was definitely a step in the right direction, not that it matters with the cancellation of the shows on Netflix with Disney starting their own streaming service. But it didn’t stop doing to the dumb things the shows were doing it just executed them well enough to not be a problem. It’s a thirteen episode long movie, but it is paced right and keeps moving so its not as noticeable as season two or any of the other shows. It doesn’t embrace the comic book fun and relies on grittiness. It goes gritty to seem real, but the damage Daredevil takes and keeps going when he’s bleeding everywhere pushes it too far sometimes and makes it seem unrealistic in a different way than most comic books. If you like the character of Daredevil it’s a well done season and should keep you happy even with all its flaws.
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