Daredevil: Born Again killed the heart of the show in 15 minutes

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again’s first episode.]

Knowing something is coming doesn’t make it any easier to accept when it happens. That’s how I felt watching Daredevil: Born Again kill off Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) in the opening scene.

There had long been rumors of Foggy’s demise, but I went into the Disney Plus revival hoping they were greatly exaggerated. However, the series wasted no time in crushing those dreams. Viewers are given mere minutes of nostalgia watching Matt (Charlie Cox), Karen (Deborah Ann Woll), and Foggy tossing back drinks at Josie’s before Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), the antagonist of Daredevil’s third season, storms the bar in a quest for revenge and fatally shoots Foggy.

As soon as Foggy’s heart stops beating, Matt throws an already incapacitated Bullseye off Josie’s rooftop, a horrific violation of his previously strict no-kill code of ethics. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how honest Matt is with himself), Bullseye survives, and is sentenced to life in prison for Foggy’s murder. By then, the damage is already done. Matt has retired his devil horns and decided that the best way he can help New York City is through wielding the power of the law, not billy clubs, and Karen has moved to San Francisco rather than stand by while a grieving Matt ices her out.

In killing Foggy and punting Karen across the country, Born Again didn’t just lose the charming ensemble dynamic the Netflix series was founded on — it lost its heart. And this isn’t personal bias speaking, but Born Again’s showrunner, Dario Scardapane. As Scardapane told Empire earlier this year: “You can’t do this show without Karen and Foggy. They’re Matt’s family. They’re the heart of his world.”

This is truly a wild thing to hear from someone whose entire plan, it turned out, was to kill Foggy and write Karen off halfway through Born Again’s series premiere. But Scardapane was right. Foggy and Karen were the heart of Netflix’s Daredevil, and it can’t be overstated how much Foggy, in particular, did to provide both the comic relief and gravity that made the show’s most dramatic moments sing.

While there were some who found Foggy’s nonstop chatter and wisecracks grating, he provided a necessary emotional anchor and point of contrast for Matt and for viewers. Foggy was light where Matt was dark. He was ebullient where Matt was subdued. He was honest with his feelings while Matt bottled his up. Foggy was an everyman hero whose idealism stood in welcome opposition to Matt’s cynicism and the gritty world around him. But it’s precisely that idealism that Born Again needed to kill in order to tell its story about what happens when a superhero loses his moral compass.

In Born Again, we see Matt try so desperately to help the city in “the right way.” But while Matt stays within the legal lanes Foggy always wished he would, it’s clear that Matt’s decision to hang up his mask was fueled by a fear of who he might become if he didn’t. The moment Matt threw Bullseye off the roof was the moment he knew he’d lost more than his best friend; he’d lost the ability to see himself as a hero. While he may tell himself he’s making this choice for the right reasons, the truth is that he’s adrift. As much as the Netflix series challenged Matt and tested his faith, he always had the buoys of Foggy and Karen to cling to when he felt at risk of losing himself. But with Foggy dead and Karen gone, Matt is unmoored within his own self-doubt and self-loathing. Yet for all the heady philosophical questions Born Again gives Matt to wrestle with, his struggles have never felt less developed.

Foggy’s idealism was always what made the contours of Matt’s inner turmoil so compelling. Their friendship felt realer than anything else in Daredevil, and it was Foggy who determined the weight of Matt’s decisions and moral boundaries. That’s why Daredevil’s “Nelson vs. Murdock,” in which Foggy confronted Matt after discovering his vigilante identity, stands as one of the series’ best episodes. It was the gravity of Foggy’s response that gave viewers a reason to care about the fallout and what this would mean for Matt. The love between these friends, and the possibility of losing it, is where the real stakes of Daredevil always lived, and how the show most successfully explored the knotty nuances of vigilante justice.

Now, without Foggy’s light, there are no shadows. Just unrelenting darkness with none of the friction that comes from those liminal spaces. So, as much as Born Again feels like a seamless continuation of the original series, I find myself scrambling for anything to emotionally latch on to, or any reason to care about Matt’s existential crisis.

In Born Again, Matt’s internal struggle remains something that we know exists, but is no longer something we feel. That’s why I can’t help but fear that Foggy’s death was a short-sighted decision made to tell this single story of disillusionment, and that the story has lost a vital piece of itself along the way. And it seems I’m not the only one left wondering whether this was best for the series in the long term.

When Cox teased Born Again’s traumatic opening event, he told Extra TV, “I’m still not convinced it’s the right thing to do.” At least unlike Matt, Cox and I aren’t alone with our doubts.

Daredevil: Born Again episodes 1 and 2 are now streaming on Disney Plus. New episodes drop every Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT.