This article contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again season 2 episode 1.Daredevil has not had the easiest resurrection. Seven years after his Netflix series closed with its third season, the Man Without Fear arrived to the MCU with the 2024 Disney+ series, Daredevil: Born Again. The first season had a famously tortured production process, one that saw the original showrunners fired and replaced with new head Dario Scardapane, who brought along indie horror vets Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead as directors. Although they had a mandate to move in a different direction, the new team also had to use footage from the several episodes shot under the previous regime. As a result, the previous season often felt at odds with itself, despite the many highs it achieved.One would expect the premiere of Born Again season 2 to announce a second second birth. Now free of the previous showrunners’ material, Scardapane has room to tell his story. And yet, the first episode still feels overburned with plot and strangely inert, devoting lots of time to checking in with its many characters instead of kicking off a season’s worth of storylines.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});In fairness, season 1 left our heroes in a precarious spot. Mayor Wilson Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) populist support only intensified after nearly being shot by the assassin Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). Fisk used that support to enact harsh Anti-Vigilante policies and to declare martial law in New York, sending his Anti-Vigilante Task Force of cops onto the streets. Daredevil (Charlie Cox), has to live in the shadows, fighting back with the help of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), back in New York and back in Matt Murdock’s arms.According to the “man on the street” reports created by BB Urich (Genneya Walton), a budding journalist forced into doing PR for the administration, New Yorkers love the new regime. We do see clips of a pirate show called “City Without Fear,” in which someone in a Fisk mask shouts about the Mayor’s corruption, but most citizens claim to feel safer in the current status quo. That may be due to the fact that the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, led by cruel cop Powell (Hamish Allan-Headley), attacks only the most vulnerable part of society. Fisk’s team gets to insist they’re taking terrorists and threats off the street while the victims, locked away in secret detention centers, are never allowed to speak.That dynamic plays out in a B-plot involving Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton), a member of New York’s upper crust accused of being the vigilante known as the Swordsman (any Avengers reader can tell you that the accusations are true). Locked in a basement prison, Duquesne must undergo a psych evaluation from Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), Matt’s ex-girlfriend who has become a supporter of Fisk’s methods after being attacked by the serial killer Muse last season.The interrogation scene, in which Glenn coerces Duquesne to answer loaded questions about his mental health, is the stand out of the episode. The rich sense of mood that Benson and Moorhead create throughout the episode is on full display here, as the few rays of light that make their way into the basement interrogation room only make the gloomy blue hue of the shot feel heavier. Dalton lets Duquesne retain his charm and his confidence, while Levieva shifts the trauma that Glenn feels when she sees an apparition of Muse into a self-righteous cruelty that she turns against her captive.On one hand, the interaction between Glenn and Duquesne illustrates the boldness of Daredevil: Born Again‘s second season. Watching a Mexican-American actor play a character who was illegally detained by militarized police and who has had the legal system turn against him cannot help but bring to mind recent events, a comparison the show invites. The Anti-Vigilante Task Force not only looks like ICE, but it exclusively attacks immigrants throughout the episode, cheered on by young men impressed by Fisk’s performance of masculine power, while Matt’s law partner Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James) is reduced to running, as one character calls it, “a legal aid hostel” for those desperate for their day in court.On the other hand, it’s a bit disappointing that a legal conversation with heavy real-world analogies is the best part of a TV show about a guy with enhanced powers who dresses up like the devil to punch bad guys in the face. Rumors about the original plan for Born Again‘s first season suggested that it was more of a legal and political thriller, more concerned about Murdock’s case load and Fisk’s policies than it was about fights between Daredevil and Kingpin.Born Again‘s season 2 premiere does begin and end with Matt in costume as Daredevil. Moreover, Benson and Moorehead shoot the fight scenes with an almost operatic bombast, veering away from the grittiness of the Netflix era (but not the violence, as demonstrated by a close-up of bone piercing the skin after DD breaks a baddie’s arm) and toward something more fluid and grandiose. Further, the first fight scene ends with a ship full of illegal weapons crashing and effectively shutting down imports into NYC and the last closes by promising the return of the supervillain Bullseye.Yet, as cool as the fight scenes are and as important as the ship crashing apparently is, at least to the many characters who keep bringing it up, they still feel inconsequential to the viewers. Part of that may be by design, as Karen expresses frustration that their efforts do little to change Fisk’s control on the city. And a lot of it is also a byproduct of modern TV storytelling, which treats each episode as a segment in a larger story instead of a discreet narrative in itself.Yet, after the expectation built up by season 1, we hoped that Born Again season 2 would have given us more. The season 2 premiere is a very safe bit of superhero television in the modern streaming era. It’s perfectly acceptable and often quite interesting. But given the odd nature of the show’s history, we cannot help but wish that Daredevil: Born Again would have began its second season with a little more daring and a little less fear.The first episode of Daredevil: Born Again season 2 is available to stream on Disney+ now. New episodes premiere Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+.The post Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Episode 1 Review – Born Again, Again appeared first on Den of Geek.